Doing interpretive research:Studying leaders and

managers

Paul ‘t Hart

Political Science @ RSSS, ANU

Utrecht School of Governance @ UU

Overview

• Observing elites: Examples

• Why ‘understand’ public elites interpretively?

• How to ‘understand’ elites interpretively: Strategies and toolboxes

• Strengths and pitfalls of interpretive approaches to public leaders(hip): Lessons from experience

Interpreting public elites: Examples

G. Reeher, First person political

H. Mintzberg, The nature of managerial work

=> Noordegraaf’s Attention!

C. Shore, Building Europe

Reeher study• Q: why do people seek, defend and exit public office?

• Design:

• interviews with 77 legislators in 3 state lower houses

• survey of 233 legislators in same states

• analysis of official records on individual legislators’ characteristics and activities

• extended personal observations of their behavior inside and outside chamber

• follow up interviews with 23 of the 77

Noordegraaf study• Q: How do senior public managers allocate

attention, and why?

• Design:

• ‘shadowing’ 15 senior bureaucrats in Dutch central government for one week each: minute recording of activity patterns; ongoing informal interviews with each subject

• diary analysis

• policy/institutional documents for background knowledge

Shore study• Q: How do European Commission officials go

about ‘constructing’ European ‘citizens’, and how to they account for their actions?

• Design:

• ‘hanging around’ at the periphery of the Commission (particularly the relevant DG)

• 100-ish interviews (with EP/EC/Council officials, MEPs, journo’s, lobbyists) via ‘snowballing‘ and ‘mingling‘ in relevant social circuits

Interpreting public elites: genres

• Leader focused

• Biography

• Psycho-biography

• Leadership focused

• Ethnography

• Collective biographies

• Thematic interview studies

• Single or comparative event/episode case studies

Why ‘understand’ elites interpretively?

Leaders and leadership have been studied ad nauseam already….

This has yielded lots of insights (propositions, theories), so ‘tabula rasa’ approach undesirable even impossible…

Interpretive approaches are labour intensive and risky; why not stick with more parsimonious and safe approaches?

Don’t political/organizational psychology/sociology offer us precisely the tools we need?

Approaches to understanding public

leadership• Leader-centred

• Relationship-centred

• Communicative

• Institutional/contextual

• Situational

• Ethical

Claim 1: Each lends itself to ‘behavioural’ as well as ‘interpretive’ research questions (or approaches to studying particular research questions)

Claim 2: Each mode of analysis adds value to leadership studies: they generate not so much competing as (potentially) complementary forms of knowledge

Leader-centered• Positivist Qs:

• leadership style?

• leadership skills?

• belief system?

• interpersonal style?

• tolerance for ambiguity

• Interpretive Qs:

• ???

Relationship centered• Positivist Qs:

• how popular, among whom?

• transactional vs transformational leadership?

• why do followers follow?

• Interpretive Qs:???

Communicative

• Positivist Qs:

• rhetorical style?

• audience responses?

• negativity and fear appeals?

• Interpretive Qs:

• ???

Situational• Positivist Qs:

• problem definition?

• degree/mode of centralization of crisis responses?

• stress levels and coping mechanisms?

• Interpretive Qs:

• ???

Institutional• Positivist Qs:

• institutional roles and resources of office-holders?

• constraining and enabling effects on office-holders?

• office-holder impact on office?

• Interpretive Qs:

• ???

Ethical• Positivist Qs:

• comparative incidence of sexual scandal over time, across offices?

• effects of scandal on ethics policies?

• Interpretive Qs:

• ???

Elite studies: The interpretivist

toolbox• Being There: Observing, experiencing

• Participant observation: ‘immersion’

• Non-participant observation: ‘shadowing’, ‘recording’

• Getting up close: Listening, conversing

• In-depth, repeated, semi-structured interviewing

• Talking to and talking around

• Drawing rich pictures: Data triangulation

• Case study

• Biography

Challenges of interpretive elite

research• Access

• Power

• Ethics

• Uncertainty

Access• Method: Knocking or sneaking?

• Persuasion: Why should they let you?

• Limits: Pushing the boundaries

• Rapport: entry - presence - exit - post-exit

Power• Stage 1: Entry - you ask, they choose to

give (or not)

• Stage 2: Encounter - you want it all, they may constrain

• Stage 3: Reporting - your words matter, they retain power to hinder/obstruct

Ethics• Who needs protection from whom?

• ‘Blending in’ vs ‘going native’

• Negotiation vs cooptation

• Involvement/empathy vs distance/objectivity

Uncertainty• How to scope your study and structure

your data/report when you don’t know what you don’t know?

• When do you know ‘enough’?

• If knowledge + empathy = understanding, then how to ‘do empathy’?

My own experiences• 20% non-empirical (theory, review, essay)

• 50% ‘positivist’ single and comparative case study research (on: groupthink, crisis, leadership)

• 30% implicitly or explicitly interpretive studies

• Police chiefs: interviews only

• Political-administrative relations: interviews, seminars, secondary analysis of ‘cases’

• Eurocrats: observation, interviews, focus groups, elite survey

• Crisis evaluations: documents, interviews, popular survey

My ‘lessons’• Getting up close is FUN, but HARD to do, and not

easy to publish in top outlets => You must know very firmly why you need to do it; and you must ask yourself if you are comfortable with its essential features and challenges

• The key reason is: Getting up close gets you into the ‘life world’ of leaders, managers that is ESSENTIAL to understanding why elites do what they do

• ALWAYS triangulate your data (methods, sources)

• Do not compromise on control over your text - ever