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

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– HERMENEUTIC UNDERSTANDING ––––– 195THE HERMENEUTIC CYCLE ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––In the above what is being suggested is that researchers inevitably bring (and positively embed)something of their objective and subjective selves to the feast of the research activity.Researchers also bring an intellectual pre-understanding. This may be illustrated by Ferchwhose work on the relationship between physical touch and developing the ability to forgivefollows the principles of hermeneutic phenomenology. He wrote: ‘Because research indicatesappropriate levels of touch are related to consistent human development, and because recentliterature presents forgiveness as an important part of personal and interpersonal growth, a studyincorporating both touch and forgiveness was warranted’ (my italics) (2000: 159). At a primafacie level, this could look like good old-fashioned hypothesis making. But it is not. Its statusis quite different. When Dalton was undertaking his magnificent work that led to theproduction of his seminal study Men who Manage he wrote that although he eschewed explicithypotheses he had ‘hunches which served me as less exalted guides’ (Dalton, 1964: 53) to thedevelopment of research.The researcher can start the hermeneutic circle ‘at one point and then delve further andfurther into the matter by alternating between part and whole, which brings a progressivelydeeper understanding of both’ (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000: 53). In this case prior researchand prior literature is bringing into the developing scene some loose boundaries, some steerinto what is being explored. In this sense both the preunderstanding and the research itselfgo through iterations of interpretation. From this springboard, ‘hermeneutic scientists interpretimmediate events such as non-verbal phenomena; physical environment and unexpectedevents in the light of previous events, private experience and whatever else they find pertinentto the situation under investigation’ (Gummesson, 2000). It is analogous to the ethnographicprocess of ‘trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of ”) a manuscript – foreign,faded, full of ellipses, incoherences, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries,but written . . . in transient examples of shaped behaviour’ (Geertz, 1973: 10).This process of reading, of iteration, of moving back-and-forth, of emergent interpretationmay be illustrated by the work of Thompson et al. They were concerned to explore the‘everyday consumer experience of contemporary women with children’ (1990: 346) throughthe lens of the hermeneutic approach. The transcripts of the interviews (which wereformulated ‘in concert with participant descriptions’ (1990: 347)) were initially interpretedideographically uncovering the internal logic of the data. The pattern of interpretation waswidened as themes, common patterns, began to emerge from the interviews. It is importantto note that these themes were those that came to the minds, intuitively, of the researchers.As the cognitive anthropologist Geertz points out ‘the object of study is one thing and thestudy of it another . . . we begin with our interpretations of what our informants are up to, or thinkthey are up to and then systemize those . . .’ (author’s italics) (1973: 15). At this stage the test ofvalidity of the interpretation, according to Thompson et al., is that the individual ‘text’ willsupport the thematic interpretation. They further suggest that these themes should first beaccessible to readers, and secondly be those themes that are ‘consistent with the aimsmotivating the study, can be directly supported by reference to participant descriptions, andprovides insight . . .’ (1990: 347). This process of emergent thematic analysis, which they referto as bracketing, allows ‘for seeing the text from a phenomenological perspective withoutpredefining participants’ experiences in terms of the interpretative framework’ (Thompsonet al., 1990: 347).