Thinking of conceptual reviews and systematic reviews

The usefulness of literature review in qualitative research and the humanities needs no elaboration for the readership of this journal. Yet, I would like to contribute to the discussion on ‘systematic review’ started by Dr. Sally Thorne with her editorial published recently in Nursing Inquiry (Thorne, 2018). I thank Dr. Thorne for sharing her concerns and suggestions, as she foregrounds an important case regarding the status of superior scholarship attributed (erroneously) to that type of work. It also invites us to question the spurious hierarchy of reviews (systematic over narrative) and avoid possible misunderstandings related to the particular contribution that each can make. In this regard, both the emphasis and the thinking style may vary significantly. Systematic review often looks for scientific explanations—notably, causal explanations—or how a variable actually varies depending on the (inferred) influence or co-occurrence of other variables. Although useful, it is a philosophically narrow model. By contrast, narrative review and conceptual review tend to focus on interpretation—or how explanations are put in perspective when we think more universally. In interpreting, we oftentimes trace a notion; we explore its variations, usages, equivalences and connotations across time, its geographies, disciplinary traditions, and schools of thought, among other things. As a result, the notion being researched is situated within an intricate network of meanings in an open-ended process. Think how little or how much of an attribute is measured at any given time, and interesting though they may be, the figures may become meaningless if the attribute's name has changed, disappeared, diversified or moved to an entirely different semantic field. Also think, for example, of all the difficulties in assessing nurse-to-patient ratios across countries without first looking at the conceptual variations of the term ‘nurse’. See? This is something to be considered in any comparison. But there is something to be said for methodological consideration as well. Although deeply reflective—and sometimes highly personal—conceptual review is not any less systematic. By way of example, I am sharing here the approach I developed in my own doctoral research (Ayala, 2015), which is by no means meant to be a recipe-led procedure. Unlike the type of review that is referred to as ‘systematic’, conceptual review is not limited to searches by strict terms on the Web of Knowledge. In building conceptual families, a typology of the retrieved sources grouped by the social and historical contexts in which they were produced begins to form. This is very helpful in framing the research problem theoretically. Generally, the review unfolds by stages: (a) adopting a receptive attitude towards concepts; (b) reading the retrieved literature critically; (c) mapping institutional affiliations of the authors and their records of publications; (d) examining the conceptual scaffolding used in the literature; (e) identifying citing papers and cross references; (f) tracking cognate concepts; (g) reading across mainstream and alternative research outlets; and (h) reflecting on the assembly of sources. Certainly nonlinear, this eight-step approach favours interpretation. In the case in point, the analysis looked at the functionalist sociology concept ‘occupational situs’ (Benoit-Smullyan, 1944; Morris & Murphy, 1959, 1961) as applied to the study of professions. So it had to be investigated to understand why authors no longer use it, and to allow us to ponder whether it would be wise to bring it back. During the review, it surfaced that beyond serious empirical limitations, the concept would be eventually routed out from the sociological tradition insofar as newer paradigms began to take the place of functionalism, society and work develop increasingly complex, and the postwar social model became the object of criticism on different fronts. If its usefulness once was that of predicting attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles of professionals, the concept would later be substituted by the study of class identity. Nonetheless, it continued to appear sparsely until the 1970s literature, then to disappear from the sociology of professions altogether. What this review sought was not a causal explanation per se. It rather aimed at developing a theoretical understanding that allowed for meaningful connections between my research problem and particular research traditions and worldviews. It was about meanings, about processes and contexts. Another example is the brilliant review on social movements by Arthur (2008). Published in Sociological Compass, an outlet that publishes state-of-the-art reviews, her article brings together work from disparate fields. She soon notes that authors working on the subject ‘often rely on a different understanding of the dynamics of exclusion’ (p. 1,015) that define the way groups resort to collective action. That is an important theoretical distinction, for it is helpful to understand why social movements in organisations differ from, say, social groups in the public space. She then goes on to identify prominent threads of research on social movements, including the one that has been the most visible and socially differentiated—that of labour movements. Other bodies of literature comprise student revolts, and movements that target organisations within the frame of larger national and international activism. The point of departure in Arthur's review is a set of general questions: When do social movements emerge? Who are the activists? What strategies and tactics do they choose? And finally, what are their impacts? The process moves on to creating a source, which covers several decades and several research traditions. But in closer inspection, it becomes evident that the concept has been treated differently, which is the organising principle of the article's main areas, which group the main threads of research. By framing the subject this way, Arthur arrives at the problem that, although it is growing, most of the literature on social movement theory has to date made modest contributions to social movements within organisations. The review moves forward to trial different theory frames and how they could be applied to organisational change and social activism. What do these conceptual reviews have in common? Both use a similar procedure. But more importantly, they seem to imply a need to have an adequate explication of a core notion and enough knowledge drawn from related scholarship relevant to the study of that notion; in other words, conceptual clarity. This enhances both reliability and systematicity of the research. In a sense, the term ‘systematic review’ may have a judgemental connotation as well, because the reader might infer that other types of analysis—thus, of researchers—will necessarily be unsystematic. Despite the insights derived from it and its usefulness in sifting evidence from large datasets, ‘systematic’ review often fails to capture much of which is not contained in—sometimes narrowly defined—keywords, which makes it especially vulnerable to external manipulation. It goes without saying that this can lead to a deterministic, blinkered scrutiny of scholarship (Munro, 2014). The same holds for ‘scoping’ reviews. Of course, those approaches are not to be discarded. It would be thought provoking to explore more often how the different understandings provided by all these types of reviews could interact. One venue would be, for example, to uncover unseen connections between concepts and empirical evidence, and how this might lead to the reordering of assumptions, hypothesis and answers we formulate. Another might be the entanglement of variance-oriented explanations with contextually pertinent interpretation. There is, nonetheless, much to discuss about the systematicity of reviews more generally, and still an awful lot to appreciate in ‘non-systematic reviews’. By building conceptual reviews, our ways of experiencing the literature could be enhanced.