Methodology §3

Two paired field protocols · One mid-project loop

NECx living-workplace narrative collection (Protocol A) · CNAM historical-archival reconstruction (Protocol B). A mid-project loop feeds Round-1 findings into Fieldwork 2.

A NECx sharing circle: energy-sector workers seated together in a workplace, one narrating while colleagues and a facilitator listen
A

Narrative collection

NECx — a dialogical colligation engine in living workplaces

  1. Convene workers, vocational trainers and community representatives in a witnessed, dialogical 'circle' at energy-transition workplaces. The circle elicits narrativizing — the verb — rather than freezing a profile: it captures the operation a worker performs, in the register where sense is actually made.
  2. Colligation, not classification. Following Whewell's and Morgan's account, the circle binds (colligates) scattered evidence under the operation a taxonomy box cannot see — an allagmatic move (Simondon): recovering the operation behind the structure. Two classes of account: research narratives (work-life experience) and narratives of transitions (sectoral / ecological change).
  3. Map evidence on spatio-temporal and causal-relational grids using STS-informed diagramming for mechanism visualization. Three narrative scales — micro-narrative · story · saga cycle.
  4. Three instalments progressively remove the researcher: (1) researcher-led, (2) colleague-led circles, (3) researcher removed. With biases named in anthropological, feminist and decolonial studies, this triangulates the individuation of knowledge 'in vivo and in situ' — addressing the constitute-vs-contaminate question: when narrative is elicited in a social event rather than found in an archive, the apparatus becomes part of the narrativizing.
  5. Detect scripts and narrative performance — e.g. 'redundancy → retraining → green job' — showing how workers narrate policy transitions through lived experience. Affect (Jajdelska's narrative performativity) is treated as load-bearing, not ornamental.
  6. Map to the EU competence frameworks (ESCO · GreenComp · DigComp) as an output, never an input — the worker's own words kept as provenance at every step. Test narrative inference against qualitative rigour standards (internal consistency · coherence · adequacy to evidence) using Narrative Science epistemology.
B

Historical-archival fieldwork

CNAM collections as long-time-scale observation

  1. Archives as longitudinal observation series across multi-decade transition windows — technological, workplace, and community shifts.
  2. Reconstruct prior industrial transitions from CNAM Musée des Arts et Métiers collections: assistive technology, workplace accommodation, energy-system changes.
  3. Museum-anchored method: industrial-heritage collections documenting how transitions reshape workplace communities.
  4. Arrange archival materials into narrative form following Protocol A structure — enabling cross-temporal competence comparison.
  5. Trace lineage of policy discourses and counter-narratives — showing how official language about transitions maps (or not) onto worker experience.

Two fieldwork rounds, one mid-project synthesis

  1. Step 01 · Apparatus

    Narrative Science framing applies to every account.

  2. Step 02 · Fieldwork 1

    M9–M22. Protocols A and B in tandem across anchor regions (FR · SE · LV · BE · UK · IT · MN · PL).

  3. Step 03 · MSM synthesis

    M22–M28. The Multi-Stakeholders Meeting (MSM) and Science Meets Politics (SMP) Conference (M27) synthesise Fieldwork 1 with civil servants, social partners and European elected officials from all political families. Interim analytics consolidation (M28) calibrates Round-2 instruments.

  4. Step 04 · Fieldwork 2

    M28–M40. Round 2 (UA · RS · ME · KE + COPs) applies MSM and interim-analytics feedback, recalibrated against first-round competence statements.

  5. Step 05 · Operationalisation

    M40–M48. Five output streams — Atlas, SED-PAN, OSDEM, Roadmap, replication modules. Expo-Action opens M40 for an 8-month public life.

  6. Step 06 · Open science

    Throughout. Preprints and open peer review; narrative and archival datasets to CESSDA / EOSC under FAIR principles.

Biases as constitutive resources

GreenPulse’s field epistemology, piloted in the NECx Kenya study, inverts the standard reflex. The array of biases inherent in a witnessed, dialogical circle is not treated as error to be scrubbed out, but strategically incorporated — recognised for its power to enrich analytical depth, and engineered into the design. This is the reflexive, decolonial core of the method: the apparatus is made visible and varied, never pretended away.

Ethnographic bias

Mead, 1920s

A researcher's mere presence shapes responses — acutely so in post-colonial fieldwork. Met head-on by three escalating design conditions: researcher-moderated → insider-moderated → insider-moderated with post-circle interviews. The bias is measured by varying the apparatus, not wished away.

Language bias

insider moderation

Circles run in the participants' language of choice, led by a local moderator — sense is made in the register where it lives, not translated into the researcher's.

Cultural & ethnocentric bias

feedback loop

A participant-feedback mechanism and local-moderator input feed back into each circle's framing, displacing the outsiders' categories.

Similarity bias

leveraged

Moderators recruit their own participants — turning the bias into a resource: familiarity and comfort are the precondition for intimate, emotionally-loaded narration.

Selection bias

by design

A deliberately narrow, comparable sample — breadth would dilute the contextual (environmental, cultural, political) comparison the study is built to make.

Hawthorne & technological bias

counterbalanced

Recording is necessary; an acclimatisation period, a single background camera and an audio recorder passed with the ritual object minimise it — and similarity bias counterbalances the rest.

Availability-heuristic & temporal bias

controlled

Data stays inaccessible to researchers until local moderation displaces the heuristic; minimal lapse between circles damps the volatility of the political moment.

Observer, interviewer & social-desirability bias

surfaced

Held up for scrutiny rather than hidden — interpretation and question-design shape results, and the collective circle's social-desirability pull is itself part of what the collective cluster reads.

The narrative & decolonial method stack

Five qualitative methods are layered to elicit narrativising rather than freeze a profile — each set so its conditions reinforce the others.

BNIM

Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method

Wengraf

Opens the interplay between individual agency and societal structure through life-moment narratives.

Life History

Life History Narrative

Captures the chronological historicisation of the self; paired with BNIM's narrative conditions.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry

Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987

Its four markers — what is · what might be · what should be · what can be — re-tuned from collective to dialogical to draw out positive experience.

Indigenous Métissage

Indigenous Métissage — a decolonial methodology

Donald, 2009 · Glissant · Zuss

Braided autobiographical accounts, conjoint identities, artifacts, places and metaphorical thinking — attentive to where dominant, normative or neocolonial discourse collides with a respondent's own representations.

Narrative Inquiry

Narrative Inquiry

Clandinin & Connelly

Holds the whole as a study of experience told and retold over time.

Literature & sources

The corpus behind the apparatus — narrative science, the philosophy of individuation and dialogue, the EU competence frameworks and skills evidence, the energy-sector narrative literature, AI-mediation studies, and the qualitative-methodology lineage of the Sharing-Circle protocol.

Narrative science & narrative epistemology

  • Morgan, M.S., Hajek, K.M. & Berry, D.J. (eds.) (2022) — Narrative Science: Reasoning, Representing and Knowing since 1800. Cambridge UP

    The ERC programme (AdG 694732, LSE 2016–2021) and its capstone — the calibrated narratology core of the apparatus

  • Morgan, M.S. (2022) — 'Narrative: A General-Purpose Technology for Science', ch. 1

    Narrativizing · colligation · configuring · the three quality criteria (consistency / coherence / adequacy)

  • Morgan, M.S. (2017) — 'Narrative Ordering and Explanation', Studies in History & Philosophy of Science 62: 86–97

    Narrative ordering · juxtaposing · the puzzle/switch element

  • Morgan, M.S. (2026) — 'Travelling Tales?', LSE Public Policy Review 4(1):7

    Insider vs outsider narratives · tellability · particular-yet-generic — the travel-of-competence argument

  • Hajek, K.M. (2022) — 'What is narrative in narrative science?', ch. 2 (+ wp002, psychological case writing)

    Narrative-identification protocol · story vs discourse

  • Berry, D.J. (2022 / wp001) — Narrative positioning, ch. 16

    Chronicle → genealogy → narrative · field-positioning, applied to policy-discourse analysis

  • Paskins, M. (2022 / wp004) — Breakdown narratives

    Case-typology for failure/disruption — fits transition-disruption documentation

  • Crasnow, S. (2017 / 2022, ch. 11) — Process tracing & causal-claim defence

    Translates narrative inference into the language reviewers expect

  • Wise, M.N. (2017 / 2022 / wp003) — 'Cat's cradle' diagrams; narrative form of simulations

    Relational visualisation for opaque causal mechanisms

  • Jajdelska, E. (2022, ch. 18) — Narrative performativity & conceptual remodelling

    Causation built at narration · reconceptualization (Churchland/Boden) · affect as load-bearing — the affective dimension NECx captures

  • Bonnin, T. (wp005) — Eukaryote-origin narratives

    Narrative-Science working paper · evidence-binding in deep-time science

  • Dillon, S., Craig, C. & Tasker, A. (2026) — 'From Storytelling … to Storylistening and Narrative Evidence', LSE PPR 4(1):5

    Storylistening · the four cognitive functions · PINE (plural, innovative, novel evidence) — NECx is storylistening, not storytelling

  • Anthology I — Case Book of Narrative Science (2019), eds. Paskins & Morgan, LSE

    Worked narrative-science cases

Individuation, relation, dialogue — the ontology

  • Simondon, G. — L'individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information (ILFI, 1958 / Millon 2005)

    Individuation · transduction · disparation · metastability — competence as operation, not structure

  • Simondon, G. — L'individuation psychique et collective (IPC, Aubier 1989 / 2007)

    The transindividual — why competence forms between people; emotion as the germ of the collective

  • Simondon, G. — Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (MEOT, Aubier 1958 / 2012)

    Analogy as identity of operations vs resemblance as identity of structures · the allagmatic

  • Simondon, G. — Communication et information (Les éditions de la Transparence, 2010)

    Information as the formula of individuation · the communicational being of machines

  • Jacques, F. — Dialogiques: recherches logiques sur le dialogue (PUF, 1979)

    Interlocution · co-reference · the person constituted in address — the relational stake of the circle

  • Ricoeur, P. — La métaphore vive (Seuil, 1975) · Temps et récit (1983–85) · Soi-même comme un autre (1990)

    Live metaphor as semantic innovation · emplotment · narrative identity — meaning made anew, the self constituted in the telling

  • Garattini, L. — 'The Eclipse and Dawn of Relations: Rethinking Scientific Logic' (working paper)

    PI's relation-based / unit-based logic framework · technicity · ontogenesis

  • Leonelli, S. — Philosophy of data-centric science; 'data journeys'

    How data travels and is re-used across contexts without losing provenance — the operation→ESCO→survey pipeline (advisory)

EU competence frameworks & VET

  • Council of the EU (2018) — Recommendation of 22 May 2018 on key competences for lifelong learning (2018/C 189/01)

    The foundational competence ontology (knowledge + skills + attitudes) GreenPulse displaces toward operation

  • GreenComp — The European sustainability competence framework (JRC, KJNA30955) + GreenComp in Practice (EC, 2024)

    12 sustainability competences · the relational/values competences taxonomies name but cannot measure

  • DigComp 3.0 (JRC144121, 2025) + DigComp 2.0 (JRC101254) + DigComp at Work + Mapping DigComp to ESCO

    21 digital competences · the published competence→ESCO crosswalk template (Zenodo 10674444)

  • EntreComp (JRC, EUR27939) + EntreComp at Work + EntreComp Playbook

    Competence as value-creating action · the LoopMe quant↔qual loop · the Spider diagram

  • LifeComp (JRC120911) + LifeComp into Action

    Personal · social · learning-to-learn competences · 'collaboration is impossible outside group work' — the nearest cousin to NECx

  • ESCO — European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations classification (EC)

    The interoperability backbone operations map onto as output

  • 'Competences at once' — scaffold deck-of-cards technique (JRC)

    Vygotskian unbundle/re-bundle · the 'Good with' cross-reference — re-authored as the NECx elicitation deck

  • Cinque, V., Carretero, S. & Napierala, J. (2021) — Non-cognitive skills and other related concepts (JRC working paper)

    Conceptual map of soft/socio-emotional/non-cognitive skills · the admitted measurement/identification failure

EU skills evidence & labour-market data

  • Cedefop (2023) — Skills in transition: the way to 2035

    Energy among the sectors most reshaped by Green-Deal skills demand — anchor for OSDEM

  • Cedefop — Second European Skills and Jobs Survey (ESJS2, 2021/2023)

    Flagship worker survey on skill use, mismatch, training — SED-PAN's quantitative spine. Twin-transition scale: all occupations need some up/reskilling; ~13% face a great-extent digital skill gap (~52% incl. moderate); 27% in 'dead-end jobs' (over-skilled); ~25% of young highly-qualified over-qualified

  • Pouliakas, K. & Santangelo, G. (eds.) (2026) — Human-centred digital transitions and skill mismatches (Cedefop WP 28)

    ESJS-based · skill underutilisation & overqualification — the 'overskill' construct

  • Eurostat — Labour Force Survey, adult learning (2022)

    ≈ 11.9% of adults 25–64 in training in the last 4 weeks — the participation snapshot vs the 60%-by-2030 target

  • Eurostat — Adult Education Survey (reasons for non-participation)

    'No perceived need' the leading reason — the meso-level symptom of the register gap

  • Flash Eurobarometer — SMEs and skill shortages (2023)

    95% of SMEs value having workers with the right skills — the belief side of the participation paradox

  • Baltina, L. & Hogarth, T. (eds.) (2024) — Re-thinking Europe's Skill Needs (Quaderno 67, Fondazione G. Brodolini)

    Post-European-Year-of-Skills reflections · PES profiling · LLL participation

  • JRC (2022) — Towards a green & digital future: key requirements for the twin transitions

    EU-policy anchor for SED-PAN's Digital-Green Competence Matrix

  • SkillsPULSE D2.1 & D2.2 (2024) · Lightcast vacancy-NLP · OSKA (Estonia) · UK Unit for Future Skills

    Mismatch taxonomy · vacancy-NLP corpus · sectoral-foresight comparators for OSDEM

Energy-sector narrative evidence

  • Moezzi, M., Janda, K.B. & Rotmann, S. (2017) — Stories, narratives, and storytelling in energy & climate research, Energy Research & Social Science 31

    Methodological flagship for energy-sector narrative evidence

  • Towers, S., Kajitani, Y., Chabay, I. & Okada, N. (2022) — Narratives, energy policy and disasters (Hokkaido + Texas grid failures)

    Direct energy-disruption case methodology

  • Koch, L., Gorris, P. & Pahl-Wostl, C. (2021) — Narratives, narrations and social structure in environmental governance, Global Environmental Change 69

    Bridges narrative evidence to policy translation

  • Helgeson, J., Glynn, P. & Chabay, I. (2022) — Narratives of sustainability in digital media (DONS observatory), Futures 142

    Conceptual precedent for the OSDEM observatory

  • Lynall, G. (2022) — Imagining Solar Energy; solar-narrative case studies (Cambridge Companion to Literature & Climate)

    Direct energy-sector precedent for narrative-evidence on green transitions

  • Sleigh, C. (2022) — Carbon-economy decline narratives

    Precedent on energy-decline and just-transition cases

  • Narratives of Low-Carbon Transitions (edited volume)

    Socio-technical transition narratives — context for the anchor regions

AI mediation, LLMs & the digital workplace

  • Besley, T., Brzezinski, A. & Fazzio, J. (2026) — Economic Policy Narratives: A Taxonomy and Application, LSE PPR 4(1):4

    LLM stance-classification of 360k speeches — validated precedent for the NECx operation-coder

  • Suchman, L. (2007) — Human-Machine Reconfigurations, Cambridge UP

    Situated-action framework for worker-machine interaction

  • Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D. & Raymond, L. (2023) — Generative AI at Work, NBER WP 31161

    Empirical LLM-in-workplace productivity effects

  • Crawford, K. (2021) — Atlas of AI, Yale UP

    Energy + labour + extractive geography of AI — the green-digital tensions

  • Bender, E.M., Gebru, T. et al. (2021) — On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots, FAccT

    Whose-narratives-get-encoded critique

  • Strubell, E., Ganesh, A. & McCallum, A. (2019) — Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP, ACL

    AI's own energy footprint

Qualitative, narrative & decolonial methodology (NECx lineage)

  • Okoko, J.M., Tunison, S. & Walker, K.D. (eds.) (2023) — Varieties of Qualitative Research Methods, Springer

    75-method single volume incl. the indigenous-methods cluster — methodological backbone of the Sharing-Circle protocol

  • Donald, D.T. (2012) — Indigenous Métissage: a decolonizing research sensibility, Int. J. Qualitative Studies in Education 25(5)

    Fort · pentimento · braiding — the decolonial keystone of the Kenya PoC

  • Tuhiwai Smith, L. (1999) — Decolonizing Methodologies, Zed Books

    Foundational for the Pacific + Canadian decolonial lineage

  • Ermine, W. (2007) — The ethical space of engagement, Indigenous Law Journal 6(1)

    The structural principle behind the insider-only moderation condition

  • Donald, D. (2009) — Forms of life and forms of identity: Indigenous Métissage

    The braided-account markers (conjoint identities, artifacts, places, metaphorical thinking) operationalised in the Kenya circles

  • Glissant, É. (1989) — Caribbean Discourse / Poétique de la Relation

    Creolisation & relation — the créole lineage behind Indigenous Métissage's hybridity

  • Zuss, M. (1997) — Strategies of representation: autobiographical métissage

    The 'braided' nature of autobiographical accounts in the métissage protocol

  • Mead, M. (1928) — Coming of Age in Samoa

    Origin of the ethnographic / observer-effect bias the protocol measures by varying its moderation conditions

  • Wengraf, T. (2001) — Qualitative Research Interviewing (BNIM), Sage

    Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method — agency × societal structure in life-moment narratives

  • Cooperrider, D.L. & Srivastva, S. (1987) — Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life

    The four markers (what is / might be / should be / can be), re-tuned from collective to dialogical

  • Clandinin, D.J. & Connelly, F.M. (2000) — Narrative Inquiry, Jossey-Bass

    Experience told and retold over time — the holding frame of the method stack

  • Field Report — Ukunda, Kenya (NGN, 2025)

    The NECx proof-of-concept: 4 Sharing Circles, ~15 participants, three escalating design conditions; biases strategically incorporated as analytical resources; BNIM + Life History + Appreciative Inquiry + Indigenous Métissage + Narrative Inquiry