Researching Organizations

The Practice of Organizational Fieldwork

Matthew Jones, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446257227, 9781446257210
• eBook ISBN: 9781446297674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although there are plenty of books that discuss the principles, the philosophy and the techniques of research in organisations, it is much harder to find information on what doing research in organisations actually involves in practice.  Yet this is often one of the most challenging, but also most interesting, aspects of a study.  Drawing on examples and debates from a broad range of disciplines (such as criminology, education and social anthropology as well management) Researching Organisations explores the issues that researchers may encounter when carrying out fieldwork in organisations.  From getting in to an organisation at the start of the research to getting out and maybe back again at the end, the book offers systematic guidance to help researchers navigate the messy reality of fieldwork.  

Researching Organisations is designed for graduate level researchers who may be undertaking fieldwork for the first time, but also for those who wish to gain an understanding of research practice.

1

Introduction

Chapter objectives

• to identify the scope of topics covered in the book

• to explain the book’s focus on the practice of organizational fieldwork

• to introduce the ‘getting in, getting on, getting out and getting back’ framework around which the main chapters are structured

• to present an overview of the book

For researchers in a wide range of disciplines, not just those in organization studies, the primary site for their research, that is, the place where they collect their data, is an organization of some sort or another. By an organization we mean a relatively enduring group of people with some degree of coordination around a common principle or objective that has a more or less identifiable boundary. As this definition suggests, many different types of social group may be considered as an organization – a small charity set up to raise funds for a local hospice, a transnational corporation, a network of consultants who offer their services under a common name, or a high-security prison. Just from these examples we can also see that organizations may vary widely in terms of aspects such as their size, motivation, location and degree of formalization. Whatever these differences, the potential significance of which will be considered in the next chapter, the common features of organizations (coordination, collective orientation and boundaries) tend to make them distinctive research sites, compared to studying other social groups such as families, street-corner gangs or residents of a neighbourhood. This book is about the practical issues that may arise when carrying out research fieldwork¹ in organizational settings and what can be done to try to address them.

In focusing on practical issues, the intention is not to suggest that researchers do not need to know about philosophical, theoretical or more traditional ‘methodological’ issues, such as survey or experimental design or statistical analysis. There is already such a wealth of literature available on these topics, however, that it would seem more useful to focus on supplementing, rather than attempting to replicate it. References will therefore be provided, as appropriate, to relevant literature on the philosophy and methods of research in organizations, so that the focus can be maintained on the practical issues of undertaking research in organizational settings. A sound understanding of the philosophical assumptions of the study and a well-thought out design, for example, may be essential prerequisites of effective research, but it is also important to be able to put these into practice.

Most of the philosophical, theoretical and methodological issues faced by organizational researchers, moreover, can also be argued to be common to social research in general and therefore addressed by general social research methods texts, whereas practical issues often arise from what will be suggested are the distinctive characteristics of organizations. Thus, while there may have been a ‘strong tradition of collections of “inside” views of the process of social research’ (Bryman, 1988: 1), some of which include chapters on research on organizational settings, there would not seem to be a comparable literature focusing specifically on organizational research. Nor would the tradition that Bryman refers to seem to have been particularly active since the publication of Doing Research in Organizations, with the main contributions being domain-specific works, such as Walford (1991) and Delamont (2002) in education, Gellner and Hirsch (2001) in social anthropology, Randall et al. (2007) in computer-supported cooperative work and Halliday and Schmidt (2009) in law.

Researchers undertaking fieldwork in organizations therefore largely have to rely either on trial and error, improvising solutions to issues as they encounter them; searching for guidance on specific issues in specialist journals; relying on such discussion of issues as may be divulged in papers and monographs (often in confessional appendices rather than in the main body of the text); or seeking the personal advice of more experienced colleagues. While none of these approaches is necessarily inappropriate, locating suitable guidance or developing relevant experience can be costly and there is a risk that lack of broader awareness of issues and ad hoc solutions may inadvertently cause irreparable harm to the research, for example when a mishandled approach to an organization for access results in exclusion from a key research site. This is not to claim that this book offers infallible guidance or that factors beyond the researcher’s control may not prevent the successful implementation of even the best-laid plans, but that providing a systematic discussion of potential issues across the whole research process may help to avoid, or at least anticipate, some of the more common problems that can derail research.

A useful way of thinking about this aspect of research in organizations is provided by a widely cited chapter in Bryman (1988) by David Buchanan, David Boddy and James McCalman, which is entitled ‘Getting in, getting on, getting out and getting back’. This framing provides the main structure of this book. Discussion of ‘getting in’ explores the issues of access to organizations, ‘getting on’ addresses issues that may be encountered in sustaining access, ‘getting out’ examines when and how to end fieldwork and potential considerations when reporting on such work and ‘getting back’ looks at possible reasons why a researcher may wish to revisit a research site and how this may be facilitated.

The primary focus of discussion of the research process is practical. This is partly because there are relatively few principles on which it may be considered to be based (and probably even fewer that all researchers would agree on). What is often presented as the guiding consideration in undertaking fieldwork is therefore ‘what works’ (Buchanan et al. (1988) refer to this as an ‘opportunistic approach’). Even if there are principles, however, another reason for a pragmatic approach to researching organizations is that there is so much variability between sites that generalized prescriptions are rarely possible. Organizational research can thus be considered as much of a craft as a science, relying on experience, sensitivity to context and the individual researcher’s social skills, even if guided by more systematic principles.

Some, perhaps much, of the guidance offered in this book may therefore appear to be obvious to researchers with substantial experience of working in organizations. If this is the case, all well and good, and sections can be skipped (although it may be advisable to check whether your experience is supported by other researchers’ reports). It cannot be assumed, however, that all organizational researchers will necessarily have such experience or will have reflected on it in ways that enable them to identify solutions to the issues discussed. The book also does not claim to offer a magic formula that will ensure that any organizational research project will proceed without a hitch. Rather, by alerting researchers to potential issues and discussing possible solutions, in many cases by reference to published examples of how they have been overcome, the aim is to provide some reassurance that the quagmire of fieldwork, as it can sometimes appear, can be safely traversed and that there is a body of experience available that can avoid each researcher having to ‘reinvent the wheel’.

In emphasising the practical, craft-based nature of the research process and the issues involved in getting in, on and out of organizations, this book might be viewed as being applicable only to ‘intensive’ observational research carried out over a long period of time. While many of the issues discussed in the book are perhaps brought most strongly to the fore in what is sometimes referred to as organizational ethnography, however, a lot of them also apply, albeit maybe to a different degree or in a different way, to more ‘distant’ forms of organizational research. This is the case not just with interview-based studies (some of which may even call themselves ethnographic), but also with surveys and, indeed, with research based on published data.

Problems of access, for example, apply to a researcher undertaking a survey perhaps just as much as a researcher wishing to undertake interviews, although they may be less visible to the former and may be framed as an issue of response rates. Nevertheless both researchers face the challenge, as organizational outsiders, of making contact with relevant respondents/interviewees and of persuading them to engage with the study. Similarly, the issues faced in ‘getting on’ in an organization, such as incentives for participation and organizational politics, apply just as much to survey respondents as they do to interviewees, even if they are not visible to the researcher sending the survey. Nor, despite their apparent objectivity, are these issues necessarily avoided by research relying on secondary data or published statistics, the possible influences on the original collection of which are rarely considered at the point of use. Highlighting these issues may therefore encourage greater awareness of these influences and their possible implications for research findings.

Table 1.1. presents an overview of some of the key issues in the practice of organizational fieldwork (which are discussed in subsequent chapters) that may arise in different forms of organizational research across the four phases of the Buchanan et al. framework. This is not intended as a comprehensive listing of all possible forms of research or issues that a particular form of research may encounter, but as an illustration of the potential relevance of the topics covered in the book across a range of different forms of organizational research. Italics are used to indicate issues that may not always be immediately evident when carrying out particular forms of research, but which may nevertheless be a potential influence on how the research proceeds.

Overview of the book

Broadly speaking, the structure of this book follows that of the process of organizational research, as described by Buchanan et al. (1988). Before we can begin to think even about ‘getting in’ to an organization, however, it would seem important to establish an understanding on a number of points that inform the approach to organizational fieldwork that is adopted in the subsequent chapters.

The first of these is to consider what it is about organizations that makes organizational research a potentially distinctive domain of study. Chapter 2 therefore sets out some of the characteristics that could be considered to differentiate organizations from other forms of social research site and explores their implications for the conduct of research. One of these implications can be seen to be the existence of a range of forms of organizational research, from ‘scientific inquiry’ to consultancy, each with their different outlook and expectations. Organizations vary too, in terms such as their size, industry, history and location and this may affect how they can be researched. Consequently, it is argued that there is no ‘one right way’ to study organizations, and that the responses to the issues raised in the book are likely to depend on the interaction between the researchers’ approach and the type of organization.

Chapter 3 discusses the research process as it is represented in many research methods textbooks, in order to locate the particular focus of this book and to relate this to the more general me...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List Of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Research and Organizations
• 3  The Research Process
• 4  Ethics in Organizational Research
• 5  Getting in: Seeking and Negotiating Access
• 6  Getting on: In the Organization
• 7  Getting out: Leaving the Field and Reporting Research in Organizations
• 8  Getting Back
• 9  Emerging Issues in Research in Organizations
• 10. Conclusions
• Index