When the First World War ended in 1918, Europe was completely devastated and ruined. The situation was brilliantly reported by Eagleton (1983, p. 54):
The social order of European capitalism had been shaken to its roots by the carnage of the war and its turbulent aftermath. The ideologies on which that order had customarily depended, the cultural values by which it ruled, were also in deep turmoil. Science seemed to have dwindled to a sterile positivism, a myopic obsession with the categorizing of facts; philosophy appeared torn between such a positivism on the one hand, and an indefensible subjectivism on the other; forms of relativism and irrationalism were rampant, and art reflected this bewildering loss of bearings.
Within the framework of such an ideological crisis or calamity, a great German philosopher called Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), “sought to develop a new philosophical method which would lend absolute certainty to a disintegrating civilization” (Eagleton, 1983, p. 54, Wertz, 2005, p.167). Vandenberg (1997, p. 11) sees
Husserl as “the fountainhead of phenomenology in the twentieth century”, even though the genesis of phenomenology can be mapped out as far back as Kant and Hegel.
Eagleton (1983, p. 54) observed that Husserl was against the conviction that objects in the external world exist independently and that the information about objects is reliable.
He disputed that individuals can be certain about how things appear in, or present themselves to, their consciousness. In order to get to the point of certainty, anything outside immediate experience must be overlooked (bracketed), and in this way the external world is condensed or scaled down to the contents of individual consciousness (Wertz, 2005, p. 167). As a result realities are treated as untainted ‘phenomena’ and the only absolute data from where to begin. Husserl named his philosophical method
‘phenomenology’, the science of pure ‘phenomena’ (Eagleton, 1983, p. 55).
According to Wertz (2005, p.168) Husserl’s phenomenology is based on the methodological principle that scientific knowledge starts with a clean and unbiased description of its subject matter (epoche). The epoche of the natural attitude is “a methodological abstention used to suspend or put out of play our “naïve” belief in the existence of what presents itself in the life-world in order to focus instead on its subjective manners of appearance – the lived through meanings and the subjective performances that subtend human situations” ( Wertz, 2005, p. 168). This does not mean that what presents itself in the human life does not exist. This existence and validity of human situations are bracketed so as to move from naïve, straight forward encounters to reflection on how the life-world presents itself, which is, to its constitutive meanings and subjective performances. This epoche allows the researcher to recollect his experiences and to emphatically enter and reflect on the life-world of participants in order to apprehend the meanings of the world as they are given according to the participants’ points of view. The researcher therefore has to observe a great degree of bracketing both during data collection and data analysis. Husserl further established the intuition of essence, which is a term used to descriptively delineate the invariant features and clarify the meaning and structure of a subject matter. (Wertz, 2005, p. 168.) The life-world is a central theme (Wertz, 2005, p.169). “The life-world manifests itself as a structural whole that is socially shared and yet apprehended by individuals through their own perspectives (Wertz, p. 169). Phenomenologists therefore pay attention to bracketing (bias-free), lived experiences of participants and personal meanings, and essential themes (essence) when studying a given phenomenon.
The quest for a suitable research design that would prevent or restrict my own biases of any form and the opportunity to understand the phenomena under investigation (Collaboration and its impact on skills development) from the perspectives of the participants (NGOs and educational leaders) involved was vital. This judgment has been vividly and expertly highlighted by phenomenologists and other researchers that have used the phenomenological approach. Eagleton (1983, p. 56) and Moustakas (1994, p. 26) employed the motto ‘back to the things themselves!” to champion the opinion that this method has a fundamental aim of returning things to the concrete. This study is also geared at having a “grasp of the real nature of things” (Van Manen 1990, p, 77). Welman and Kruger (1999, p. 189) concurred that “the phenomenologists are concerned with understanding social and psychological phenomena from the perspectives of the people involved”. Lester (1999, p. 1) aptly expounded that phenomenological methods are associated with and are deeply rooted in the paradigm of individual knowledge and subjectivity, and hold with high esteem the importance of individual perspective and interpretation. This makes the approach “very powerful for understanding subjective experience, gaining insights into people’s motivations and actions and cutting through the clutter of taken-for-granted assumptions and conventional wisdom”, with the purpose of illuminating the specific, to identify phenomena through how they are perceived by the actors in a situation (Lester, 1999, p.
1) .
This choice was further motivated by the conviction that an understanding of collaboration and its impact on skills development in rural South Africa, from the perspectives and common or shared experiences (life-world) of partners engaged in Workplace Skills Development (WSD) will deepen the scope of understanding of the partnership between NGOs and educational leaders, the impact of the phenomenon on skills development, challenges involved and possible best practices. This premise has been highlighted by Moustakas (1994, p. 26), and has been brilliantly captured by Creswell (2007, p. 62) when he observed that knowing some common experiences of several individuals can be very indispensable for groups which include (but are not limited to) educators, health personnel and policy makers to develop a deeper understanding of the characteristics of a phenomenon in order to develop policies and practices. Investigating a phenomenon, which Moustakas (1994, p. 26) labeled, an
“object” of human experience, by using the phenomenological paradigm, rendered these objectives more realistic.