Data in Organization Studies

Data in Organization Studies

Organization studies (OS) is about understanding the social world we organization students inhabit. Because it is not a closed system of study like logic or mathematics, there is little room for deductive science. OS is necessarily an empirical study, exploring attitudes, behaviours, desires, practices, experiences, artefacts, symbols, documents, texts, feelings, judgements, beliefs, meanings, measures, facts and figures. Even the armchair/conceptual theorists must muse on empirical data.

However, what is to count as data of organizational life? There is no clear consensus on an answer among the community (or is it communities?) of scholars who study organizations. Some organizational students run well-controlled experiments to produce data which others claim ‘have little or nothing to say about the realities of organizational behaviour’ (Lawler 1985: 4). Some spend months in the field reporting their data as ethnographic tales that others dismiss as mere anecdotes (Martin 1990). Some ask hundreds and thousands of people to answer carefully chosen questions producing data which others disparage as simplistic, distorted reflections of the respondents' organizational reality, unrelated to their organizational behaviour.

Can we reconcile these paradigm-laden positions and arrive at an acceptable definition of data for OS? The advantages of a common position are clear. If the field can establish a common paradigm, resources will flow more freely, and research will accumulate more ‘successfully’ (Pfeffer 1993). We could all use the money! However, will the accumulation of knowledge reflect the variety and complexity of organizational reality? Many argue that accumulation is an illusion; the debate goes on (Jaros 1994; Pfeffer 1995; Van Maanen 1995a, b; Moldoveanu and Baum 2002).

A more recent and enduring challenge comes from postmodern and poststructural theorizing in the humanities (Zald 1996; Chia 2003). Early advocates, Cooper (Cooper and Burrell 1988; Cooper 1989) and Burrell (1988) wrote extensively on the implications of postmodernism for organizational studies. Hassard and Parker (1993), Calas and Smircich (1997) and Linstead (2004) provide samplers of views on the utility and significance of postmodernism for organization studies. Postmodern theorizing challenges the very notion of a common ground. In particular, OS postmodernists warn against any totalizing narrative (e.g. Jeffcut 1994b; Kilduff and Mehra 1997; Calas and Smircich 1999), i.e. an attempt to provide an all encompassing explanation. They would argue that any attempt to develop a universal definition of data for OS is doomed. Yet, as these ideas have gained greater currency in OS (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2003) the very suggestion that a universal approach could be possible and beneficial may be generative (Jones 2003).

Thus, my strategy in this review will be to offer such a definition of data in organization studies. However, I make no claim to absolute truth in doing so. Instead, I offer this grand narrative, bracketed as a heuristic for OS. I believe we can self-consciously use modernist writing techniques to forge temporary consensus, to create the shared explicit and tacit knowledge and assumptions required to do OS. Thus, I do not write in opposition to the postmodern. As Deetz has noted in discussing competing research programmes, they can be seen not as ‘alternative routes to truth, but as specific discourses which, if freed from their claims of universality and/or completeness, could provide important moments in a larger dialogue about organizational life’ (Deetz 1996: 195). Although I cannot promise the beauty of Kubla Khan, I join Coleridge in asking you, the reader, for the suspension of your disbelief.

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