Download The power of richness: How can qualitative research help us ask

The power of richness:
How can 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
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 neither shared nor
fragmentary
Some recent research
disrupting assumptions
Dutton and Dukerich: Organizational
identity influenced by interactions
outside organization
Worline: Courage as a set of actions
rather than individual trait
Michel: Amplifying uncertainty can
increase organizational knowledge
Feldman: Routines can be a source of
learning and organizational flexibility
and change
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)
My story
Early research experiences
Training in quantitative/statistical - “Just
assume it!”
First research project - re-oriented research
question when assumption disrupted
Later research experience
Studying processes that produced stability in
organizational routines
Noticed that routines change
Proposed new way of understanding routines
that encompasses change and stability
Abduction
Abduction – theorizing through
disciplined guessing
Pragmatic inquiry:
the transactional
conjunction of
experience, self
and ideas.
Ideas
Self
Experience
Experience
Rich experience – data gathering
4+ years of ethnographic research
Over 1000 hours of observation; over
100 hours of participation; formal
interviews; informal conversations;
40,000 internal emails
Longitudinal comparisons of annual or
semi-annual routines
Cross sectional comparisons of units
and hierarchical levels in organization
Experience, cont.
Rich experience – data analysis
Analyzed data using meta-theories
Ethnomethodology, semiotics, dramaturgy,
deconstructions
Developed examples of analyses for course
and Sage book, Strategies for interpreting
qualitative data.
Multiple perspectives provided more
ways of connecting and understanding
observations
Ideas
Started from traditional assumptions
about organizational routines a la
Cyert and March, Nelson and Winter,
Cohen et al.
Routines best conceptualized as a
unified entity: a program, an
organizational skill, a heuristic
Routines as relatively stable
May respond to outside forces
Resistance common response
Ideas, cont.
Traditional ideas did not help me
What I could explain with these ideas
had already been explained
Some observations were unexplained
Needed a new set of ideas
Practice theory – Giddens, Bourdieu,
Orlikowski, Latour, Carlile
Self
Reluctant 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, cont.
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
Lessons?
Power of richness?
The complexity of rich data and data analysis
provides doubt opportunities
Doubt can be debilitating or generative
Making doubt generative (Locke, Golden-Biddle
and Feldman, forthcoming in Organization Science)
Embrace doubt as a constructive part of the
process of inquiry
Nurture hunches
Disrupt order