Thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence

I have now decided to stay with the topics of sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence for my assignment and thesis. At the session on Saturday 16th November I went through my presentation with the group after initially thinking that I would not bother as I thought it was not going to be good enough. I also had  a bit of confidence loss in what I am doing. Whilst doing the presentation  I realised that the topics and themes are actually worthwhile. I received good feedback from the group.

I need now to firm up my thinking on a whole range of issues including:

  1. Questions – I need to repeat the Goldilocks test on the questions but more importantly I need to make sure that the questions will be able to elicit responses of value to the research.
  2. Methodology – I need to make a decision at least for the assignment on the methods that I am going to use. My initial thoughts are that Grounded Theory would be a good place to start because it will allow me the opportunity to practice coding in software (such as NVivo).
  3. Scope of the assignment research project – this needs to be carefully crafted as there is going to be a very limited amount of time to carry out the actual research component and I will need to identify people who can possibly provide data.
  4. For the assignment I am going to look at doing a small amount of triangulation by finding relevant documents and carrying out some textual analysis.
  5. Ethics – I will need to inform the participants that ethical approval has been granted and that they have the right to curtail the interview if they wish to do so.
  6. Participants – I need to identify the participants for the assignment. I only need one or two people for the assignment and there is an opportunity to interview the current VC before he leaves at the end of December. I would want to have some excellent questions though before proceeding as I would not want to waste his or my time.
  7. Timeline – I need to work up a firm timeline for the research. This should be straight forward, assuming I can get the participants on board.
  8. Literature review – I need to work on my literature review very, very soon. I have been doing a lot of reading recently but I need to get my references into Mendeley and organised into categories.
  9. Theory – I need to firm up the underlying theories that I am going to use. I was thinking of using ANT which is complementary to the Case Study method but Grounded Theory is similar in terms of following the actor.

Re-thinking the title

I have been reading the book: The Research Journey, Introduction to Inquiry by Sharon E Rallis and Gretchen B Rossman (ISBN: 978-1-4625-0512-8 (pbk)).

Reading the book has encouraged me to re-think my project title. I decided to review some of the earlier reading and thinking I have done and some of the original concepts that I looked into. I remembered that I was initially interested in organisational behavior, organisational theory, organisational change, Sensemaking, Action Research, Grounded Theory, innovation, service, business systems, information technology, and Actor-Network Theory.

I need to refine and narrow my project scope but I do not want to throw out everything I wanted to use previously. So I have decided to start the conceptual plan with an overarching statement routed in the organisation and then move on to a statement that includes the word innovation and integrate this with the word service.

The combination – organisation – change – innovation – service seem to capture all of the concepts above and more.

Last night I came to the following:

An Actor-Network Theory and Sensemaking inquiry into organisational change: exploring service innovation in relation to postgraduate student enrolment in post 1992 higher education institutions.

Some possible research questions:

  1. How do postgraduate course recruits make decisions whether or not to enrol?
  2. What are the critical factors leading to successful enrolment?
  3. What are service innovations?
  4. What innovations contribute to successful achievement of enrolment targets?
  5. What impact do service innovations have on the organisation, the staff, the curriculum and other services and systems?
  6. When should innovations be implemented?
  7. Who determines the effectiveness of service innovations?
  8. How are service innovations developed and implemented?

A couple of possible research propositions:

  1. P1: postgraduate applicants are more likely to enrol is they have continuing dialogue with academic staff.
  2. P2: services supporting postgraduate recruits (ICT, documents, interviews etc. etc.) need to be clearly defined and transparent.
  3. P3: to be successful service innovations need to include: fees and finance, academic teams, support teams, academic policy, curriculum development, marketing, PR and ICT and other organisational areas.
[Book] The Research Journey

[Book] The Research Journey

A change of direction – sort of

I was reading a paper Actors, Networks and Assessment, An Actor-Network Critique of Quality Assurance in Higher Education in England by Jonathan Tummons, University of Teeside (2011). The paper is a very clear exposition of using ANT to analyse a domain of interest and of how to make practical use of ANT. The main point that came across to me after reading the paper was that it is essential to be able to clearly identify an area that is worth researching but more importantly something that you have a strong interest in and that will keep you interested over a protracted period of time. The idea needs to be able to generate crisp and achievable aims, objectives and propositions. The idea needs to be something that relates to your work and is something that generates passion and energy.

At the moment I am working on a work project aimed at converting higher education course applicants to courses to full enrolment. After reading the paper above, I realised that there is a lot of scope in this project to become a research project. The work encompasses marketing, advertising, public relations, business development, market intelligence, international, EU and UK recruitment, national and international laws and regulations, web sites, letters, emails. telephone communications, working in teams, working with academic and support staff, working with external agencies, short and long term strategy including the global market, information technology and reporting systems, data management, customer service techniques, international agencies and reporting to senior management.

The current systems and processes work reasonably well but there is a lot of scope for system, process and team improvement. The main areas of interest include:

  1. What are the critical factors that lead to conversion from applicant to enrolment?
  2. When should the recruitment season begin and why?
  3. What are the barriers to communication within the various teams?
  4. What impact do the non-human actors have on candidates – websites, web pages, emails, paper pamphlets etc.
  5. Can the process be streamlined and improved?
  6. What innovations can be implemented and how can these be implemented?

The theoretical underpinnings would be Sensemaking and Actor-Network Theory. Possible research methods are Grounded Theory and Action Research. The recruitment of students is a service oriented process and the current processes and networks (teams) could benefit from service innovation.

The paper Service Innovation using Actor-Network Theory by Lorna Unden and Janet Francis (Staffordshire University, 2011) is a good source of information for using ANT to lead to service innovation. Using ANT it would be possible to ‘follow the actor’ through the current processes and identify where power resides.

A possible starting point is:

Determining the factors leading to successful conversion of applicants through to enrolment in higher education: Actor-Network Theory, organizational Sensemaking and service innovation.

The aim would be to determine how the sociology of associations – the networks of humans and non-humans influence the decision making of course applicants.

Sensemaking, Grounded Theory and ANT

For the literature review for assignment two, I have been reading a range of journal papers and conference proceedings about Sensemaking, Grounded Theory and Actor-Network Theory. After reading the paper Ecological Sensemaking by Gail Whiteman and William Cooper (Academy of Management Journal, 2011), I came across a reference to the book Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide to through Qualitative Analysis by Kathy Charmaz (SAGE, 2008).

Book cover for Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis

I have been reading through this book and it is an excellent introduction and guide to GT. It has given me some ideas for how GT and ANT could be combined, in fact I have a couple of papers that demonstrate how this can be done for example, the paper Actor-Network-Network Inspired Design Research: Methodology and Reflections (Ben Krall, 2007) and Doing Chinese Studies at the Crossroads of Grounded Theory and Actor-Network Theory (Basile Zimmerman (University of Geneva, Switzerland, 2008).

For the essay for assignment two, if I had more time and more words or I had the opportunity to write it again (!), or I can just write here on this blog, I would re-focus on the combining of GT and ANT. I believe that GT can provide a structured framework for the application of ANT. GT and ANT are complimentary in terms of the methods used i.e. structured intensive interviews, observation of phenomena, textual analysis, video and image analysis and coding of results. ANT on the other hand often uses the same methods, interviews, textual and document analysis and observation of phenomena. GT uses the process of writing regular memo’s to record outcomes of interviews etc.

I am also interested in Karl Weick’s Sensmaking as a possible overarching theory for my thesis. Within Sensemaking I would use Grounded Theory combined with ANT to drill into the issue. Sensemaking and organizational storytelling also have a strong relationship.