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 Experience Self Ideas

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”