Coordinación 61 

It should be noted that at the beginning of an interview, direct per­ sonal questions tended to make most interviewees nervous and/or appre­ hensive. It was regarded as preferable to begin with generalised discussion of procedures and situations. The aim was never to harass or corner the non-executive director into providing information re­ quired, and if a question was asked, for instance about the operation of a particular board, which obviously caused the interviewee to become defensive or annoyed, the subject was quickly dropped and the safe gen­ eralisation returned to. The intent was to produce a conversational atmosphere rather than to give the sense of a ’formal’ interview. This succeeded so well that in some instances the researcher obtained infor­ mation on the financial difficulties of marital settlements, and on the drinking habits of director's colleagues.

In conducting these interviews, the researcher observed some repercus­ sions from the fact that she was a female attempting to investigate an occupation which appears to be predominantly a male preserve. It is noteworthy that the pronoun used to describe the non-executive director was invariably ’he*, and that no deference when reference was made to the collectivity was paid in this respect to the fact that the inter­

viewer was a female. Where no such deference is ever shown, we can safely assume that members' gender for competent membership would be invariably male.

In most cases the interviewer was treated as a reasonably unintelligent schoolgirl doing a project, (in a few cases she was treated as an an­ noying interruption that would probably go away fairly soon if supplied with information.) The non-executive directors instructed the re­

searcher on the contingencies of performance of their role. Many

interviewees actually explained to the researcher how the research work should be conducted (usually by large-scale survey methods). This kind of attitude, however, enabled the researcher to ask many 'naive' ques­ tions and to have these answered without any comment on their validity. It is likely that a male interviewer attempting this kind of prompting device would have met with a contemptuous response, and might have low­ ered his credibility to a point where the interviewee refused further co-operation. The avuncular, slightly patronising, attitude adopted to the female researcher had the effect of permitting an 'uninformed* approach to the interviewee, and of eliciting the information required in order to remedy the supposed ignorance of the researcher.

Using the 'prompt sheet' reproduced above, it proved possible in the course of the interviews to obtain a great deal of very varied inform­ ation about the role relationships and role performance of the non­ executive director, and about the host of different contingencies per­ ceived by non-executive directors to affect the nature of their role and their behaviour in that role.

Concluding Remarks

study of it". This is a distinction onto which we shall hold. What he is suggesting is that when we describe any group - for example, in our case, non-executive directors - our description

"must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine (the social group under study) place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define them." (Geertz 1975)*

Our description is essentially a second order description, it is a scientist's description of their lives - only the actual role occupant can make a first order description as it is his life. However, if we are to generate this description we must, as Geertz suggests,

"begin with our own interpretation of what our informants are up to and then systematize those",

So a test of sorts of our work would be that it would be insightful (analytical, systematized, more theoretical than the ad hoc rationalis­ ation that these "men of affairs" customarily hold about their work) but would still recognisably - to them - capture the essence of their world.

But then, what is our entitlement to believe that "our interpretation" has any validity? There are several responses to this question. It can be suggested that special training as a social scientist, a demon­ strable ability to collect data, an ability to analyse that material - generate descriptions of their activity - confers a special status. The work is not that of a novelist, generating moral propositions on material that is at best only partial data, nor that of a propagandist generating materials that are publicity for or against the non-exec­ utive director activity. Rather we are treating the materials we have access to with sociological indifference (Garfinkel and SacKs 1970). By this we mean that all the accounts we receive of their activities, whether from non-executive directors, commentators, journalists, theor­ ists and so on are treated as accounts which give shape and meaning to our understanding of the way they structure their experience, the way

they account for the world in which they live. These accounts may be seen as different in style and content but they are all accorded equal status by us in our attempt to describe and analyse their experience. We are aware that the above paragraph has the air of something of a sales pitch for the activity of the social scientist - that there are many traps and snares in any scientific activity in the search for ob­ jectivity, that membership of the collectivity "social scientist" in­ corporates many promises and problems. Yet it is an utterly bland fact that the way in which we collect data, assemble descriptions, sys­ tematise those theories, hypothesise and theories are in crucial res­ pects different from, more concentrated than these activities as commonly undertaken by the man in the street (Schutz 1971)*

However, we do share an identity with the man in the street. What we trade on is our ability to relate to, 'to communicate with others be­ cause they use similar mechanisms for interpreting the world.' Geertz writing as an Anthropologist, suggests that:

"understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity. The more I follow what (the group) are up to, the more logical and the more singular they seem. It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissoves their opacity." (p. II*.)

If this is true of some (to us) obscure African tribe, it is much more true of our collectivity. We approach them as strangers but are aware of commonalities of identity. It is these commonalities of identity that enable us to talk with them and more relevantly enable them to talk to us. So it is that we understand much together - it is the frame of their and our banalities, our world of common-sense• Ultim­ ately, as in all social science, our work is not just about that part­ icular group - non-executive directors - but is also about ourselves and the world at large, although it is our firm objective to say some-