Qualitative Methods and Analysis in Organizational Research: A Practical Guide. - Review - book review

Gillian Symon and Catharine Cassell (eds.): Qualitative Methods and Analysis in Organizational Research: A Practical Guide

1998, London: Sage. 255 pages.

Qualitative Methods and Analysis in Organizational Research: A Practical Guide, edited by Gillian Symon and Catharine Cassell, is a useful and indeed practical collection of methods for qualitative data collection and analysis, preceded by a brief introduction by the editors on their views on qualitative research. It is written for researchers, students and practitioners in the fields of management, organizational behaviour, organizational psychology, industrial relations and human resource management. The editors and contributors are all British social psychologists.

The book provides a straightforward description of a number of qualitative frameworks and methods, with enough detail and examples to allow the reader to use them in the field. It largely avoids in-depth discussions on the nature, position and justification problems of qualitative research in the organization sciences, which, at the same time, is both its major strength and its major weakness.

The present collection complements a previous one, Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research, a Practical Guide (Cassell and Symon 1994). The emphasis of this first volume was on qualitative data collection. Insofar as qualitative data collection can be separated from analysis, the present volume gives more attention to isses of data analysis.

In the 1994 collection, the editors showed themselves to be staunch defenders of an emerging qualitative research tradition. They stated that one of their aims was to 'raise the profile of qualitative methods' (Cassell and Symon 1994: 1, 11), thus valiantly opposing the forces of positivist orthodoxy. In the present volume, they avoid this kind of rhetoric, but these two collections do indeed contribute towards a higher profile of qualitative methods by showing their variety and power for analyzing and understanding organizational phenomena.

After an introductory chapter by the editors, the following chapters contain eleven qualitative frameworks and methods. Each chapter outlines the background and features of the given approach, demonstrates its particulars and power in an elaborate illustrative case, and concludes with an evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses. Almost every illustrative case stems from the field of organizational psychology. Five cases are at the individual level and two are at the team level. Only three cases are at the organizational level, so the collection is more about research in organizations than on them.

The collection includes some general issues concerning qualitative research, viz, a very useful discussion by Phil Johnson on analytic induction, a key issue in many qualitative studies, and a discussion, somewhat less useful perhaps, on observation by Joe Nason and David Golding. Furthermore, there are a number of specific data collection methods, viz, life histories (by Gill Musson), the Critical Incident Technique (by Elizabeth Chell), attributional coding (by Jo Silvester), qualitative research diaries (by Gillian Symon), stories and anecdotes (by Yiannis Gabriel) and pictorial representations (by David Stiles). Finally, there are a number of methods for analysis, viz, template analysis (by Nigel King), conversation analysis (by Dalvir Samra-Fredericks) and Soft Systems Analysis (by Chris Clegg and Susan Walsh).

Several contributions include a brief account of their paradigmatic background. Some concern well-established methods, such as the Critical Incident Technique and Soft Systems Analysis (the chapter on the latter is especially useful, giving a clearer introduction to the method than do several of the publications of its originator, Checkland, himself). Others are somewhat more idiosyncratic -- but might also be called innovative -- such as the use of stories and anecdotes or the use of pictorial representations by subjects to clarify their attitudes vis-a-vis the research issue. Although the introduction to the 1998 collection does not repeat the rhetoric of wanting to raise the profile of qualitative research, I assume that the editors have not given up on their noble venture. Now, they simply present their array of methods in an explicit eclectic way: 'it is our aim not to privilege a particular account, but to open the field to alternatives' (Symon and Cassell 1998: 4). They abstain from any further defence of qualitative approaches by not providing a lengthy contribution to the quantitative versus qualitative research debate.

A key issue in this debate is whether the quantitative--qualitative choice is an instrumental or a paradigmatic one. If it is an instrumental choice, qualitative methods are seen as a means of data collection and the resulting data as a type of evidence. In that case, the choice depends largely on the research questions at hand. If it is a paradigmatic issue, however, the choice for qualitative research is the direct result of certain basic paradigmatic assumptions. Denzin and Lincoln follow this approach in their definition of qualitative research: 'Qualitative research is multi-method in focus, involving an interpretative, naturalistic approach to its subject matter. This means that qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them' (Denzin and Lincoln 1998: 3).