All Substantive Chapters in Second Draft

Print out of Research Methodology with notebook used for
keeping track of editing process

Well this weekend is the first milestone in the finishing straight, in that I have sent my supervisor copies of what I hope are second drafts of all substantive chapter with the sending in of my worship chapter yet again. I think this time it will do in that I have as in my community and location chapter brought the theory into much closer contact with the actual description. This tends to make me a much clearer my theoretical thinking. It does however mean that any pretence of my PhD having a literature review has gone.

I suppose I should say that there are reasons for this and none of them is a unwillingness to do literature review, I have tried first to do a full one and then when clear that would not work to do three smaller ones. There are two major reasons for using this approach.

Firstly there is not a cohesive literature on which to draw. I can think of at least four different literatures I have drawn upon. Firstly the small set of writers who actually work in Congregational Studies when appropriate, then wider group of social anthropologists and ethnographers, then some social theorist, then wider areas such as social geographers, theorists of cultural identity and theory of worship and finally add in a wide variety of books that have an origin within the Reformed Tradition and then add some mathematical text books. My reading is extensive, wide ranging but not cohesive.

Secondly I use literature in a very different way to how it is used in most literature reviews.  In most literature reviews it is used to set up the question, and to critically review others solutions. The question found me long before I had read any literature and as far as I can tell I am working in an area very few have bothered to study. I can think of two other attempts in existence: one is twenty years old and the other is much more internally focussed than I am. For me the prime point of literature is as thinking tools. I tend never to ascribe whole heartedly to a view of a thinker but I am interested in the way I can use their ideas to further understand the situation. Therefore bringing them into close contact with the actual description makes sense. There is perhaps a mini-literature review in the introduction but the majority of my literature is combined in with the text.

I have two tasks going on at present. On the one hand and what I concentrated on today was starting to cut my methodology chapter by 50%. It stands at around 19,000 words, it has a max of 10,000 and I need to add quite a bit about writing as analysis. There are some easy bits to cut. I did nowhere near the amount of time I could have done on the auto-ethnography of the tradition. As a result I think I can largely cut that section. Equally quite a bit of my introductory part is pure indulgence and needs to go. I can cut back quite a bit of my description of ethnography as a tradition, it looks like my examiners will both be familiar with it. The other task is to read through all six substantive chapters and write brief overviews of what is in each. I think there is a development through them but until I actually do that reading I do not know.