how can writing qualitative research help us ask better questions?
DESCRIPTION
How can writing qualitative research help us ask better questions?. Martha S. Feldman University of California, Irvine. Qualitative research as a way of disrupting/questioning assumptions. Some famous assumptions disrupted by qualitative research - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Qualitative research as a way of
disrupting/questioning
assumptions Some famous assumptions disrupted by qualitative research Hawthorne experiments: human
interaction not important to productivity Trist and Bamforth: specialization
increases productivity Goffman: self is independent of situation Garfinkel: norms not created in context March et.al: decision-making as linear Lave: cognitive ability can be measured
independent of context in practice Martin: culture as shared
Some recent research disrupting assumptions
Anteby: Organizational control can be consistent with enhanced worker identity
Bechky: Temporary organizations are neither ephemeral nor unstable
Feldman: Routines not unitary, have internal dynamics (that matter)
Locke: Doubt is a good thing
Michel: Amplifying uncertainty can increase organizational knowledge
Perlow: Working less time can increase productivity
Worline: Courage as a set of actions rather than a trait of individuals
Weeks: Organizational culture cannot separate itself from popular culture
Criteria (Weick, 1989)
That’s interesting (assumption of moderate strength is disconfirmed)
That’s absurd (strong assumption is disconfirmed)
That’s irrelevant (no assumption is activated)
That’s obvious (strong assumption is confirmed)
Getting to “that’s interesting”
My story No consensus (not everyone agrees that
work is interesting) Didn’t start out “interesting” (initial
focus was on mechanisms of stability) Moving to interesting required
interaction between experiences, self and ideas (Locke, Golden-Biddle and Feldman, 2008)
Abductive process: Involves doubt/questioning
About meaning of experiences About relevant ideas About self and identity
The process Abduction – theorizing
through disciplined guessing Pragmatic inquiry: the
transactional conjunction of experience, self and
ideas Doubt: questioning
nature and content of experience, self and ideas
Relationships enable doubt
Experience
Self
Ideas
Experiences Experience is deeper than it appears in
published papers
Experience presented through illustrative examples, vignettes, narratives Experience engaged in many ways
Mulling over many specific observations Writing observations into vignettes, etc. Analyzing observation/vignette in relation to
emergent ideas (also a writing process) Summarized for publication
Experience and doubt
What do you doubt? Is this interesting? (Too much time spent here.) Why is this interesting? (Why do I keep coming back to
this?) How is it understood? (Source of both useful and
distracting information) By informants? By you?
Example: LLD as a Hilton experience (schema) Vignettes describing routines and paradoxes
(both/and; either/or) Narratives of subroutines in recruitment
(actions and time)
Ideas Ideas emerge through interaction with
experiences What does current set of ideas help explain and
leave unexplained? How can the unexplained be explained?
What is being explained (experiences) changes through interaction
Examples: Experience to ideas: Routines that change
required moving from routine as entity to routine as process
Ideas to experience: Practice theory encouraged focus on agency in addition to traditional structural focus
Self
Self changes in interaction with ideas and experiences
Example: Reluctance to focus on change
Previous research led to questions about stability: Order without design
I believe stability is important Disciplinary background in political science and
political theory – how is order possible? Theoretical background in phenomenology – how
do we make order out of the sea of phenomena?
Self and doubt
Outsider status Faculty position in Political Science Dept. and
Public Policy School Routines often studied by economists
Social support Women academics at UM interested in
organizations
Need to publish Associate needed to come up for full
Summary
Experiences, ideas and self all move in relation to one another
Making any one of these static tends to make it difficult to engage doubt, make doubt generative find “that’s interesting”