Vignettes of interviews to enhance an ethnographic account

Abstract

This article explores challenges of applying an ethnographic approach, combining participant observation and interviews, to a study of organizational change. The exploration is connected to reform changes, as they are constructed in the interaction between managers and teachers, in a Danish Upper Secondary High School. The data material is presented in four vignettes from the organizational field. The vignettes present insights from the study and emphasize the value of interviews. In this way, the article makes a case that interviews add analytical depth and complexity to the study to counter the view that they are context stripping and are the minor partner in the ethnographic relationship between observational fieldwork and interviews.

Keywords:

• education
• ethnography
• organizational change
• vignette
• reform
• professions

Notes

1. The upper secondary high school called gymnasium in Danish.

2. In May 2003, the Danish Parliament came to agreement about a reform of upper secondary high schools, Stx, the general upper secondary high school, Hhx, the business high school, and Htx, the technical high school. The first students under the new reform were enrolled in August 2005. Among the central ideas of the reform were:

• Boosting cooperation among teachers.

• Focusing on shared responsibility for the schools' education program. Related to this, developing a school based evaluation of performance, comprising students' portfolios and teachers' performance.

• An enhanced management-focus on human resource, change-, and strategic management (Jacobsen 2009).

3. Burrage, Jarausch, and Siegrist (1990) describe professions in general, whereas Sehested (1996, 2002) describes teachers specifically.

4. This article reports on detailed studies at one of the schools, whereas a Ph.D. thesis compares the processes of change across the three schools (Jacobsen 2009).