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

36 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––to see whether these accounts resonate with and inform the members’ own understandingsof their subjective experiences. Even though the concepts and categories used in this processmight be allowed to emerge from the data (see Glaser and Strauss, 1967 for a full discussionof grounded theory, and Länsisalmi et al., Chapter 20, this volume), they must best interpretthe particular material by retaining the meaning of the actors involved. In this sense, theconcepts and constructs developed in a particular life history will be context specific.APPLICATION OF THE METHOD IN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Some of the specific benefits of applying this method are, first, in understanding howorganizations’ function involves understanding the ambiguities, uncertainties andproblematics that individuals experience and resolve on a daily basis. Allowing people toexplain for themselves the experience of contradictions and confusions, moments of indecisionand turning points, can illustrate graphically how organizational socialization processes areaccomplished, for example, and consequently illuminate our understanding of how individualsand organizations function, more than methods which reduce experience to abstracteddefinitions and moribund descriptions.Second, the technique allows the researcher access to the network of typifications, orinterpretive schemes, which individuals bring to their roles in particular organizations. Thismay be particularly relevant if the research question involves understanding the motivationsand influences which powerful organizational leaders, or specific groups, bring to bear onorganizations (see, for example, Bloor and Dawson, 1994). The method can expose themanner in which entrepreneurs or founders come to hold their particular beliefs and versionsof rationality, and how they impose these definitions on others.Finally, the organizational literature is replete with studies of organizational culture but veryfew studies actually give specific advice about how to conduct a cultural analysis that capturesthe complexity and dynamism of cultural processes. Life history method can provide this. AsJones points out, ‘the world of formal organization can be viewed as a network of typifications,as a particular form of language that has been produced historically through the rational andexpressive acts of its population’ (1983: 154). This organizational language, or grammar ofaction, provides the basic rules for organizational activity. In this sense, this grammar of actionis the organizational culture. Understanding how this language is constituted, throughgathering organizational life history data, can give students an analytic handle on the culturalcomposition of organizations. This understanding should include the recognition thatorganizational languages or grammars are constituted in three main ways (Jones, 1983), eachof which is central to the way organizational lives develop.First, organizations, like individuals, do not exist in a vacuum. The constitutive rules orgrammars of action of an organization reflect a rationality embodied in the widerenvironment(s) of which the organization is a part. These rules are embodied in the languageof the organization, and are reproduced through it. For example, the language of health careorganizations in the UK now includes an economic discourse, which was introducedexternally, but which now influences and informs the activity of all health care organizations.Second, organizational languages are constituted collectively, and represent and reproduce acollective memory of events (see Middleton and Edwards, 1991 for a detailed exposition onmemory as a socially constituted activity). These collective memories, which provide recipes