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

184 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––in organizations was a site of struggle between experts and that while this was presented as aproblem suffered by employees, no one was asking employees how they experienced bullying.We aimed to give these employees a voice. Through doing this and feeding our research backto organizations we hoped to influence organizational practices and to alert academics to thelimitations of focusing solely on expert derived measures without examining their meaningfor participants concerned.The context in which the research took place was a growing application of the term,bullying, to work. This appeared in both academic and in popular literature. The researchbegan with discomfort at the wide application to work of a term previously used mainly inschools. We were suspicious, not only of the usefulness of applying the conventional measuresderived from studies of school bullying to studying workers, but also with the faddish ubiquityof the term in the popular management press. We were concerned that individuals were beingdemonized in an attempt to deflect attention from some fundamental organizational issues.The focus on individual differences and, at the most, interpersonal interactions leads to anunpoliticized and undersocialized world view overemphasizing the role of individual agency(Henriques et al., 1984). Our concern was whether bullying is seen as due to the deviantbehaviour of rare individuals in an organization or whether it is more fundamental toorganizational culture.Language was regarded as central to the area as a number of different groups sought to ownand define the term (Ashforth and Humphries, 1997). Academics, managers, trade unions,and victim groups were amongst those concerned with establishing their own definitions.Power was fundamental, both within definitions of bullying and in the enthusiasm with whichgroups sought to close down alternate meanings. We investigated how a term (bullying) couldsuddenly be claimed by different groups and be attributed specific meanings that bothchallenged past use and exploited previous associations. The question was, ‘Who definesbullying and what are the implications of this definition for subordinated groups in theorganization?’ The main aim of the research was to hear from workers themselves what theyexperienced as bullying at work.MANAGING THE RESEARCH PROCESS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Liefooghe is the field worker who negotiated with the organizations and collected the data.His background is in psychology, group dynamics, counselling and, bullying. MackenzieDavey had no contact with the organizations and was involved in the analysis of the transcriptdata and discussion of interpretation of other observations. Her background is inorganizational communication, feminist research, and discourse analysis. While the data areclearly Liefooghe’s the analysis is shared. This approach to critical analysis encourages thechallenge of any position, prevents researchers from going native and analysis from becomingdivorced from the organization (Alvesson, 1998). We argue that collaboration encouragedreflexivity as interpretations constantly had to be justified and examined.The critical research agenda is not the most seductive for senior managers. As Alvesson andDeetz say, ‘Why should corporate managers allow a valuable corporate resource – time – tobe used against their own and maybe the company’s interest?’ (2000: 193). However, thepopular press and management literature about bullying at work meant managers wereconcerned about the issue and in some cases keen to find out more. Even so, response to a