Studying Organizational Symbolism by Michael Owen Jones

Author:Michael Owen Jones [Jones, Michael Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Research, Reference
ISBN: 9781506338705
Google: wG29CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 1996-03-29T05:36:31+00:00

I’m trying to catch up on things that have happened since I was last here to study this case. That was back in 1950. I think probably the best thing to start would be if you could give your own impressions as to how things are going now, compared to the past. Do you think things are getting better or worse, or staying about the same? (p. 16)

Whyte asked for impressions (“as to how things are going now, compared to the past”), by which he meant Gary’s assessments and reactions, and got sentiments—opinions and feelings—followed by (with minimal prompting) a column-long story. Throughout the interview Whyte says such things as “That’s a good example. I wonder if you could give me a little more detail,” “I see,” “That’s an interesting one.”

Sometimes it is difficult to elicit information directly in interviews, as Whyte (1957) observes elsewhere; one must devise indirect techniques of questioning. The issue arose when Whyte and Frank Miller undertook a study of “The Meaning of Work” at Corning Glass Works. Direct questioning about reactions to the processes involved in work itself (i.e., whether the men “had feelings of creativity”) was unproductive (on aesthetics, see also Jones, 1987; Strati, 1990, 1992, 1995). They took an indirect approach by asking an interviewee to arrange a set of cards, each representing a job his team performed, in order of preference. Then they requested an explanation of why he ranked them that way. One gaffer said in regard to pieces that he had ranked high on the preference scale: “When you get done, you’ve got a nice piece of work there. . . . It really looks like something.

. . . When I can say I made that piece, I really swell with pride” (Whyte, 1957, p. 21). Concerning an object he rated at the bottom, another gaffer said, “The trouble with these things is you don’t have anything when you’re finished. Until they are ground and polished in the finishing room they don’t look like anything so it is just a lot of work for nothing” (p. 21).

Whyte concludes his essay by pointing out that having to explain ranking decisions helps interviewees express feelings. Requesting people to make comparisons often produces meaningful responses (i.e., rather than querying how they feel about one thing, ask “How do you feel about A compared with B, C, D, etc.?”). The presentation of cards or pictures draws attention away from the interviewer and points it toward interviewees’ experiences and sentiments:

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