80 6 Background Chapters
- You understand the links between your own work and the work of others who
went before you. - You now know what assumptions you made, perhaps unconsciously, about your
study area. These can now be made explicit. - You are aware of the issues surrounding the application of current methods in
your field, and have explicitly pointed out their limitations. - You may have realized (perhaps with the help of feedback from your supervisors
and participants in your research seminars) that you were making unwarranted
assumptions about the level of knowledge of other people about the background
to your own work. For example, if you come from India and your project is lo-
cated in India, you might assume that the reader was as familiar with the names
of the states of India as you are. What if one of your examiners comes from
Finland? - In your efforts to understand and interpret the results of your own work you will
have reached a new level of understanding of the work of others—this is what is
meant by a ‘critical’ understanding. For example, if you were working in the area
of ‘sustainable architecture’, you would by now have realized that many people
writing about it had been using the words as a vague catchphrase, and you need
to go back and make some careful definitions. - Most likely you designed your own work without being completely conscious
of the research questions or even the hypotheses that informed it. This possibly
sounds silly, but my experience with students is that this is what often happens.
When I ask students why they did something and they have no ready answer,
they sometimes seem shocked. This does not mean that the work does not have a
valid basis, but rather that the driving force behind it was in part developed in the
unconscious mind. It now has to be made explicit. In the chapters on your own
work (see Chapter 7) you need to make it explicit, and your background chapters
will have to lead into your research questions or hypotheses.
This gives us a framework for how you should tackle the revising of the background
chapters, as explained below.
Ensure that the ways that you are going to use words and ideas are carefully
defined. Where these are fundamental to your own work, the development of these
ideas in the literature or even in the history of ideas must be discussed. For example,
in her thesis on landscape heritage, Jan had to trace through the development of
the notions of heritage and landscape. Both of these words have a host of everyday
meanings, but it was fundamental to her research that the reader understood pre-
cisely how she was using the terms.
Any formal literature review that you do before you begin your own work should
not appear in the final thesis in that form. What you should have, rather, is a struc-
tured account of the literature that is current at the time you did your own work. You
will be able to impose a structure on it, because by now you have largely finished
your own work, which will have gone further than the work of others (that’s why
you were doing the research). You can write it with the critical perception of the
worker who has now gone past this point. The story in Chaps. 2 and 4 about Karen’s
work is a good example. She couldn’t get started on her review of existing theory