Getting On With Field Research Using Participant Deconstruction

Abstract

This article adds to the repertoire of field research methods through developing the technique of “participant deconstruction.” This technique involves research participants challenging and reinterpreting organizational texts through the application of orienting, disorienting, and reorienting deconstructive questions. We show how participant deconstruction complements existing strategies for “getting on” with field research—cultivating relationships, developing outsider knowledge, and mobilizing insider knowledge—by facilitating research participants’ questioning and challenging of organizational texts and thus opening up alternative latent understandings, illuminating concealed meanings, supporting reflexivity for participants and researchers, and suggesting fruitful lines of inquiry. We illustrate the application of the technique with examples drawn from health care research projects. Through gathering further practitioner feedback from a variety of alternative contexts, we go on to demonstrate the potential application of participant deconstruction in a range of field contexts, by different types of practitioners undertaking deconstructive readings of a wide variety of organizational texts. We also offer suggestions for further research to extend the technique.

Managing Job‐Related Diversity Processes in High‐Reliability Teams in the Emergency Department

“…Data collection involved observing doctors and nurses while they diagnosed and treated patients with acute illnesses and injuries during shifts in the ED (over 1,000 observational hours, recorded as fieldnotes) and interviewing emergency physicians and nurses about their professional identity, values and practices (66 interviews, digitally recorded and transcribed). Previously published studies examined our ED fieldsite as the institutional coalface where profession and organization come together (Wright, Meyer, Reay and Staggs, 2020; Wright, Middleton, Hibbert and Brazil, 2020; Wright, Zammuto and Liesch, 2017; Wright, Irving and Selvan Thevatas, 2020; Wright et al ., 2016). The present paper conceptualizes the ED as a high‐reliability organizational context and focuses at the level of teams.…”

The dynamics of SME growth processes and the role of enabling constraints: an evidence-based theoretical framework

“…The semistructured interviews were performed after the structured interviews and served to validate the findings and to explore the most complex, second-order construct of ECs, particularly the constraining and enabling effects from the entrepreneurs' perceptions. The role of the interviewer’ s observations and secondary data analysis consisted in triangulating the sources of information from the direct interviews as well as in providing new information, and thus strengthening both the reliability of research results and analytical validity (Wright et al , 2020). Secondary data analysis rested on structured content analyses of company websites, press releases, current events and news recorded on the websites, as well as company reports (Ndofor et al .…”

“…In addition, supportive sources of data included secondary data on the researched firms (approximately 43,000 words/about 140 normalized pages) and interviewer observation (about 29,000 words/95 normalized pages). The observations were made during on-site visits as well as through phone calls to clarify some points of the interview (Marschan-Piekkari and Welch, 2011; Wadham and Warren, 2014; Wright et al , 2020).…”

Ventriloquial Authority in Management Learning and Education: A Communication as Constitutive of Learning and Education Perspective

“…Such theorists often adopt the approach of a master theorist such as Foucault (2007) or Derrida (1976Derrida ( , 1978Derrida ( , 1982 to illuminate what is being enabled and/or suppressed through discourse or apply a pre-existent theory such as feminism (Lucas, D'Enbeau & Heiden, 2016). For example, Jevnaker and Raa (2017) apply Foucauldian analysis to underline the significance of British economist Joan Robinson's work, and Wright, Middleton, Hibbert and Brazil (2020) apply Derridean deconstruction as a method to reveal suppressed themes in managerial discourse. Poststructuralist approaches tend to focus on narratives and ideologies as (becoming) independent of human agency and as having effects on individuals without them having a conscious role in the construction or knowing of them.…”