Research
Making do with whatever tools and materials are at hand rather than acquiring purpose-made ones; Lévi-Strauss used it for mythological thought, and in research methods it describes assembling a study from whatever theories, data, and methods are available.
Merriam-Webster defines it as “Construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also: something constructed in this way.” From the French bricoler, “to putter about”, and first recorded in English only in 1960 — which dates the concept’s arrival in English-language scholarship fairly precisely, and explains why it still reads as a borrowed term rather than a naturalised one. Note that the dictionary sense explicitly covers “a structure of ideas”, so the methodological use is not a stretch from the word.
Merriam-Webster is cited here as the dictionary of record. Where a lexicon entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it — there is no other body with standing over what a word means. The reading of how the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own.
Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.
Developed by Amit Jain at allfrontierglobal.com
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