Research Methods in Language Policy and Planning: A Practical Guide, First Edition. Edited by Francis M. Hult and David Cassels Johnson. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Researcher Positionality Angel M.Y. Lin 3 Introduction Language policy and planning (LPP) as a field of studies emerging in the 1950s and 1960s has largely been “problem‐oriented” and responded to the needs of the newly established states; many of them had just gained independence from their former colonial powers (Spolsky 2008, 137). The early LPP researchers were tech- nical in their orientations, seeing their task as one of planning, standardizing, regulating, containing, or managing linguistic diversity for the national develop- ment agendas of building national cohesion (e.g. planning for spreading a stand- ardized national language) and modern economic development (e.g. planning for producing a workforce with the required kinds of linguistic proficiencies for the economy). LPP researchers saw their work consisting of status planning, corpus planning (Kloss 1969), and acquisition planning/language education planning (Cooper 1989). The technical orientations of these early approaches have been Introduction 21 Knowledge‐Constitutive Interests, Disciplines of Inquiry, and Researcher Positionality 22 Disciplines of Inquiry and Researcher Positionality 24 An Example: The Case of Hong Kong 26 On the Necessity of Becoming a Reflexive “Tweener” 30 0002477526.indd 21 2/7/2015 12:54:17 PM UNCORRECTED PROOFS