Tratamiento avanzado de las aguas residuales

Underpinned by my epistemological positioning (Section 1.3), interviews in this thesis are treated as interactional events in and through which ‘ways of knowing’ are co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewees (Holstein and Gubrium, 1997, p. 125). More spcifically, in the context of this thesis, interview talk is conceived of as metatalk wherein participants ‘reframe’ their lived experiences and opinions to make them ‘instiutionally credible’ by providing ‘rational accounts’ (Sarangi, 2003, p. 72). Interviews in this way afford the interviewees ‘opportunities’ to achieve ‘the interview agenda within the bounds of social- interactional resources available to them’ (ibid., 68). And the resources are critical for the interviewer/ the analyst as ‘inferencing resources’ in making sense of the data (ibid., 64). In this way, interviewees and the interviewer share and negotiate such resources in coproducing the realiteis.

It then is critical to take into account the roles of both an interviewer and interviewees involved in the meaning-making processes, orienting to their own agenda. For instance, the interviewer can propose or invoke identity categories in questions or responses to the interviewees and the categories can be taken up by respondents. This was the case where I brought up certain

categories such as ‘Korean (managers)’ and ‘local’. This means the interviewer and the interviewees ‘share presuppositions about indexical associations related to categories’, and further jointly participate in positioning the self and the others (De Fina, 2015, p. 361). This implicates the importance of the researcher’s critical engagement with the ways questions are asked and more broadly with positioning herself/himself and being positioned by the interviewees. This then leads us to the notion of the reflexivity of the research which I discuss in the following section.

Having conceptualised interviews as co-constructed, meaning-making processes, the language of the interviews is an important factor to consider: I used English and Korean languages according to my participants’ preference and self-identified dominant language. With one participant, whose main language is neither English nor Korean, I preferred English as our main common language. Using the languages with which the language users felt most comfortable and natural to use facilitated the processes of producing and co-constructing meanings (Welch and Piekkari, 2006). This is further in line with my position that sees language as a resource which actively constitutes processes of producing and negotiating knowledge (Section 1.3).

Given my use of Korean language, it is worth discussing here my approach to translation in the research. The interviews were transcribed in the source languages that had been used for the interviews. I delayed translation processes until the writing up phase of the research in order to capture more fully how the interviewees constructed meanings and avoid potential distortion of meanings in the translation process (Van Nes et al., 2010). In other words, I maintained the transcribed data in Korean as long as possible for the data analysis and translated them once I selected excerpts to be used for reporting the findings. In the stage of editing this thesis, I had further discussions with a proof reader about translated words and phrases to ensure meanings were translated in accordance with the speaker’s use of the words in context. In addition, since English is my second language, I acknowledge the limits of my ability to capture fully the meanings produced in and through the English interview data. I shared the transcribed English data and my interpretations of it with my supervisor to ensure my interpretation of participants’ language use in context.

While in the field, I interviewed 17 employees in total. Some of those were interviewed during both of the field work periods, depending on their availability. In conducting interviews, I aimed to obtain diverse narrative resources such as stories and views to explore a range of perspectives on the organisational activity and practices, and issues that are pertinent to the participants’ organisational life. Since my fieldwork consists of the two phases, and as my research focus and questions developed, I developed two sets of general interview questions for each phase (see Appendix 3). In the first phase, my interviews were focused on the

participants’ experiences at work that includes the length of their time working for the company, whom they work with, and issues around workplace practices and communication. In the second phase, the focus was placed on the participants’ roles and responsibilities. I asked them for further examples or detailed descriptions of activities at work. The interview data with my field notes provided not only topical themes but also contextual information regarding professional roles and profiles of the employees, and the details of the organisational practices. The information helped to a great degree my analysis of the interviews and meeting events.

In the following I provide detailed accounts of my analytic approach and process. Analytic approach and processes

The analysis initially involved transcribing interviews and workplace interaction data and iterative readings of the datasets to familiarise myself with the data and conduct and manual coding (Appendix 6). The workplace interaction data were transcribed verbatim. After the identification of analytical themes and patterns, selected parts of the material were re- transcribed in detail with reference to transcription conventions (Appendix 9). As the analysis focused not only on what is being talked about but also the way problems are talked about, the analytic process involved both thematic and interactional analysis to interpret how meanings are constructed and negotiated in interaction (Holmes, Marra and Vine, 2011, pp. 20–21).

Using MAXQDA and thematic analysis

I used the MAXQDA software programme for systematic coding and visual mapping of the interview data (see Appendices 7 and 8). This was to identify a range of organisational topics that emerged locally, and the broad themes that emerged from the coding.

When using MAXQDA, I coded the data with an open mind and created as many codes as possible to fully record my participants’ perspectives. In the meantime, new codes were constantly emerging, evolving, declining and integrating, and focal points were mapped out based on the code system (Appendix 8). By activating each of the codes and sub-codes, segments for the individual code were retrieved. When revisiting the segments, I removed the codes which appeared to be of little relevance to the segments and coded them with newly emerged and evolved codes (Creswell, 2013). It was to ensure that they were coded in such a way that they could represent the codes. The process was iterating and non-linear. This process helped me reconsider relations between the codes and identify the key concepts emerging from the data. The segments were used for developing the taxonomy of organisational problems. Then, I focused on the key concepts and looked for their links with other concepts in order to obtain as a complete picture as possible and visualised the relation between them

(Appendix 8). This level of analysis was intended to code the full material and provide a descriptive frame for the datasets upon which I built the interaction analysis of selected interview excerpts as well as the conceptual framing of the ‘problem’ in the thesis.

In the sections that follow, I introduce discourse analytic approaches and explain how I adopted the approaches for the data analysis, explaining key analytic concepts that I have drawn on in analysing employees’ construction of problems (Section 4.6.1). I then discuss interactional sociolinguistics, a main analytic framework employed to engage critically with the interactional data and the context (Section 4.6.2). I then move onto how I analysed the interview data as metatalk, linking ‘analytic themes from linguistics and sociology to focal themes relevant to a professional domain’ (Roberts and Sarangi, 2005, p. 633).