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

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– LIFE HISTORIES –––––––––– 35anticipated future which provides lives with a sense of unity and purpose’. As such the lifehistory method provides a fundamental source of knowledge about how people experienceand make sense of themselves and their environments, allowing the actors to speak forthemselves. In some circumstances the voices may then be interpreted, but the process ofinterpretation will always attempt to reflect the actors’ perspective, rather than simply that ofthe researcher. This is not to say that the approach accepts the account of the individual assome kind of unproblematic version of an objective ‘truth’. Rather, the method is predicatedon the assumption that ‘all perspectives dangle from some person’s problematic. Views, truthsand conceptions of the real can never be wholly ripped away from the people who experiencethem’ (Plummer, 1983: 57). But neither does the method seek to deny that people existwithin particular structural and institutional constraints. Instead, it specifically locates itself inthe nexus between deterministic structures and individual agency, between those factors thatmight be described as relatively objective, and the subjective interpretation of the individual(Casey, 1993; Elder, 1981). Ontologically, it recognizes the dialectical relationship betweenthese two processes: that human beings, through their actions, impose themselves on andcreate their worlds, but they do so in a world which presents itself as already constitutedthrough a network of typifications. These typifications – for example, group norms, groupmeanings, group language – express the systematic and coherent ‘rationality’ or ‘grammar’ ofthe context, and thus reflect, and in turn constitute, the culture or system of shared meaningin which the individual is located. In sum, the approach views ‘the individual, embedded ina network of relationships and statuses, as the irreducible unit of analysis’ (Mathews, 1977: 37).But it would be a mistake to view life histories as totally individualistic. Of course theyreflect the experiences of the individual through a given period of time, but because livesmove resolutely through history and structure they can also provide an understanding thatextends beyond the individual and into the wider context of organizations, institutions,cultures and societies. As Thompson (in Bertaux, 1981) points out, a life history cannot betold without constant reference to historical change: social or organizational. In a period whenconstant change is perceived as the norm and much organizational and management researchis devoted to trying to understand it, life histories can provide a useful window through whichto widen our understanding of the change process within organizations. The method canavoid the common research error which Becker (1966: xiii) noted three decades ago butwhich still holds true today: that process is an ‘overworked notion’ in research, in thatresearchers often talk a lot about ongoing processes whilst using methods which prevent themfrom uncovering the very processes which they seek to identify.The life history method also recognizes the collusion of the researcher in the researchprocess. It does not presume that the researcher is some impartial, value-free entity,unproblematically engaging in the research process to produce objective accounts of a reifiedtruth. Rather, the approach recognizes that the researcher also brings implicit and explicittheories to the research situation, and the task of the researcher includes surfacing these in thestruggle for balance between theory in the researcher’s head and theory employed by thepeople in the research situation.The explicating of the researcher’s basic assumptions and theoretical frameworks is a centralaspect of the validity of the method. In addition, validity is achieved through the congruenceof research explanations with the meanings with which members construct their realities andaccomplish their everyday activities. Part of the methodological rigour, then, entails allowingthe explanations of the researcher to be subjected to the scrutiny of organizational members