EL CONTEXTO SOCIAL EN EL QUE OPERAN LAS ORGANIZACIONES NO GUBERNAMENTALES

As I began consciously to explore the field, I sought both to immerse myself, and to distance myself. I immersed, in the sense o f seeing chance encounters as part of my

study; I distanced by recognising that these experiences and accounts were only one o f a multiplicity of angles on, or views about, the phenomena that I was beginning to explore. I found a set of questions cited by McCracken (1988) useful in illuminating this process:

What is [the topic’s] place in daily life? Who does it involve, according to what schedules, for what putative and actual purposes, with what consequences? What assumptions about the world does the topic rehearse? How does it play out received understanding about how the world is constituted? (p. 32)

My response to these questions is contained in the report of the data from the conversations in Chapter 4.1.

Moustakas’s (1990) description of the absorption of the researcher in the topic (p. 45) was one that, in part, reflected my experience during this phase of my research. Contrary to Moustakas’s advice, I was not single-mindedly preoccupied with my research question, but, congruent with his account, the question kept on cropping up in all sorts of

circumstances when I little expected it to.

I have called this phase of my fieldwork ‘conversations’, and indeed during the seven months of this process I carried out eleven conversations. However, I also undertook one observation, one questionnaire and was embroiled in three sagas (on a total of six

(A) with people who could illuminate my thoughts about intellectual property developers, and

(B) where I made notes of the encounter in my research journal for that period.

The sagas subsequently became a separate category of inquiry in my mind, but at this stage I was bundling them together with the conversations (and, indeed, the observations) in the phase o f the research that I then called ‘Openings’, and now refer to as Phase 1.

O f these encounters, I saw ten people once, four twice, and one three times. I held the view that 12 of these people were potential intellectual property developers in

management development. Of the rest, one was in management development but was not an intellectual property developer and we discussed why he was a negative case; one was an industrial sociologist working in the field of industrial relations; and the other was a political scientist. I saw these last three on one occasion each.

As to the nationality of these 15 people, one was Canadian, one American and one Brazilian. All the rest were British.

The individuals were:

Meredith Belbin (2 - observed, including some conversations, & questionnaire) Tom Boydell (2)

David Clutterbuck (3 - o f which 1 was the ‘MDL’ saga)

Jim Chandler (political scientist - The ‘political scientists strike’ saga) Caroline Egan-Strang (The ‘MDL’ saga)

Ian Flemming (the negative case) Andrew Mayo

Neil Millward (industrial sociologist)

Gareth Morgan (2 - Canadian - conversation & observed) Alan Mumford (2 - both the ‘MDL’ saga)

Mike Pedler

Gifford Pinchot (American - observed) Ricardo Semler (Brazilian - observed) Mike Woodcock (The ‘litigation’ saga).

This collection o f people can be described as a convenience sample. They were just the people who I happened to encounter for other purposes and who had an angle on this study. They have some virtues as a sample however. They included a majority o f people in my main area of interest (management development), but also some from other fields by way of contrast. They were not a hit and run sample, in the sense that I saw five of them (even in just this phase o f the research) on more than one occasion. Most were from my focal country (Britain), but again there were three from elsewhere to provide the potential o f a perspective on the national culture. As well as established IPDs there were two in the sample who were not established as IPDs, and one who did not see himself as an IPD at all. Finally, and in retrospect, my sample seemed appropriate in that it included

six of the nine people who I subsequently interviewed in Phase 3, having identified them as EPDs via the questionnaire.

My approach to conducting these conversations was ethnographic. As Schwartzman (1993) says:

First approaches provide researchers with a rich source o f data. It is in these encounters that the most dramatic differences between the ethnographer’s culture and the informant’s culture will be apparent. The surprises, differences,

misunderstandings, and such that occur in these encounters may foreshadow major research concerns and issues; however, in the beginning, researchers may not know how to interpret what these real differences reveal about themselves and their informants, (p. 48)

It was because o f not knowing how to interpret these initial conversations that I restricted the encounters that counted to those that I had written up in my research journal, at or close to the time of their occurrence. I did not record what was said verbatim, either here or subsequently in this research, and this reflected the conviction that searching for meaning is a different quest from searching for accuracy, for both researcher and informant (Case, 1995). I did, however, make detailed notes of what was said and my responses to it. These notes were usually made at the time o f the encounter, or, if not then, very soon afterwards.

I treat the information that I gained from these informants under a number o f themes rather than chronologically or strictly by considering each respondent in turn. I have a sense, in weaving this story, that it is like a fine Oriental rug. Each strand creates an impact that relates to the rest of the rug. It is hard, and does violence to the rug-maker’s intentions, to examine each strand without holding in mind the other strands. On the other hand, I am conscious that this approach to the data does violence to my earlier stated desire to be idiographic. In creating this account I am conscious o f tensions sharpened by the unremitting linearity o f words. It is so much easier with music, where different musical ideas can overlap in time and still be accessible, separately and together, to the attuned ear. I have attempted to approach the happy state o f a musical form, in this respect of wholes and themes, by keeping some mini-accounts entire, but grouping them within a strand of my discussion.

The strands are bundled together under a number o f issues. The contents of these issues are spelled out in Chapter 4.

2.4.3 Sagas

What is the unit of data in an ethnographic study? One answer is that it is a story. Stories are shaped by the flow o f events, and they also shape them. Smith (1988) defines a problem as ‘an understandable situation that is significant to and may be solvable by some agent, although probably with some difficulty’ (p. 1491). This contributes to my definition of saga, as it emphasises the quality of design rather than discovery common to

both sagas and problems (Weick, 1995).

Later in this chapter I will outline the centrality of stories in the sensemaking

methodology. For now, suffice it to say that the stories I assembled became for me a central touchstone of how IPDs behaved. I call my stories ‘sagas5, because, for me, that term captures something of the drama and vividness of the events. Sagas are described as ‘prose tales of the deeds of heroes in the old literature; a body of legend about some subject5 (Chambers 20th Century Dictionary), but, of course, when they were first told they were not about the old literature. They began as lived experience - perhaps idealised, perhaps projected back into the past, to give them weight, but in essence capturing the crucial behaviours of the type described, in a way which offers meaning, warnings and examples for emulation in the present time. My description o f a saga would be ‘a vivid account of a piece of ongoing life addressing ambiguity, uncertainty and interrupted perceptions, and building towards a coherent conclusion5.

How do you capture such an event? It is hard to give a coherent account to satisfy the canons of methodological rigour. My experience has been that it is not until one has been immersed in a saga for some time that one realises that this is what it is. Sagas are not just punctuated episodes in the flow of life. They are created by the act o f punctuation. It

is by dividing up my experience in this way, that I create the unit of meaning that I will name as a saga. I will then present it to point to a conclusion or to be interrogated in the search for meaning. Am I reliable in my telling of the story? How would we know? I can gain some intersubjective verification, and I have done this wherever possible - asking

the other parties whether they can see what I see in the events which unfolded. On occasion, I have used documentary sources, or shown my account to the other witnesses. But social life is much less determined than such a process of verification would imply. It is not just that the other party might have a different slant on the saga from me, but also I (and each of the others) have any number o f different slants for different purposes.

One of my early tales, the litigation saga told in Chapter 4.1, is a case in point. Telling it in the context of this research, it is a story o f the fierce defence o f intellectual properties (IPs). But I have also told a story about the same events as a moral tale about the blinding effect of riches on judgement. Again, I have told it as a tale, which, frustratingly, does not quite conform to the neat ending of the rich man seeking more and ending up losing a great deal. The events as I recall them, fit all o f these three stories well, and I have also heard Mike Woodcock, the protagonist in the tale, use them as a story about the

extravagance and the fecklessness of Americans. So, the stories are not true, but they are cogent.

Having absorbed the sensemaking perspective (which I describe later in this chapter), I find that I am noticing mini-sagas all the time, and also noticing how I construct the stories following the principles outlined in Weick, 1995. These mini-sagas, conversations and stories represent a final stage (Phase 4) in my research fieldwork. This is both

reassuring - the methodology has plausibility; and alarming - is it too plausible, and, in my hands, a solipsistic account simply of how things seem to me to hang together? There is a sense in which this work, and in particular, these mini-sagas are not research, just

life. However, this is what Weick is talking about when he discusses plausibility, extracted cues and enacting sensible environments. Where hard science and social

science connect there is an increasing consensus that the observer is implicated in what is observed. As quantum physicist, Danah Zohar says (Bancroft, 1996) quantum reality means there is no participant observation, only participant participation.

Weick (1995, p. 128) contends that stories ‘are works of fiction, but they are “no more fictional than any other product such as thought since abstraction, schematizations, and inference are part o f any cognitive act”. (Robinson & Hawpe, 1986, pp. 111-112)’. Later Weick says that, ‘there is a strong element of improvisation, bricolage, making do, and resourcefulness associated with any act of sensemaking that works’ (p. 181).

I have used the sagas in this research as the raw material for furthering understanding of intellectual property developers (IPDs) and their behaviour. One way I have done this is to write a meta-saga about the sagas - the story of the stories, as it were. This can be found in Chapter 5 of this thesis.

One advantage of sagas over interviews is that sagas capture the theory of action in use (Argyris, 1992), whereas interviews risk being imbued with the espoused theory. They are content embedded in cues, frames and connections. Sagas alone, however, do not seem to me to offer the considered reflection by respondents upon their own practice, which the interviews in this study afforded.