essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

88 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––• category B: the self identified in terms of position within social roles and structures (‘Iam a psychologist’), termed ‘social’;• category C: as a social actor abstracted from social structure (‘I am not very selfconfident’), termed ‘reflective’;• category D: conceptions of the self as abstracted from physical being, social structure andsocial action, that is to say, non self-identifying statements (‘I am a human being’), termed‘oceanic’.All statements defining the self can be fitted into one of these four categories, although specialclasses may have to be constructed for ambiguous statements.For most individuals, the majority of statements fall into a single class, A, B, C, or D, whichsuggests that these four categories may be used not only to describe responses, but alsorespondents. On the available evidence, Spitzer stated that seven out of 10 respondents couldbe clearly characterized by self definitions of one of the four types. Through the use of theTST in the USA in the 1950s, researchers came to the conclusion that the vast majority ofAmericans were firmly anchored socially, because respondents from different researchpopulations gave statements falling mainly in the B category, and could therefore becharacterized as ‘social selves’.Since the work reported here, apart from our own studies, the TST as a tool forcharacterizing personality has languished, while more standardized and conventional scalingapproaches to identity constructs have thrived, largely as a result of the increased analyticalsophistication available through highly accessible software packages. Yet one could argue thisis more of the same, in terms of paradigm predominance, and fails to get at the qualitativerichness we know to be the distinctive essence of experienced identity. Perhaps it is in responseto this deficit that once again researchers have started to look again at the TST as aninstrument of choice – uniquely combining a structured approach with maximal responseopenness.One recent highly practical use was by Coover and Murphy (2000) who examined theinteraction between self and social context, and concluded that academic success was predictedby more complex self-identities than by self-esteem as measured in the TST. Moretheoretically, Bettencourt and Hume (1999) found that values, emotions and personalrelationships were more often used in group identity representations than in personal identityrepresentations, in their investigation of the cognitive content of social group identity. TheTST has also been used to show how some self-perceptions can be dysfunctional; Jenningset al. (1986) used the measure to identify self-reflective individuals to test the relationshipbetween ideal-self discrepancy and anxiety. In an organizational context, Locatelli and West(1991) with a modified form of the TST, along with other instruments and techniques,collected images of organizational culture, concluding that the TST yielded the richest andmost useable data. However, another organizational study was carried out by Walker et al.(1996) in which they completed a qualitative versus quantitative comparison of anorganization’s culture, using a modified form of the TST (‘This company is . . .’) for thequalitative assessment. They found each method produced similar cultural themes.