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”