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

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– THE FUTURE CONFERENCE––––––––– 377democratic design principle’. It states that people need to be involved in the decisions thataffect their lives. This became the guiding principle of his work and has far reachingconsequences for how social systems, large and small, are structured.So in the FC the power (to collect data and determine what is significant, what decisionsare to be made, what actions are to be taken, and so on) is explicitly situated with the groupitself. Were the ‘facilitators’ or process managers to retain power over the content, this wouldreduce the likelihood of the group taking responsibility for the decisions, particularly aboutwhat happens afterwards. This is another significant point of departure from the traditionalresearch paradigm where the ‘expert’ researcher collects and analyses the data and ‘objectively’analyses it and reports significant trends and proposals deriving from them, back to thesponsors.In the FC, people attending (who are a microcosm of the system and therefore cover allthe different perspectives within the system) do the analysis and make decisions about whatis critical, what is unimportant and what to take as the basis for decision-making.There is no role for the traditional researcherThe corollary of the position above is that there is no place for a traditional researcher withinthis paradigm. Anyone using the method will be doing so effectively to enable people to dotheir own research as a prelude to making changes in their lives or social system (be it workor community based). The role of the manager/facilitator is to manage the process, structurethe enquiry along pre-agreed lines, and help people stick with the task particularly when thegoing gets tough (for example, when there are disagreements about what the data means).Validity and reliability are not concernsThis has been covered to some extent in the paragraphs above, but it is worth underlining itas another major source of difference with traditional approaches to research. As stated above,there is not much emphasis on reliability and validity of the data. However, there is a kind ofvalidity that comes from the variety of perspectives. This helps to ‘triangulate’ the data toensure that a single loud voice does not unfairly dominate the group (Pretty et al., 1995: 59).The participants deal with complexityThis is a result of the assumption about ‘who can know’. An extension of what Emery called‘ecological learning’ (Emery, 1993: 83) is the ability of ordinary people to deal withcomplexity: in a rapidly changing world, it is virtually impossible for anyone to knoweverything that is going on. The FC has a simple and pragmatic way of dealing with this: oncekey people from any system get together, there will be a view from every part of the system,each with their unique perception, knowledge, and experience, and this enables complexityboth within the system and immediately outside it to be quickly mapped. Done this way, thepicture that emerges stands a better chance of being up to date, and reflecting what is actuallyhappening both inside and outside the system.Emery’s wife Merrelyn, has added a useful concept to this, ‘puzzle learning’. The analogyis the jigsaw where the shape of the next piece cannot be known until the last one is down.This is the kind of complex data gathering and assembly that people are good at. With