Bricoleur

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

For Lévi-Strauss, bricolage was used to describe a way of knowing the world, one that would draw upon existing ways of classifying objects and practices. The bricoleur by definition is able to perform a number of different tasks, using whatever tools (mental or physical) are at his or her disposal. In this way the bricoleur is seen to possess a “toolbox” of sorts, one that in the context of a researcher contains different knowledges, perspectives, and techniques; in isolation, they may have no apparent use but are there because past experience or exposure indicates they have been, or have the potential to be, useful.

What bricoleur researchers therefore do is keep things in their toolbox in case they may come in handy at some point in the future. Related metaphors [Page 60]include quilt-maker (who creates a finished product out of scraps of material that otherwise have little use) or jazz improviser (who creates music in unpredictable ways using a repertoire of harmonies and rhythms). Common to these metaphors is a stock of materials from which a finished product is created.

Application

As a metaphor, bricolage is often used to describe a fluid approach to research that might consist of using or doing several different things. As Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln point out, there are many kinds of bricoleurs; for example, interpretive, narrative, theoretical, political, and methodological. Whatever researchers are trying to accomplish, they do so in an emergent way as bricoleurs use the tools at their disposal, or add new ones to their toolbox as they become aware of new ones. Bricoleurs can even create new techniques if the ones at their disposal are not adequate for the problems being researched, emphasizing the fact that in much qualitative research, not all decisions concerning research design can be made in advance.

This approach to research is therefore quite consistent with grounded theory and naturalistic approaches, both of which emphasize the need to be open to discovery and sensitive to the way research questions and the context in which they are studied are related.

Theoretical and methodological bricolage was used by Sigmund Wagner-Tsukamoto and Mark Tadajewski in their study of the green consumer, which examined how consumers assess the environmental friendliness of supermarket products. At a theoretical level, their use of cognitive anthropology draws on practical thinking that reflects action-oriented learning and intelligence as well as the information-processing and problem-solving tools that individuals are already familiar with. This permits the investigation of how skillful consumers frame a decision-making choice in relation to the subjective perception and construction of context.

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