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Analyzing in the Present

The article presents a notion of “analyzing in the present” as a source of inspiration in analyzing qualitative research materials. The term emerged from extensive listening to interview recordings during everyday commuting to university campus. Paying attention to the way different parts of various interviews conveyed diverse significance to the listening researcher at different times became a method of continuously opening up the empirical material in a reflexive, breakdown-oriented process of analysis. We argue that situating analysis in the present of analyzing emphasizes and acknowledges the interdependency between researcher and researched. On this basis, we advocate an explicit “open-state-of mind” listening as a key aspect of analyzing qualitative material, often described only as a matter of reading transcribed empirical materials, reading theory, and writing. The article contributes to an ongoing methodological conversation problematizing the notion of “data” and the use of “data-reliant” methods of analysis.

Making methodology a matter of process ontology

In recent years a growing population of researchers has approached organizational studies from process theory perspectives (Helin et al. 2014). Researchers working from the insights of process philosophy emphasize the temporal‑relational and emergent nature of organizational life. This is often explicitly opposed to Cartesian/Newtonian world views (Shotter 2015) and to the tendency to reify organizational ‘units’, ‘structures’ and ‘levels’ described as stemming from the ‘systems theory’‑thinking that have dominated and organized our knowledge of organizational life for decades (Stacey 2010; 2011).