In this section I reflect on the research process, including on my assumptions, past experiences, potential biases and sets of beliefs that may have influenced my decisions regarding this study and my interpretations of data. I do this early in this section to situate myself in this study. Although this study is at the positivistic end of the qualitative research spectrum (Denzin & Lincoln, 2008), I believe the research process has been a process of discovery and that I should accurately portray and make visible my own decision-making process to add to the credibility and transparency of this thesis.
My interest in service encounters began when I had to hold two seemingly different positions at work. I held a managerial position in a business school where I also tutored a service marketing paper to undergraduate students. As a tutor, my position was
84 similar to frontline personnel who deliver courses to clients. Teaching was a new skill I had to learn, and I often sought help from my friends to solve class management
problems. I was also the department’s academic secretary, a post similar to an
operational manager in a service organisation. These positions allowed me to gain insights about service encounters from the service organisation’s perspective, and from the person who represents the organisation to the customers. I began to wonder how frontline personnel learn to deal with service encounters and how service managers can help them learn.
This led me to choose the focus of my PhD study: frontline service personnel learning the service encounter. Having a background in service marketing, I looked at research in this area to explore learning about service encounters. Service marketing literature provides limited research on this topic. The predominant paradigm is that frontline personnel’s knowledge is the result of information processing. One intriguing lead in the literature was the community of practice concept. These discoveries led me to knowledge management.
Knowledge management literature became the next main source of insight in my literature review. Similar to the service management and marketing areas, the predominant paradigm of knowledge management is that knowledge is the result of information processing. Knowledge management does incorporate frameworks for understanding how individuals share and learn as well as the role of CoPs in solving workplace problems. However, the micro processes of knowledge sharing are only vaguely described and have not been examined indepth, although there is some research indicating that storytelling plays an important part in the process (e.g., Brown &
85 Duguid, 1991; Geiger & Turley, 2005). Stories develop shared meaning (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002). These insights enabled me to develop research questions for my research proposal:
1. How does a community of practice facilitate knowledge sharing?
2. How does sharing knowledge through stories enrich members’ knowledge?
3. How are stories shared in a community of practice?
4. What kind of story is useful to facilitate sharing knowledge about service
encounters?
Collecting the stories was my initial challenge. I have always been interested in hair stylists’ work, but there were too many challenges involved in gaining access to back-
stage areas where stories would be told. For several reasons, including my being an international student, doing participant observation study—my first option—was considered impractical (by my supervisors and myself). My supervisor then suggested examining stories shared in online communities of frontline service personnel. I searched publicly available online communities through Google. I found that frontline service employees in all sorts of fields use forums to learn about their jobs: waiters in fast-food restaurants, baristas, customer service officers in retail stores, bank tellers, hair stylists, teachers and flight attendants all provided forums with manifest rich discussion. I found also found that these discussions covered both technical and social aspects of service. I became more and more interested in online communities of practice and extended my literature review on this subject. This phase reflected the iterative process of the qualitative research process as I moved from analysing publicly available discussions in online communities to consulting literature, to going back to
86 online communities to refine my research topic. This phase marked a significant process of the research as I finally defined my research questions:
1. Why do individuals participate in an online community of frontline service
personnel?
2. What workplace knowledge do individuals share in an online community of
frontline personnel?
3. How do individuals share knowledge about service encounters in an online
community of frontline employees?
The initial research questions guided me to develop a suitable research methodology for the online settings (research methodology is presented in the next section). A pilot study was conducted to test the methodology (see Section 3.4.1 for the detailed description of the pilot study), leading to research design refinements (Section 3.4.2). The pilot study indicated that I needed to focus on a specific service typology to be able to explore knowledge about service encounters, leading to a decision to set the research in an online community of hair stylists.
During the data analysis process in the pilot study, I noticed that identity was an important issue in sharing knowledge about service encounters. The identity issues were more apparent in the online community selected for this study. I was also more curious about the dynamics between individuals and groups that lead to learning. These issues brought me back to the literature review guided by these research questions (research questions refinement is presented in Section 3.4.5):
1. What are the online community’s characteristics that facilitate knowledge
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2. How do online community members overcome limitations of online media to
share and learn implicit elements of service encounters?
3. How do individuals develop practice and identity in an online community of
frontline service personnel?
Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated learning paradigm and Wenger’s (1998b)
community of practice concepts were reviewed in the first phase of the study. These concepts have not fully elaborated the dynamics between individuals and groups, especially in explaining how participation in CoPs enables individuals to construct professional identities. Further literature review in the second phase of the study led to Weick’s (1995) sensemaking concepts as an interpretive lens to examine learning in an
online community of practice. This phase allowed me to further develop theoretical frameworks and guide the second phase of data collection and analysis, and led me to reach the conclusions of this study.