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Natasha Whiteman &#38; Russell  Dudley-Smith (2020)Forum Qualitative  Research, 21(2). Online journalAbstract. As has often been noted, BACHELARD's counter-intuitive orientation to scientific inquiry, with its rationalizing insistence on relational anti-essentialism, has profound implications for social research methodology. The question remains how this orientation might inform the actual practice of research. In this article we present a pragmatic response, one that emphasizes the need to scrupulously avoid the use of essentialized categories. Doing so involves much work and constant vigilance, for which technique is an absolute requirement. Our reading of BACHELARD therefore insists that productive research requires the artifice of a methodological technology that wrenches research from self-evidence whilst avoiding its ossification in theory. We argue that this continuous disruption and rebuilding of forms of thought is necessary but often neglected in social research; often simply because suitable technology is unavailable. By developing work by DOWLING (1998, 2009, 2013), we then suggest one that is. This is demonstrated by contrasting a diagrammatic technology known for only breaking weakly with established categories—BECKER's classification of deviance—with a relational space that achieves the rational artifice required (one in fact more consistent with BECKER's own pragmatic project). The value of the artifice a relational space achieves is then illustrated in the empirical context of digital file-sharing.Extract. “Yet, from the perspective of the methodological issues introduced above, this work also demonstrates the difficulties of escaping the double-bind that researchers face. The influence of preconstructed artefacts in the methodology of this literature is evident in the deployment of concepts and ideas that can be seen to be borrowed from the social world (BOURDIEU &#38; WAQUANT, 1992, p.236). When the terminology deployed by scholars remains within the register of ordinary language, it achieves immediate accessibility. Examples include categories of "attitudes for support [for copyright protection]" such as "sweat of the brow," "theft," "artist rights" and "protection" (LEWIS, 2015, p.51), references to the "tropes" of "mass influence, civil rights and shared community" (ANDERSSON SCHWARZ &#38; LARSON, 2013, p.234), to the "mirroring" between awareness of individual gratification and the slogan "caring is sharing" (ANDERSSON, 2012a, p.597), and the use of the metaphor of "blood donation" for understanding file-sharing activity (p.585). This proliferation of value-laden terms demands intensive scrutiny (BOURDIEU et al., 1991 [1968], p.23). Without this, the danger is of relying on common expressions that too easily supply "the appearance of explanation" (p.22). Such individualistically moralizing terms are likely to do little more than reflect-back to practitioners the already-known (BOURDIEU, 2019). The imposition of more scholarly theoretical frames runs the opposite risk of closing-down the empirical. BOLTANSKI and THÉVENOT's (2006 [1991]) six regimes of justification have been particularly influential in file-sharing research (ANDERSSON SCHWARZ &#38; LARSSON, 2013; EDWARDS, KLEIN, LEE, MOSS &#38; PHILIP, 2015).The recruitment of such frameworks sees scholars revealing the theoretical; positioning audience responses within preconceived “orders of worth”.”Download link