Introduction to special issue - “Telling Tales”

Citation

Cunliffe, A.L., Linstead, S. and Locke, K. (2009), "Introduction to special issue - “Telling Tales”", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 4 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/qrom.2009.29804aaa.001

Introduction to special issue - “Telling Tales”

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, Volume 4, Issue 1

This special issue emerged from the 2008 Qualitative Research in Management and Organization Conference held at the University of New Mexico. The conference was organized to recognize and celebrate the 20th Anniversary of John Van Maanen’s seminal Tales of the Field – a book that had, and continues to have, a profound impact on qualitative organizational scholarship. The theme of the conference was appropriately “Telling Tales,” because Van Maanen brought to our attention the idea that our research accounts are as much about our own stories as researchers, as they are truths about the lives of organizational members. He highlighted the possibilities for doing and writing ethnography differently, and asked us to think more reflexively about our work.

Accordingly, the conference brought together scholars from organization studies, communication studies, anthropology, psychology, health sciences, and public administration, from across Europe, North America, Asia, and Australasia, each with interesting tales to tell. The tales spanned a range of qualitative research methodologies, a variety of contexts and topics. Five of the tales are offered in this special issue, and represent the range of methodologies and issues covered.

Although the authors of each paper utilize a different methodology in their work, there are three common themes: each author is interested in developing a different approach to qualitative research; the impetus for the paper often lies in personal experience; and the tales told are reflective or reflexive accounts. Accordingly, their narratives reflect all three of Van Maanen’s conventions for writing ethnography articulated in “Tales,” though they do tilt heavily towards confessional and impressionist forms.

Frederic Bill and Lena Olaison offer an alternative approach to focus groups that they have called an indirect or role-play-enhanced focus group method. They situate their indirect approach within the focus group methodology, describe the stages involved in its use, and talk about their experience of running this method by offering an example from their own work with small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners. Bill and Olaison argue that adding a role-play dimension to focus groups offers a way of studying the action and experience of participants, rather than just participant accounts.

Clair Doloriert and Sally Sambrook offer a moving and, at times, distressing multi-layered autoethnographic tale of a doctoral student’s path to this approach to research. They discuss the choices one makes in writing such a tale – the degree of self disclosure, the ethical issues and the personal and epistemological risks involved in an autoethnographic “reveal”. They also provide a way of conceptualizing the risks through the notion of researcher-and-researched and researcher-is-researched relationships. They suggest this theoretical framework can help PhD supervisors and students make decisions about what type of autoethnographic tale the student might wish to tell.

The theme of emotion in our work is continued in Gail Whiteman, Thaddeus Müller, and John Johnson’s paper. They argue that many research accounts are sanitized, emotion-less texts that can mask the lived experience of research and generate theorizing about organizational life that is inherently inadequate. In their quest of examining how an analysis of emotional experiences in research can enrich our accounts, they offer three examples from their own work, demonstrating how their lived experience of emotionality in the field challenged prevailing theory and opened it up to new questions and new formulations. Recognizing the institutional norms around emotionality, they caution that while paying attention to our emotions can enhance our understanding, it can also carry consequences in terms of how such accounts are received by others in the academic community.

Peggy Wallace uses de Beauvoir’s feminist existential philosophy in her empirical study of the career choices of women professional accountants. She explores the question – Why are there not more women at a senior level in the profession? – by examining the personal narratives of 13 women through the lens of de Beauvoir’s work. Wallace concludes that this approach can offer a more in-depth understanding of the choices women make, because it explicitly recognizes the role of agency and the uniqueness of individual circumstances.

Finally, Kevin Orr and Mike Bennett offer a reflexive lens on their experience of designing and conducting a study of local authority chief executives. They focus particularly on research relationships: between themselves as academic (Orr) and senior practitioner (Bennett), and between themselves and the executives in the study. They highlight the political nature of these insider-outsider relationships, along with the tensions, contradictions and opportunities, and their impact on our research accounts.

The tales told here carry a double message; the forms they take underscore and reinforce the range of research and writing that takes place under the qualitative research umbrella. At the same time, their content reminds us of the Academy’s institutional barriers to researching and writing “differently.” In a context where quantitative research continues to be regarded as the hallmark of “science” and the randomised controlled trial as the gold standard for incontrovertible “evidence,” and hence funding, qualitative research is at best subaltern, most frequently marginalized, and occasionally dismissed as subjectively compromised or ideologically motivated. The more sophisticated the qualitative methodology gets, the more it courts a double marginalization, by rendering itself less amenable to quasi-quantitative reconstruction and incorporation into multi-method compromises, and risks telling its tales to itself.

The papers in this issue are happy to run that risk. In a world where history continually unfolds new tensions, new surprises and new modes of being, qualitative research offers a way of getting closer to understanding these phenomena, their puzzles, mysteries and contradictions by interrogating in detail the lived experience that accompanies them. As Henri Bergson argued, where the nature of the object of research is dynamically changing, the form of analysis that engages and reconstructs the object needs constantly to change too in order, not to correspond with the object’s “truth,” but to stay within touching distance. Qualitative research needs continually to experiment in order to allow itself to be touched by, and in touch with, the world in which it is embedded. The papers in this issue illustrate how creative that effort can be, and how worthwhile, the risk.

Ann L. Cunliffe, Stephen Linstead, Karen LockeGuest Editors