La influencia de la versión de Don Quijote de la Mancha de Yang Jiang

Having collected the interview material, I then sought to select short and specific relationship-based narrative accounts from the interview material using a selection process and then subjecting them to analysis. By incorporating a selection process and a narrative based analytic strategy in the research, I was carrying out and completing Step 4 of Turnbull’s (2002) theory building process. As with any qualitative research project, the integrity of this research comes from the transparency with which the study was carried out and from a clear explanation of the interpretive decisions made (Lewis, 2009). As such, what follows in this section of the chapter is an explanation of the process of selecting narrative accounts from interview materials and the process involved in analysing them.

Selecting the narratives: a preliminary interpretation

On completion of the interviews, I started to interpret managers’ interview talk (Cunliffe, et al., 2004) by first downloading digital voice recordings to my

66 computer and then listening to them in order to identify particular narrative structures. As earlier described, a narrative, for the purposes of this research, is a piece of language constructed by managers that consists of states of affairs plotted together into a meaningful whole through chronology/time and causality involving an array of characters (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998; Lawler, 2002). As such, and given the ‘relationship’ centred aim of this research, to be considered a narrative for analysis, participants must have (a) cast both giving and recipient characters (organisations and/or individuals) in successfully established philanthropic relationships; (b) linked together meaning (e.g. intentions, actions, events and incidents) related to giving and receiving; and (c) narrated these elements into a meaningful structure showing signs of time/temporality.

As I listened to the interview recordings, I came to recognise some common language features that were not considered narratives. Primarily they included strongly held views about what philanthropy was, or should be, lacking plot (opinions), or plotted accounts that seemed too inflexibly factual (reports) on what corporations give, how much they give, etc (Gabriel, 2000). As I established earlier in this chapter, these language constructions have considerable value, yet there is little need to search for deeper or hidden meanings since the meanings are explicit, uncontested and incontestable (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1998).

It soon became clear to me that giving-managers and their organisations were taking centre stage in the interviews with both giving-managers and receiving- managers. This was perhaps understandable given that corporate philanthropy

is generally understood in ‘giver-centric’ ways (Chapter Two). But this meant

that the ‘relationship’ based narratives I had tried to encourage participants to talk about in interviews (i.e. giver-receiver collaborations) were not so prevalent. An initial impression was that, given the active and purposeful

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narration of corporate philanthropy, ‘hierarchical’ relationships were more

prevalent than ‘heterarchical’ (see Gergen, 2001).

Of course, there were instances in managers’ accounts that exhibited features

that went beyond ‘descriptive accuracies’ and into the realm of the ‘evocative’,

many of which reveal ‘egotistical’ and ‘laudatory’ accounts of philanthropic

relationships. It was these expressive and evocative accounts that I was most interested in. Six narratives authored by three giving-managers were identified and selected for analysis based on managers’ ability to narrate giver-receiver relationships into a meaningful structure using time/temporality. For balance, I selected six narratives authored by three receiving-managers. The connections between participants and narratives are identified in Table 3.

Narratives and Authors Participant (Author) Narrative

Mary Giving for the corporate good

Heroes, villains and victims

Megan Filling the void

Engaging staff in active duty

Claire In support of a community hero

Raising hope and expectation Louise

Robert Craig Lance

David The corporate saint and the indebted inheritor

Tania Beyond the call of duty

The provider

The spoils of good giving

Oliver The indispensible manager

The dispassionate engagement Karl

Fiona

68 As is evident from Table 3, the interviews of six participants were not used for analysis. Indeed, the reduction of the full interview accounts of other participants to narratives was quite radical. Perhaps only ten percent of the interview-talk produced by giving-managers and receiving-managers was used for initial analysis.

Analysing the narratives: a poetic interpretation

Once the narratives were identified in the voice recordings, the spoken texts were transcribed into written commentary. Because they are essential meaning- making accounts with ‘structure’, the short narratives were preserved verbatim

in an attempt to respect participants’ ways of organising meaning (Riessman, 1993). Importantly, as detailed in information sheets to participants, I replaced participant’s names with pseudonyms (see Table 1 and Table 2 above) in an attempt to ensure confidentiality (pseudonyms are recognised in the verbatim transcriptions by the use of square brackets; e.g. [the organisation], or [Oliver], etc). Those narratives were then subject to detailed analysis.

A question was devised to help analyse the narratives. That question was; what do the selected narratives assume about corporate philanthropic relationships? I have based the analytic approach on my familiarity with Yiannis Gabriel’s (2000) work on poetic analysis, which led me to believe that this analytical approach would assist me in answering this question. Some help on understanding time as an essential narrative component was also sought from Cunliffe et al., (2004). Gabriel (2000) argues that managers use eight mechanisms to attribute meaning to characters, incidents and events when they narrate their experiences as organisational agents. These include the attribution of motive, agency, unity, responsibility, character qualities, emotion, causal connection, and providential significance.

69 Each mechanism represents a way of either giving meaning to specific parts in

participants’ narratives or making connections between those parts (Gabriel, 2000). I used these mechanisms as a framework (Step 5 of Turnbull’s process) to interpret the narratives. I also chose to incorporate a temporal element in my

analysis, thus seeking to address a limitation in Gabriel’s analytical method; the lack of attention to time. Time is an important aspect of understanding the temporal nature of corporate philanthropic relationships because time casts giver and receiver in an ongoing exchange of behaviours. I established this in Chapter Two. Narrative researchers highlight the salience of time as a central component to narrative understandings (Riessman, 1993) and I looked to Cunliffe et al., (2004) for guidance on how to look for participants’ use, and experience, of objective (e.g. clock) and subjective (e.g. durational) notions of time.

With Gabriel’s eight mechanisms and Cunliffe et al.’s (2004) work on time, I established a set of nine narrative mechanisms to interpret each of the narratives selected for analysis (see Charmaz, 2006). Several questions were posed to guide the analysis. Table 3 states the narrative mechanisms and the specific questions used for analysis.

The analysis of all six narratives created in interviews with giving-managers is presented in Chapter Four, and in Chapter Five the analysis of all six narratives created in interviews with receiving-managers is presented. In those chapters, I show that by narrating their experiences of being engaged in corporate philanthropic relationships, managers make use of a wide range of narrative mechanisms.

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NARRATIVE MECHANISMS AND QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Motive How do participants cast themselves and others with motive/intent? Was an incident, event or action aimed at achieving a particular outcome? Agency How are people cast as active and purposeful actor-agents?

Unity How are collectives of people activated and made into something capable of being a single actor-agent?

Responsibility How are actor-agents held to account for their actions?

How are actor-agents attributed with blame and credit and how does this help determine whether their actions are right or wrong?

Character Qualities

How are actor-agents cast in positive or in negative ways?

How does this allow us to make assumptions about how actor-agents see each other?

Emotion How is emotion invested in actor-agents? Causal

connection

How are incidents or events and the actions of actor-agents connected or linked?

Providential significance

How do participants craft incidents that are engineered by superior beings3?

Time How do participants structure events and incidents through the use of time? How is time used to organise objects and actor-agents?

Table 4: Narrative mechanisms and questions for analysis

When interpreting those narratives, I came to recognise that managers wish

their ‘motives’ to be well known and that they find it easy to ‘blame’ and ‘credit’ people and organisations for the good and not-so-good behaviours they

carry out. Much less utilised are the mechanisms of ‘emotion’ and ‘providential significance’. Of course, there is much more to the narratives and the analysis is presented in Chapters Four and Five.

3_{As Gabriel (2001) explains, providential significance, “presents an incident as having been} engineered by a superior intelligence in order to achieve a particular end, such as a radical

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