Subject to Evidence

Part 11 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews — the series finale.

Sometimes the most useful thing an interviewer can do is put their own developing explanation on the table and let the participant test it. Clare and Lena explore when and how to do that without turning the interview into a request for agreement, and bring the whole series together in one case.

Takeaway: expose your assumptions, invite concrete contrasts, track how the explanation changes, and check accounts against other evidence.

Readings

• Ray Pawson, "Theorizing the interview" (1996)
• Ana Manzano, "The craft of interviewing in realist evaluation" (2016)
• Chris Smith and Tony Elger, "Critical realism and interviewing subjects" (2014)
• Dennis Gioia, Kevin Corley and Aimee Hamilton, "Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research" (2013)
• Kathleen Eisenhardt and Melissa Graebner, "Theory building from cases" (2007)
• Kathryn Roulston, "Considering quality in qualitative interviewing" (2010)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 10 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

Ask an expert how they do their job and you often get the manual version. Clare and Scott explore ways to make practical know-how discussable — including asking someone to instruct their "double" — without treating the instructions as a transparent record of the work.

Takeaway: use instructions to reveal what people care about and the norms they work to, then examine real occasions, artefacts and wider connections.

Readings

• Davide Nicolini, "Articulating practice through the interview to the double" (2009)
• Davide Nicolini, "Zooming in and out: Studying practices by switching theoretical lenses and trailing connections" (2009)
• Vincent Pouliot, "Practice tracing" (2015)
• Ann Langley, "Strategies for theorizing from process data" (1999)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 9 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

When useful knowledge doesn't surface, it's tempting to assume people are hiding it. Clare and Lena look at the other explanations — uncertainty, difficulty putting it into words, the risk of speaking up — and how to tell them apart and respond well.

Takeaway: investigate knowledge, articulation, the conditions for speaking up and the response, rather than reading agreement or dishonesty into silence.

Readings

• Roger Tourangeau, Lance Rips and Kenneth Rasinski, The Psychology of Survey Response (2000)
• Mats Alvesson, "Beyond neopositivists, romantics, and localists" (2003)
• Wang, Tseng and Yen, "How do institutional norms and trust influence knowledge sharing?" (2014)
• Further reading: Amy Edmondson, "Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams" (1999); James Detert and Amy Edmondson, "Implicit voice theories" (2011); Catherine Connelly et al., "Knowledge hiding in organizations" (2012)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 8 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

Interviewing a minister, a CEO or a board chair brings its own problems: polished answers, limited time and a status gap. Clare and Scott explore how to question someone more powerful while keeping critical distance and still getting evidence you can use.

Takeaway: preparation and rapport support the conversation; critical interpretation and corroboration support what you conclude from it.

Readings

• William Harvey, "Strategies for conducting elite interviews" (2011)
• Robert Mikecz, "Interviewing elites: Addressing methodological issues" (2012)
• Laura Empson, "Elite interviewing in professional organizations" (2018)
• Mats Alvesson, "Beyond neopositivists, romantics, and localists" (2003)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 7 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

People don't always do what they say they do. So are interviews just cheap talk? Clare and Lena look at a sharp critique of interview research and the replies to it, asking which claims interviews can support — and when claims about what people actually do need observation or other evidence.

Takeaway: match the claim to the question and the evidence, while keeping what interviews reveal about meanings and accounts.

Readings

• Colin Jerolmack and Shamus Khan, "Talk is cheap: Ethnography and the attitudinal fallacy" (2014)
• Michèle Lamont and Ann Swidler, "Methodological pluralism and the possibilities and limits of interviewing" (2014)
• Paul Atkinson and Amanda Coffey, "Revisiting the relationship between participant observation and interviewing" (2002)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 6 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

"What do you usually do?" gets you a tidy summary. "What happened on Tuesday?" gets you something closer to the work. Clare and Scott explore interviewing methods that combine concrete accounts of specific events with people's general understanding, without treating either as a transparent record.

Takeaway: ask about a particular occasion, examine it, then compare and interpret.

Readings

• Uwe Flick, "Episodic interviewing" (2000)
• Sandra Jovchelovitch and Martin Bauer, "Narrative interviewing" (2000)
• Lee Butterfield et al., "Fifty years of the critical incident technique" (2005)
• David McClelland, "Identifying competencies with behavioral-event interviews" (1998)
• Amina Memon et al., "The cognitive interview: A meta-analytic review" (2010)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 5 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

Much of what we know about strategy comes from asking executives what happened. But what if both their memory and the question are unreliable? Clare and Lena look at research that tested executives' recollections of their own past strategy, and what it means for anyone relying on a leader's account.

Takeaway: improve the question you ask, hear from several knowledgeable people, and keep evidence about events separate from explanations made after the fact.

Readings

• George Huber and Daniel Power, "Retrospective reports of strategic-level managers" (1985)
• Brian Golden, "The past is the past — or is it?" (1992)
• C. Chet Miller, Laura Cardinal and William Glick, "Retrospective reports in organizational research" (1997)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 4 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

A confident, detailed, sincere account can still be wrong. So what can an honest, vivid memory actually establish? Clare and Scott work through research on how people remember events, from John Dean's Watergate testimony to how people answer questions about their own past.

Takeaway: separate exact events, recurring patterns and later interpretations, then match each claim to suitable evidence.

Readings

• Ulric Neisser, "John Dean's memory: A case study" (1981)
• Norman Bradburn, Lance Rips and Steven Shevell, "Answering autobiographical questions" (1987)
• Roger Tourangeau, Lance Rips and Kenneth Rasinski, The Psychology of Survey Response (2000)
• Norbert Schwarz and Daphna Oyserman, "Asking questions about behavior" (2001)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 3 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

What can a leader change when the centre depends on powerful units it cannot simply command? Clare and Lena look at how leadership can create coherent action across a federation without treating local autonomy as either a defect or a complete answer, drawing on research into the history and reform of the World Health Organization.

Takeaway: judge a reform by its policy effects and by how it lastingly redistributes authority.

Readings

• Tine Hanrieder, International Organization in Time: Fragmentation and Reform (2015)
• Tine Hanrieder, "The path-dependent design of international organizations: Federalism in the World Health Organization" (2014)
• Nitsan Chorev, The World Health Organization between North and South (2012)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.

Part 2 of 11 in our series on meetings, memory, power and interviews.

Every organisation has one seat, everyone gets three minutes, and the rules say all voices are equal. So why does the same concern land differently depending on who raises it?

Clare and Lena explore how status works in rooms built on formal equality, drawing on Vincent Pouliot's research on diplomatic pecking orders and Merje Kuus's work on how expertise gets recognised. They ask what a less powerful participant can do, and what the person running the meeting is responsible for.

Takeaway: don't judge influence by speaking time. Trace what happens to a contribution: who drafts, who repeats it, and whether it reaches a decision.

Readings

• Vincent Pouliot, International Pecking Orders (2016)
• Merje Kuus, Geopolitics and Expertise (2014)

Workplace examples in this episode are hypothetical.