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

364 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––throughout the organization. We started with a case study of Nottinghamshire CountyCouncil, where the host officer was a manager in the chief executive’s department. Theinterviews were carried out by one of the academics, working with the head of quality forNorth Tyneside Council as co-interviewer. The research team then studied the corporate corein Kirklees Council, where the Nottinghamshire manager became the co-interviewer, withthe host officer being the head of organization development for Kirklees. Finally, the Kirkleesmanager joined the team to research North Tyneside Council (where the host officer was themanager who had been a co-interviewer in the first case study). The three organizations werevery different in size (one of Nottinghamshire’s service departments was larger than the wholeof North Tyneside for example); in structure (North Tyneside had no chief executive, whileKirklees was an innovator in having strategic directors with no line management responsibilityfor services, and Nottinghamshire had a more traditional, for that time, chief officer structure);and in culture (Nottinghamshire was quite formal and relatively stable; North Tyneside wasrecovering from major job losses, and Kirklees was encouraging an experimenting and openculture). The differences across the case studies were very fertile in elucidating the role of thevarious elements of the corporate core. The practitioner researchers became fascinated by thedifferences they found in the organization they researched compared with the organizationthey worked in. As the team worked together, there were discussions not only of the data, butalso of personal reactions and questions, based on the surprises they had encountered, asdifferent from their own organization. There was considerable questioning across the wholeresearch team as to how each organization ‘worked’. Each case study was written up by theinterviewers and an overview comparative report was also written. The overview report wasable to address some contemporary organizational and policy debates about the role of thecorporate core in organizational and cultural change. In particular, it examined how thesepublic organizations dealt with the contradictory organizational tensions of fragmentation andintegration, centralization and decentralization, stability and flexibility, and managing structuraland cultural changes. It was able to reflect debates on these issues in private sectororganizations but show how the pressures were somewhat different in the context of providinglocal democracy and public services.A second use of the co-research method was in the study of the role of leadership and themanagement of influence in four contrasting local authority organizations (Devon,Hertfordshire, Knowsley and Warwick), which had each been engaged in a major changeinitiative (Hartley and Allison, 2000). The research team consisted of four academics and eightpractitioners (seven managers and one councillor). On this occasion, the host officersparticipated in research in one or more of the other case studies, but other co-interviewerscame from organizations not engaged in the research (though part of the wider network oforganizations working with the academics in a Consortium – see later section). Practitionersparticipated to the extent that they had interest and time – from one case study only to beinginvolved in three of the four. Two of the academics participated in all four case studies in thisresearch, providing continuity and consistency across the cases. The research team wrote upfour published reports (one on each case) and the whole team produced an overview report.In each report, the authors were the interviewers (whether academic or practitioner) inalphabetical order. The reports and academic publications were able to address quite subtleconceptual notions of political, managerial and distributed leadership and trace the impact ofeach of these types of leadership (and their interaction) on organizational processes ofinnovation and change.