How can writing qualitative research help us ask better questions?

1. How can writing qualitative research help us ask better questions? Martha S. Feldman University of California, Irvine

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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)

5. 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

6. 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 Ideas Self Experience

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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?

11. 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

12. 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”