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

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– GROUNDED THEORY –––––––––– 245the divisions, different professional groups, hierarchical levels, both sexes, and different agegroups. The themes guiding the one- to two-hour interviews were: first the informant’s ownwork and daily routines, secondly work-related values and company values, and thirdly theinformant’s career history within the company and important events in the organizationduring this career.Although the themes guided the interviews, the interviewer (the first author of thischapter) did not ask exactly the same questions each time. In this way each successiveinterview was used to expand understanding of the organizational culture. After eachinterview, the interviewer summarized the emerging themes and these summaries served asa basis for the reformulation and development of questions and testing of the emerginghypotheses. All the interviews were recorded and extensive notes were taken during them.Based on these notes, 33 of the most informative interviews were transcribed, and the restserved as validation material in recorded form. Most informative interviews included severalrepresentative quotes describing different dimensions of a variety of themes. These interviewswere selected due to their ‘density’ regarding both their descriptive strength and richness inreferring to various themes.ANALYSISAn inductive analysis of the data was conducted following the basic principles of groundedtheory methodology. The main aim was to generate a descriptive theory of the dominantorganizational culture and/or subcultures present in the divisions, and to formulate preliminaryhypotheses on how collective stress might be produced and coped with within these cultures.The process of data analysis is illustrated in Figure 20.1. The data were, first, read andcategorized into codes that were suggested by the data rather than imposed from outside, aprocedure known as ‘open coding’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). These codes were thenclustered into ‘concepts’. Once all the data were examined, the concepts were organized bythemes, which became candidates for a set of stable and integrative categories. Conceptsrepresented the properties and dimensions of a particular theme. The identification of themeswithin each division and comparisons between divisions often required several rounds ofanalysis of the transcriptions. Once a particular theme had enough properties, namely no newproperties related to a theme emerged in the transcriptions, a particular theme became anintegrative category with a set of defined dimensions. Iteration between data, concepts andthemes ended when enough categories and associated dimensions were defined to describethe cultures of the divisions, a situation Glaser and Strauss (1967) refer to as ‘theoreticalsaturation’.Constant comparative method was, thus, applied on three levels. First, we compareddifferent codes and respective extracts of transcriptions, which resulted in the definition andselection of a set of concepts to be elaborated further. Second, we compared different conceptsto one another, which resulted in the definition of a set of properties and dimensionsdescribing each theme and, finally, an integrative category. Third, we compared themes andcategories, which resulted in the definition of three main integrative categories describing anddistinguishing the subcultures.These integrative categories were found in all the subcultures, but had somewhat differentcontent (namely, dimensions) in them. The first two categories represent what Schein (1990,1996) describes as underlying basic assumptions and values and the third one observableartefacts, ‘products’ of and manifest behaviours of a certain culture (Table 20.1):