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

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ANALYTIC INDUCTION–––––––––– 167and Johnson, 2002). It follows that social science research must entail emic analyses whereexplanations of human action are generated inductively from an a posteriori understandingof the interpretations deployed (namely cultures) by the actors who are being studied.Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) argue that ethnographic fieldwork shares these inductivecommitments. However, ethnographers’ explanations of observed behaviour often remain atthe level of a posteriori ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973; Denzin, 1978) of actors’interpretative procedures which goes beyond the ‘. . . reporting of an act (thin description)but describes the intentions, motives, meanings, contexts, situations, and circumstances ofaction’ (Denzin, 1978: 39). In this, theorization is limited to providing a conceptualframework for understanding actors’ cultures. While the theoretical aims of AI include suchdescriptive frameworks, AI avoids what Loftland (1970) has called ‘analytic interruptus’ by alsotrying to explain and predict through positing causal models as illustrated by Bloor (1976,1978). The ontological and epistemological ambiguities this creates will be returned to later.I shall now illustrate the application of Bloor’s model by reviewing how it was used todescribe and explain how senior shop stewards interpret disclosed accounting information incollective bargaining.THE EMPIRICAL APPLICATION OF AI ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––The background to the researchThe empirical focus of this research was to examine the significance of disclosed accountinginformation (DAI) in senior shop stewards’ constructions of organizational reality andtentatively delineate the factors that engendered these propensities through the generation ofgrounded theory. Obviously there were different possible ways of pursuing these objectives.One could have been to observe and analyse actual collective bargaining processes in theireveryday social contexts. However getting access to such events appeared unlikely, thereforea more viable strategy was pursued which entailed following Bloors’ approach to AI andapplying it to Life Histories collected by interviewing a sample of individual senior shopstewards. Below I shall give an account of this research, with each phase in data collection andanalysis corresponding to those illustrated in Figure 14.1 above.Phase I: gaining accessMy initial contact with a selection of informants was facilitated by a friend I knew from myprior membership of a major blue-collar trade union. In many respects he was my equivalentof Whyte’s ‘Doc’ (1955) since he acted as an intermediary and informal sponsor by mobilizingan extant social network by introducing me to senior shop stewards and vouchsafing for me.In this he unwittingly presented these potential informants with a rather vague descriptionof my intentions since I had described the research as being concerned with ‘plant-levelindustrial relations and how things had changed over the past few years’.Although informants’ initial compliance had been appropriated by the intercession of mysponsor, I was concerned to resolve any persisting anxieties. So an important element in myimpression management was to make informants feel comfortable and gain their trust byinterviewing them on their own ‘turf ’ (Lyman and Scott, 1970) as well as engaging in initial