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

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– ANALYTIC INDUCTION–––––––––– 171membership. Moreover no pattern within or between categories emerged regarding subjects’ages or length of experience as a senior shop steward.All informants worked in organizations with a lengthy history of trade unionism withmanagement recognition often having been acquired after protracted and attritious campaigns.Thus it was unlikely that they belonged to managerially sponsored shop steward organizations(see Willman, 1980). As incumbents of very similar offices all had been involved in significantareas of negotiation including collective bargaining over domestic rates of pay, changes inworking practices, the introduction of new technology, redundancies, grievances, and theenforcement of collective agreements as well as custom and practice norms.During fieldwork, several informants had claimed that they had not been exposed to DAI,they were therefore excluded from the sample. The remaining 16 were all familiar withemployee reports and said that management also provided plant level disaggregatedinformation during collective bargaining. The latter included things such as output per worker(often juxtaposed with that of major competitors), plant operating accounts, costinginformation, state of the order book details, simplified balance sheets and predictions of futureplant and company financial performance.In this context, Jackson-Cox et al. (1984) have noted the significance of management’sdisclosure strategies in mediating the impact of DAI. They differentiate an ‘integrated’ strategy,with routine but selective provision of information, from an ad hoc strategy characterized bythe piecemeal and intermittent provision of information. Of the informants in this research,two-thirds felt that management regularly provided information pertaining to specific issueswith the remainder claiming that DAI was temporally intermittent and substantivelyhaphazard. But since there was no pattern to the distribution of these phenomena betweencategories, I had to conclude that they exerted no systematic influence upon the developmentof the accounting orientations expressed by informants.While they all had undergone some financial training through the education services ofthe trade union movement, a pattern between and within categories was apparent when Iquestioned them about in-company financial training provision. Only one ‘sceptic’ hadadmitted to some in-company financial training whereas all the ‘cynics’ and ‘realists’ did admitto this training. Although the form and content of these programmes varied, all the relevantinformants remembered discussions and presentations of the missions and goals of their firmwith a focus upon the current and future financial situation. All alluded to an emphasis uponissues such as the need to invest in current and fixed assets, sources of investment, profit andloss, value added, interest rates and the implications of these issues for the current and futurefinancial management of the firm.Therefore in-company financial training seemed to be an important case feature that mightexplain the development of informants’ accounting orientations. But it was shared by twocategories – ‘realists’ and ‘cynics’ and therefore could not account for their apparentdifferences. This implied that some unique case feature must account for this differentiation –but what?During the first round of fieldwork I began to suspect that variations in informants’ rolesvis-à-vis constituents might constitute a battery of unique case features. These suspicionsdeveloped out of various comments such as that of a ‘realist’ who claimed . . .I tell the lads the plain facts, its then their decision as to what we should do . . . it’s onlyright to be democratic.