Qualitative methods have played and are likely to continue to play an important role in scholarship on organizational development and change. One key data source dominates all others, however, in the qualitative lexicon: the one-on-one interview. This has become so common as to seem almost banal and taken for granted. And yet, the interview is actually a very complex phenomenon where many different things may be going on. This essay attempts to elucidate some of this complexity by identifying five different genres of interviewing, each with its specific ontological assumptions and purposes. We identify and illustrate specific techniques and practices associated with each genre, and offer suggestions for further development, while inviting researchers to think through more carefully what interviews can and cannot deliver, and how they can be made meaningful.
This study contributes to a holistic understanding of sensemaking by going beyond the mind-body dualism. To do so, we focus analytically on a phenomenon that operates at the nexus of mind and body: intuition. By observing four film crews, we unpack how people act their intuition into sense-that is, how they transform, through action, an initial sense (intuition) that is tacit, intimate, and complex into one that is publicly displayed, simpler, and ordered (i.e., a developed sense). Our model identifies two sensemaking trajectories, each of which involves several bodily actions (e.g., displaying feelings, working hands-on, speaking assertively). These actions enable intuition to express a facet of itself and acquire new properties. This study makes three important contributions. First, it develops the holistic-relational character of sensemaking by locating it in the relations among multiple loci (cognition, language, body, and materiality) rather than in each one disjunctively. Second, it theorizes embodied sensemaking as a transformative process entailing a rich repertoire of bodily actions. Third, it extends sensemaking research by attending to the physicality and materiality of language in embodied sensemaking.
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