(Three new articles on qualitative case study research methodology for investigating workplaces)

 For the last several years, I’ve been working on questions of qualitative research methodology. How do we research workplaces? How do we bound or delimit them so that we collect the right data and don’t collect superfluous data? Since work overlaps with lots of other things in our lives — for instance, we might be texting with our loved ones during business hours, and our bosses during family time — how do we separate out what is relevant? Since we pick up literate practices during different parts of our lives, how do we trace the impacts of these literate practices and when are practices from one part of our lives (ex: how to make a to-do list) incompatible with our work? Where and when can we be considered to be working?

Such questions are even harder to answer than they seem, especially since digital communication and devices have made it easier, cheaper, and faster to communicate than ever before. That means more working during “non-work” hours, at “non-work” places, and more interference across work projects (say, getting a Teams message about Project 1 when you’re working on Project 2). It also means the reverse: your family might text you at work and expect you to answer. Boundaries become more porous. New work configurations become more possible.

These issues have been part of my focus ever since 2000, when I began the research project that turned into my 2008 book, Network (2008). But they kicked into high gear as I began looking at projectified work in the series of case studies that led to my 2015 book, All Edge, and later when I started researching early-stage technology startups. 

This year, I’ve published three papers looking at different aspects of qualitative research methodology, all of which examine the question of bounding the case at different angles.

Spinuzzi, C. (2023). Mapping representations in qualitative case studies: Can we adapt Boisot’s I-Space model? Journal of Workplace Learning 35(6), pp. 562-583. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-01-2023-0013.

In this article, I critically examined Max Boisot’s I-Space model, which provides three-axis representations of “knowledge assets” used by a population. Could it provide appropriate visualizations for qualitative research into workplaces? I-Space maps information in three dimensions (abstraction, codification and diffusion). I conclude that I-Space is not directly adoptable for case study methodology due to three fundamental disjunctures: in theory, methodology and unit of analysis. However, it can be adapted for qualitative research by substituting analogues for abstraction, codification and diffusion.

Here, I want to highlight the unit of analysis part of the article. The I-Space model assumes that knowledge assets are used by a “population.” But populations overlap; population is not enough to define who does and does not fit into a workplace study. After all, everyone in a given workplace is also involved elsewhere, and workplaces increasingly include those who are involved temporarily or tangentially. If population isn’t enough to define a workplace, how do we define it?

Spinuzzi, C. (2023). What Is a Workplace? Principles for Bounding Case Studies of Genres, Processes, Objects, and Organizations. Written Communication, 40(4), 1027–1069. https://doi.org/10.1177/07410883231185875

The question of defining the workplace amounts to how we define the boundaries of a case study — the unit of analysis for a given workplace. Traditionally, workplaces have been bounded by the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how? Or: organizational boundaries, location, time, processes, and work objects/outcomes. Since the Industrial Revolution, corporate work has been organized so that these questions all lead to the same conclusion: a location where work takes place during specific times, by specific people defined by an organizational boundary, using specific genres and processes in service of specific objectives. But that corporate arrangement has been fraying for a while, partly due to new information and communication technologies, and it frayed a lot more during COVID, when a substantial part of the workforce began working from home. In this article, I look at the history of this corporate arrangement and how case study methodology has free-ridden on it. Now that it is faltering, we have to rethink our workplace case study boundaries — including the principle I have been using for a long time, the activity system, which is indexed to a cyclically transformed work object(ive). The article concludes with a discussion of how to select appropriate case boundaries.

Guile, D., & Spinuzzi, C. (2023). “Fractional” Vocational Working and Learning in Project Teams: “Project Assemblage” as a Unit of Analysis? Vocations and Learning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-023-09330-1

Although this article was the latest to be published, David Guile and I have been working on it for a long while. We have separately been examining workplace learning in projectified work — work that is bound by a project objective rather than by departments or teams — and we’ve bumped up against the limits of the unit of analysis I mentioned above, the activity system, which (we argue) tends to assume an enduring institutional arrangement. The activity system is tremendously useful for exploring such institutional arrangements, but in the cases we have been examining (specifically early-stage tech startups and client-facing interprofessional project teams), it doesn’t capture the learning we see happening across projects. To capture these fractional (intermittent, discontinuous and concurrent) working and learning dynamics associated with projectification, we propose a unit of analysis anchored in the concept of project assemblage, based on ideas from actor-network theory, cultural-historical activity theory, and cultural sociology. Through this unit of analysis, researchers can examine how unstable project teams learn to use different forms of specialist activity to enact objects, objects that may not cohere, even though team members may treat them as unified and coherent. 

I hope these articles are all useful for researchers who, like me, are fascinated by the dynamics of workplaces!