The fifth interview

The fifth interview was very interesting. The participant was a team member with a very different perspective on the question.

The participant currently works in a customer facing role and has had a lot of student interaction. This has changed though over the past three to four years as a result of the introduction of technologies particularly web based services that allow students to upload their work electronically which previously had to be submitted on paper. The paper had to be processed, catalogued passed on to markers, returned to the administration team and returned to students.

This process was very labour intensive and made the participant feel underappreciated especially when it came to how they felt they were viewed by other staff – particuallary academic staff.

The impact of technology on the team has been to free up time for the participant to spend more time with students and they felt that this allowed them to provide a much better and more personalised service than before,

The number of students coming in person has significantly reduced and this has meant that those coming in have more complex issues to deal with. This has allowed the participant to develop better customer service skills. The participant mentioned that they felt that the team had developed a better skill set and was more appreciated by academic staff as a group that had real expertise – rather than just being paper pushers.

The participant said that the SID system is a success but it is early days and there is a need to constantly reinforce the message – with staff and students – that it should be used.

This was a very interesting interview because the participant is a direct user of the SID system and had some useful insights. Once again I felt the interview went well and there were some very useful convergent points raised.

The fourth interview

The fourth interview was with a person was quite different from the three earlier ones. The main difference was the three earlier interviews were with managers the fourth was with a team member who had quite a different perspective on the question.

The interviewee was much more focused on operational issues and talked about team structure issues. The issue of staff changes was raised and how these have had an impact on the team and its work. The participant mentioned that over the years the institution has discussed many organizational level changes but many have not been implemented and many others have been only partially implemented.

On one occasion a merger between two teams was stopped due to teams objecting to job changes and the need to develop common practices. This resulted in some conflicts developing due to a lack of openness to new ways of working.

Over time jobs have changed though mainly due to the impact of new technologies being introduced. Technologies that have reduced the need to handle paper. The technologies have increased the skill level of the team and this has in turn built the confidence level of team members who now have more time to provide better customer support.

The use of the student information desk (networked communication system) was raised and the difficulty of building a supportive network of users and how difficult it is to get user buy in. It is felt by the participant that the SID system creates an impersonal service – unlike direct email communication – even though the SID system is seen as a better system than email.

I found that this interview worked well probably because I’ve done a few now and am getting more confident about the process. The data collected is becoming very relevant to the project and ties in very well with relevant theories.

The third interview

I carried out the third interview yesterday afternoon. The participant talked about changes to the team that they manage and who the changed have occurred over the past five years. Changes include changes to the structure of the team, staff leaving and being replaced and the introduction of technology.

The participant was not sure at the beginning of the interview where to start. The participant decided to start with the question “Who is my team?”. This was a great starting point for an answer about identity and multiple identities.

The participant mentioned that they are a member of four teams each of which has a different identity. The issue of working practices and the variety of technologies entering the team were mentioned.

Issues of structure change at team, department and institutional levels were mentioned. Work complexity was mentioned as an influence on the team and how the team functions.

The introduction of the student information desk was raised as an issue for team members and the different ways that staff members have responded to the system i.e. some consider it to be the enemy and others a member of the team. The view that technology has increased workloads rather than reducing it.

The participant mentioned that staff tended to be more open to adopting new technology and innovations if the new technology replaced a manual system or was clearly an improvement otherwise staff would be inclined to see the technology as a problem or be seen by those introducing the technology as blockers or resistors.

The participant mentioned that there needs to be a fit between the technology, the team and the organisation in order for it to be accepted. The need for a technology champion was mentioned as a way of helping the team adopt the technology.

After the interview I reaslied that there is a need to expand the interview scope from the four originally selected teams to include the IT manager who was responsible for the implementation of the student information desk.

Looking at the project through an ANT lens I need to start ‘following the Actors’ a bit more closely. I will be speaking to the IT team manager in the next few weeks, tracing the documentation around the initial idea for the information desk and how the system was translated from the initial idea into the actual application.

I want to investigate how the decision making process and internal relationships influenced the procurement, the project design, planning, training and implementation. I also want to investigate whether the information desk was seen as being aligned with the interests of team members who would be using the system.

The impact of organizational and technological change on team identity

In my last post I had just started in my new job and was trying to find a relevant project that combined organizational and technological change. I have now managed to find a suitable project concerning the centralising of administrative services combined with the introduction of a new corporate information system.

The information system will link a new front office function (previously back office) with faculty administration staff (previously front office but becoming more back office). These changes are likely to have an impact on how group identity is constructed and deconstructed.

The issue of in-groups and out-groups is likely to be challenged and staff members may find themselves under stress due to changes in their long held team identities. The research project is now entitled The impact of organizational and technological change on team identity.

I have received permission from the institution to carry out the project and have now submitted my RES2C, project proposal. The research committee sits in May so hopefully I will get the go ahead to proceed. The next step after this will be submitting the Ethics approval.

 

Thoughts on why anyone would want to be interviewed, or not…

I asked the interviewee that I used last week if I could re-interview her as part of the Convergent Interviewing process. The reply I got was interesting, basically along the lines of “you interviewed me last week why do it again?”

This got me thinking about the difficulties of interviewing and why people volunteer to be interviewed. The question is, why do people agree to take part in interviews or, what’s in it for them?

A number of points and questions arose from this thought:

  1. Getting interviewee participants is not easy. There has to be a benefit to the interviewee otherwise why would they agree to participate?
  2. What is the incentive for the interviewee participant? I think there is a very narrow and short lived engagement process that occurs in the mind of a potential participant. Possibly the potential participant’s initial thought is based on a feeling that someone is interested in what they have got to say about something – although I’m not sure what this says about randomly selected participants. Why the hell would a randomly selected person want to participate in an data collection exercise? Surely there’s even less motivation for them to participate?
  3. I can see how purposeful selection could lead to greater engagement but again there has to be some kind of incentive for the participant but I’m assuming if someone is told that they have been selected on the basis of their expertise then they might be more forthcoming.
  4. The potential difficulties of getting interview participants and getting people to agree to more than one or two interviews is potentially a difficulty if the researcher is undertaking Convergent Interviewing or just wanting to go back to speak to people again. There are also issues around timing, availability, getting a room and also if you are going back multiple times to people issues around confidentiality might come up because of something as simple as people going off for meetings.
  5. When planning interviews and selecting participants I think depending on the number of people you need to interview it would be good to have more people to interview than absolutely necessary in order to keep numbers up in case some participants decide not to turn up or walk out during an interview.
  6. In some ways small numbers of participants might be easier to manage than large numbers because you can build a closer relationship with potential interviewees and they might be more likely to make a commitment and a contribution.
  7.  I think there is a possibility that the feelings of the interviewer could have an effect on the interviewee. For example today I had a second interview scheduled with my participant from last week but I was feeling tired and did not really want to proceed. I needed to drive up some energy in order to make the interview happen again. As it turned out I did do the interview but it was not as effective as the one I did last week possibly because I was not in the mood but I also detected that the participant was also not in the mood. This could be a significant downside to interviewing – how does the interviewer keep their feelings and physical demeanor neutral so that they do not ‘contaminate’ the interviewee and influence the energy and motivation of the participant?
  8. After completing the two interviews I realized the importance of having sound questions. I found that especially in the second interview I realized that the question I asked was not specific enough but I did not want to ask a leading question either.

A lot of the literature around interviewing is based on getting a valid statistical sample and the methods that can be used to make interviewing more effective but there is not much (in the books I’ve looked at) on why people actually volunteer to be interviewed and why they don’t. I think purposeful selection of participants for interviewing might be the way forward – where this is a choice – because I think choosing people might be more effective than the random sample because of the issues around massaging ego’s on one side and people not wanting to be involved on the other.

I think I have gathered a reasonable amount of data that is interesting in terms of the research questions that I have used but I think if this was my full scale research project I would need to do a lot more work around question design and thinking more specifically what I want out of the interview. Reading the literature prior to the interviews has helped my thinking in terms of the domain of interest and contextualized in terms of what my participant has said and the restructuring process that is currently going on.

 

 

Consultation begins turbulence increases

The university has begun a consultation process to gather the views of staff with respect of the change proposal that has been drawn up by the new VC. A series of staff forums where staff can raise issues, concerns and suggestions have begun. These are being chaired by senior managers some of whom have been given notice that their jobs are at risk of redundancy. The response of staff to the proposals at these meetings has varied between resignation and an acceptance that the Schools structure is a done deal and anger at the way that the process has been implemented. The anger at the implementation seems to fit very well with views on Organisational Justice specifically the aspect Procedural Justice and Informational Justice.

I have noticed that in the last few days formal meetings seem to always start with a discussion about the restructuring. There does not seem to be any part of the organization that has been left untouched by an element of uncertainty. I have found that asking people simple questions about the restructuring elicits long answers with strong views on the situation. This leads me to an assurance that using Convergent Interviewing is a sound method of gathering data.

An interesting point to note is in the literature on interview techniques much is made of the interview process whereby the interviewer should make an introductory statement at the beginning of the interview e.g.

  • Identify the auspices under which the research is being conducted.
  • Purposes of the research, funded or for a thesis.
  •  Indication of what the research is about.
  • Indicate why the subject has been chosen.
  • Make it clear participation is voluntary.
  • Assure the respondent that their identity will not be revealed and all information will be confidential.
  • Provide opportunity for respondent to ask questions or raise concerns.
  • Ask some simple opening questions and lead to the main substance of the interview.

(Bryman, 2012)

The interesting point is that when interviewing strangers the lead in to the main interview is probably essential in order to gain the confidence of the interviewee and to put them at ease. I have found that asking people I know and work with at work a question the usual response is for the colleague to open up with their views expansively and almost immediately. My view is that there is a strong possibility that I am going to be able to gather a lot of interview data for the assignment and the thesis project with little problem.

I have attached notes that I took at a consultation meeting that took place on Wed, Dec 04, 2013.

Consultation Meeting Notes Wed Dec 04 2013

Invitation to part time staff to consultation meetings received Thu, Dec 05, 2013.

Part time staff invitation to consultation meetings December 2014

Restructuring FAQ #1 posted Dec 05, 2013.

Restructuring FAQ 05122013

Bryman, A, (2012), Social research Methods, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK.

Turbulence continues

The new VC has held a senior management group meeting where the change strategy was presented. A number of breakout groups were formed to discuss the changes. Feedback from the groups was essentially supportive of the strategy to move from faculties to schools. The main concerns were with the process, the perception that the institution had been thrust into a state of uncertainty and concerns about how staff will respond to this. It was agreed that staff should provide their thoughts either in teams or as individuals and feed these back to a generic email address so that the VC can start to gather view. The other main area of concern was the lack of detail in the current proposal and the fact that several senior managers have been given notice that their posts are at risk of redundancy. This was seen by many as potentially destabilising for the whole organization as there is now the possibility that some of these staff will leave before replacements have been recruited leaving the institution without leadership at a critical and turbulent time.

I am now very keen to start interviewing for the assignment as there is a lot of rich data in circulation. I would really like to interview  about ten people but at the moment this is not possible. I will however record any useful data and views here.

The issues raised at the meeting have clear resonance with the three core theories that I am considering using:

  1. Sensemaking
  2. Institutional theory
  3. Organizational Justice theory (OJ)

Issues relating to Organizational Justice are already coming to the surface, specifically issues around how the proposals for change have been developed and how these have been communicated. Staff are generally accepting of the need for the organization to change.

In terms of OJ there are some real connections between what is going on and the theory.

The study of people’s perceptions of fairness in organizations:
  • Distributive Justice:  The form of organizational justice that focuses on people’s beliefs that they have received fair amounts of valued work-related outcomes
  • Procedural Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the procedures used to determine the outcomes they receive
  • Interpersonal Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the manner in which they are treated by other people
  • Informational Justice:  People’s perceptions of the fairness of the information used as the basis for making a decision

The issue at the moment relates most strongly to Procedural Justice, Interpersonal Justice and Informational Justice. People do not understand the process that has brought about the changes, people do not consider the process to be fair and there is a deficit of information.

OJ also relates strongly to individual and team performance and has been shown to have an impact on customer service. These issues are clearly of concern to the organization. My question for the assignment research project is:

  1. What are the key issues that employees attend to during organizational change?
  2. How do these issues differ across the hierarchical levels of non-supervisors, supervisors and executives?

The interview question is:

Tell me what you think is good and what is bad about the change that is occurring.

I am planning on using Convergent Interviewing which is a form of semi-structured interviewing. The structure is supplied by the initial question and then the interviewer leaves the interviewee to speak for as long as they like. This can be up to 90 minutes. The interviewer can use small prompts to keep the interviewer talking such as asking ‘what else’, ‘how do you fell about that’, nodding but mainly being very attentive.

In some ways the change is happening about a year too soon. By the time I get to asking the question for the main project the change situation will be about a year into the change. It’ is likely that some of the staff in the institution will no longer be working there in a year. This is a little frustrating.

 

Turbulence in action

The university where I am planning on carrying out my research project has appointed a new Vice Chancellor (CEO). The VC designate will be starting work officially on the 1st January 2014. He has though started to attend some meetings on a weekly basis with the current senior management team and individual members of staff and students. The aim of these meetings seems to be for the new VC to gain an early understanding of the institution and some of the key challenges facing it.

On Monday this week the senior management teams of the Faculties were called to meetings with Executive Deans where changes to the existing structure were outlined and a number of posts were identified as being at risk of redundancy. These included the Executive Dean and Pro-Deans of Faculty.

The main message from the Executive Dean was that although there is going to be a lot of turbulence over the coming months it is essential that business as usual continues as there are still students to recruit and the business to deal with.

I have spoken to a small number of staff in a variety of positions about the proposed changes and it seems that there is a common thread of uncertainty but for some people resignation and the view that change is absolutely necessary even if it results in their own positions being made redundant.

The trades unions today issued an email to members saying that they have not confidence in the new VC and asking the Board of Governors to cancel his contract prior to his January 1st start date.

The VC has stated that the changes are not financially driven or a post reduction process but a way of ensuring the long term sustainability and success of the institution.

According to Scott (1995) the dominant sociological view (of an institution) focused on the effects  of cultural belief systems operating in the environment of the organization. There is a possibility that people feel a high degree of uncertainty because they see a threat to the culture of the current organization.

Scott, W.R, (1995), Institutions and Organizations, Sage Publications Inc., California, USA.

More thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence »

The situation where I would like to carry out the research for my assignment is changing rapidly. The new CEO has presented the plan for changing the organizational structure to the board of governors and there is a meeting on Monday 25th November with senior managers. At the meeting it is expected that information will be presented outlining the new structure.

I will need to identify some key participants to interview soon as I want to make sure that I speak to people who are currently in existing posts and roles and who may be or will be affected by changes. This will allow me the potential to go back at a later point to review their opinions on the changes after they have been implemented.

The feeling of organizational turbulence has definitely increased over the past week due to the build up to the meeting this week. There is an increasing feeling of uncertainty and apprehension. This is very rich material for carrying out the interviews. I would expect to find that people are attempting to make sense of the situation and would also expect to find that people discuss issues relating to justice and how decisions have been decided on by the executive.

Since my last post I have been looking at various papers investigating large scale change in organizations. I have also been looking at methods for organizing my assignment  literature review. In doing this I came across two related and very interesting papers. One Introducing the Literature Grid: Helping Undergraduates Consistently Produce Quality Literature Reviews by Peter Yacobucci (2012). I have created a spreadsheet for the purpose from the specification in the paper and this seems to work very well and I think it will be very helpful. I looked at using NVivo 10 for the literature review but I found the application crashed several times.

I found I had wasted a lot of time setting things up in NVivo 10 so at the moment I am sticking with the spreadsheet. During the search for a method of organizing my literature I started to search for papers  in Emerald on interview techniques. In one, Employee perceptions of organizational change: impact of hierarchical level by Jones. L, Watson. B, Hobman. E, Bordia. P, Gallios. C, Callan. V (2008).

The abstract describes the paper as, The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of organizational level on employees’ perceptions and reactions to a complex organizational change involving proposed work force redesign, downsizing and a physical move to a new hospital. I found this paper to have several similarities to the situation that I am intending to investigate in my assignment.

I realised that as the situation is similar but separated by time and being a different field (a hospital) I noted that the authors specify two research questions that I could re-use in my own research. In my view it is perfectly acceptable to re-use these questions because the situations are different and it would be interesting to see how the outcomes of my assignment study differ or are similar to this study.

What I found to be very interesting in the paper is a reference to Convergent Interviewing. When I first read the paper I did not pick up that this is in fact a specific interviewing technique. I re-read the paper and found that the interviewers asked their participants only one question. I found this confusing at first. After looking up references to Convergent Interviewing I found that the technique is based on asking just one question. The question has to be very well crafted in order to illicit a significant response from interviewees.

In the paper there is a question that chimes with my own research so in the same way that I am going to use the research questions I will use the same interview question. According to the papers on Convergent Interviewing the interviewer should ask the question and then use deep listening in order to focus on the answer and use some small prompts if necessary. The aim is to allow the participant about an hour to 90 minutes to talk about their thoughts and views. The interviewer records the main points of the interview in their notebook.

I think it is going to be a challenging getting my participants to respond adequately to one question. On the other hand I believe that people who are struggling to make sense of a turbulent situation will be willing to talk about their feelings and opinions because they will have strong views on the situation – either positive or negative.

I will be approaching some interview candidates this week.

 

 

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.

Things fall into place

After spending the last few months investigating Actor-Network Theory, Organisational Justice Theory, Institutional Theory, socio-technical systems, service systems, sensemaking, service science and team change I have FINALLY had an epiphany that has led me to a much more concrete and plausible research topic.

I found a PhD thesis Managing Organizational Change during Institutional Upheaval, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Higher Education in Transition by Dijana Tiplic. After reading through the thesis I realised that where I am working is an organization in upheaval. A new Vice Chancellor will be starting in January and this change at the top is already causing uncertainty throughout the organization.

I felt that the word upheaval seemed a bit loose so decided on turbulence. I have found that this is a good choice as turbulence is actually a technical term relating to large scale organizational change either as an external influence or an internal one. Some external turbulences include the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, the 1929 Stock Market crash, the 2008 financial crisis, changes in legislation affecting businesses such as tax changes, interest rate changes etc.

Internal turbulence can be produced by a change in the Chief Executive Officer, a major IT infrastructure implementation either one that succeeds – look at the introduction of ICT’s into the newspaper industry by News International, or one that fails and almost or completely destroys the company.

I have realized that there is a good link between sensemaking in organizations, institutions, turbulence and change. These concepts are all active where I work and as the organization and it’s institutions are on the verge of a turbulent change (new CEO) this is an opportunity too good to pass up.

I am going to use the situation to investigate how an organization controls change in turbulent times and make the transition from one leader and associated ideas to another. Staff in the organization are concerned and apprehensive about the future and are anticipating significant changes. There is a view that the university will be transformed from a faculty based structure to a schools based one. This view tends to be based on the fact that the new VC’s ex-university is a schools based organization.

Speaking to various people in the organization there is a strong view that the whole place is going to be transformed into a new structure. People I speak to about the new VC tend to speak as though they are justifying their positions. I have noticed that there has been an increase recently in a focus on managing performance. This seems to be related to people / managers in the organization justifying their position or the position of their team. There is also a feeling of uncertainty amongst some staff that this change might be an opportunity to remove them.

The challenge for the organization is to manage the turbulence so that it successfully emerges stronger and better positioned in the market i.e. profitable.

So the title of my thesis is going to be: Making sense of the organization in turbulent times. I’ve Googled this title and it does not seem to exist!

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

The problem

Over The past few years the numbers of applicants to post graduate courses has been in decline. This is the case for many universities and is true for applicants in the UK/EU and overseas (outside the EU). There are many reasons for this decline including the downturn in the UK and European economies, UK government immigration policy and the perception of many in countries such as India that applicants from outside the EU are not wanted. Many employers who would in the past sponsor applicants to do management courses and other masters courses have cut their development budgets.

These are just some possible causes but there are likely to be others. If it is the case that the pool of applicants is getting smaller – at least for the time being – then the remaining applicants need to be managed in such as way that the probability of them enrolling on a course is increased. People can make as many applications as they like to as many universities as they like and the decision whether or not to take up a place is likely to hinge on a number of criteria. For example, the distance of the university from the applicant’s home or workplace, course fees, reputation of the institution, potential of job enrichment, promotion or employment at the completion of a course, personal circumstances such as caring, finances, time, confidence in own ability to complete a masters course.

The research project I intend to carry out would make use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as a method for describing the whole range of activities, systems, processes, staff, committees, IT systems, communication plans and other actors. The aim would be to follow the actors both inside the university and those outside considering applying and through the application process through to an end point. The actors would include the range of human and non-humans for example, web sites, emails, pamphlets, telephone calls, messages, and adverts to name just a few.

Other research methods that could be brought to play are Sensemaking Theory – how do the applicants and the staff make sense of the organization and the processes and how to these impact on the applicants? My aim is to create a written ‘rich picture’ of the process and to use ANT to describe innovations and services and to see whether these lead to improved recruitment on to masers courses. Another aim of course is to generate some suggestions for improving recruitment systems and policies.

 

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.

Issues to investigate

I was speaking to a colleague at work the other day about Actor-Network Theory and applying it to a work-based issue. I mentioned that ANT seems to invoke quite strong emotional responses in people sometimes for example I mentioned using ANT to another colleague who responded along the lines of “you don’t want to use ANT because it’s all about power”. This person seemed quite taken aback at the thought I would actually use ANT. This other colleague of mine said “of course ANT is about power!” I said I thought everything especially at work and in terms of project teams, innovation and technology is about power. This person recommended that I read a book called Kinds of Power by James Hillman (Doubleday, 1995).

Book cover, Kinds of Power, James Hillman

Kinds of Power, James Hillman

I’ve now got a copy of this book and have just started to read it. I’ll update on this in a later post, but the main thrust of the book is that business is the one factor that impacts on everyone’s life, more than religion, government, politics, etc. Hillman asks the question “What constitutes the power of business?” Related to this is Karl Weick’s Sensemaking and his views on how power shifts in groups depending on circumstances. Anyway, as I said more on this later…

After thinking through issues relating to the last two assignment essays, reading a lot of journal papers, reading a lot of related books and thinking through work based issues that could be used as possible areas for the research component I have identified a couple of possibilities.

Three issues have the level of complexity, organisational cross-dimensionality, levels of power structure, mess and opportunity for using a range of methods such as interviews, text analysis, video and images. There are issues in all three relating to the initial concept, the business case (quality of), budgets, contractor selection (tendering processes), project team selection and management, team dynamics and in ANT terms, Problematization, obligatory passage point (s a contact point to connect all the actors those involved in the network, Punctualization (blackboxing), Translation (making connections and relating things that were previously different – relating things in a socio-technical network – how ideas are turned into concrete thing like labs, or systems etc.), the Obligatory Passage Point, Network organization, power dynamics and the breakdown of network structures, user impact, acceptance and adoption and dissolution or degeneration into failure. All three of the potential projects contains heterogeneous elements that can be blackboxed or Punctualized.

What has become clear over time though are the potential ethical, operational and governance issues. For example, there are issues about confidentiality to consider. The three potential projects are all current, live projects that have a high degree of visibility in the university. There are likely to be political and management sensitivities surrounding all three. I believe this to be the greatest difficulty in carrying out a work-based project i.e. would the institution like to potentially have problems exposed to a wider audience and have thesis published on them? I foresee some difficulties here.

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.