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

–––––––––––––– CRITICAL RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS IN ORGANIZATIONS –––––––––– 189This participant challenges the objectivity of the system through questioning the measures andprocesses used to assess performance. There is no reward for ‘an objective good performance’as it depends where an individual falls on the imposed bell curve within their team. In otherwords, a whole team can never be ‘excellent performers’ as performance is treated as normallydistributed within a specific team. Measurement, or the lack of it, becomes bullying in twosenses: the lack of appropriate measures, and imposing a technological artefact (normaldistribution) that is regarded as being unfair.In sum, employees acknowledge the roots of bullying at school but distinguish this fromtheir experience at work. Classic bullying, the kind that occurs within schools amongstchildren, is seen to be interpersonal in its nature. Organizational bullying, they argue is lessstraightforward and more subtle. It consists of organizational practices such as ignoringemployee voice in negotiation, target setting, performance management and the pay andappraisal system. These systems are seen as inherently unfair.CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Critical analysis concentrates on challenging forms of domination and revealing contradictionsbetween rhetorics of equality and discrimination (Morrow, 1994). In attempting both toacknowledge different accounts and to highlight power imbalances we are oscillating betweenpostmodern relativism and critical realism. The serious issue underlying these arguments ishow, if you are subjecting everything to critique, you can justify a position that argues that‘real’ social inequalities exist, that we can identify them and that we have a duty to challengethem (Edwards et al., 1995; Parker, 1999). For Habermas, clarifying the ways that languageis used can reveal the operation of power and open systems to challenge. We positionedourselves to represent those employees who were not heard in the organization. In doing so,we demonstrate that a term represented by management as protecting individual employeeinterests may be adopted by those employees to describe their own oppression by managementas a group.Throughout the analysis we were painfully aware of the implications of our reporting. First,we had to confront how we were going to report findings back to the managers in theorganization who had sponsored the research. We had to balance issues of clarity and fidelityto the data with the need to preserve confidentiality. Our hopes of having an impact onmaterial organizational practices, were disappointed when a director greeted our feedbackwith the words, ‘Given our tremendous performance and profit over the last financial year,we must be doing something right. And if they call that bullying, perhaps we should do moreof it.’ This raises issues of how far critical researchers can challenge the organizations that theystudy.Secondly, and of greater concern, is the issue of how to present our work withoutundermining the position of those who experienced an extremely abusive, threatening,interpersonal relationship at work. In describing how employees use language, we weresometimes seen as denying that ‘real’ bullying happened. Demonstrating how an emotionalterm is used by different interest groups can appear to belittle the experience.In raising the profile of the mundane, there is a danger of deflating the value of the extreme.This dilution of emotive terms demonstrates the delicacy and significance of labelling anddefinition in creating meaning.