Collecting data

I set out to collect data from diverse and multiple sources in order to glean a more whole and rich view of the practices being enacted. Given a research aim of understanding subjective experiences, I was seeking depth data, and thus I undertook a programme of conducting forty semi-structured interviews of individuals from all levels of the organization17. Interviews were semi-structured and open-ended in order to allow respondents to expand on those issues which they felt were most significant and meaningful. I began each interview by taking a life history approach, asking participants to trace back their involvement with the RNLI, how and why they had come to join the RNLI and what happened when they joined (cf. Musson, 1998; Kirton, 2006). Interviews lasted from fifteen minutes to three hours, with an average of fifty minutes per interview and took place at local stations (coxswains, launch authorities, LOM’s, mechanics

16

See data collection schedule in appendix B.

17 _{The breakdown is as follows: Waged: 5 directors, 4 senior managers, 3 staff officers, 1}

coxswain

Unwaged: 4 coxswains, 4 deputy coxswains, 3 mechanics, 2 deputy mechanics, 9 crew members, 2 lifeboat operation managers, 2 launching authorities, 1 training coordinator.

and crew members) in RNLI headquarters in Poole (directors and senior management of the RNLI) and RNLI divisional base in Dublin (divisional management and staff of the RNLI). All interviews were digitally audio recorded. Prior to interviewing, I acquainted myself with Taylor and Bogdan’s (1984) and Kvale’s (1996) advice regarding the search for meanings in qualitative interviews.

Interviews were very active – both researcher and researched played a role in the construction of meaning and this framed what would be discussed next. During the interviews, I was attentive to situations where alternative stories were discredited or ‘disqualified’ (Antaki and Horowitz, 2000: 155) and I probed deeper when I sensed that respondents had a story to tell. Certainly, the interview was not simply a neutral exchange of ‘asking questions and getting answers’ (Fontana and Frey, 2005: 696; cf. Holstein and Gubrium, 1995; Scheurich, 1995; Atkinson and Silverman, 1997; Hertz, 1997), rather, I felt that the interviews were mediated by our respective and mutual repertoires. For example, when interviewing a mechanic I sensed through his body language that his appointment from unpaid volunteer to paid mechanic had not run smoothly. This hunch gave me impetus to ask more pointed questions about this aspect of his organizational life, which might not have otherwise been asked had I not picked up on non-verbal aspects of the interview. This line of conversation was enabled by qualifying and reassuring my role as an independent researcher guaranteeing anonymity.

Interestingly, almost all of the respondents who were volunteers spoke of their kinship connections to the lifeboat (this aspect is further developed in

section 5.1.1). When asked how they first got into lifeboating, these respondents emphasized how it was a family thing, explaining that their fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had been involved, at varying levels from coxswain to shore helper, in the local lifeboat of their day. As in Thornbarrow and Brown’s (2009) fascinating ethnography of the Parachute Regiment, many respondents spoke of being ‘born into’ the lifeboats and being intimately familiar, from an early age of the ‘history, traditions, and the mentality’ (Ibid, p.360) of lifeboat volunteers. All stations had multiple members of the same family involved, and coxswains spoke of the difficult choices which had to be made on nights of wild weather as to whether it was right, morally, to bring two members of the same family out on a dangerous shout should neither of them came home again.

Data were also derived from approximately 850 pages of organizational documents and analyzed for meanings, expressions of power, indications of reflections of reality and managerial perspectives (cf. Forster, 1994; Fairclough, 2003). The most notable of these documents was the RNLI Divisional Working Practices Handbook (2008), the formal set of guidelines issued to each station. In an approach similar to that of Brown (2000, 2004, 2005), I analysed these texts for evidence of moral positioning, to see if the text was intended to have a performative function as authorative for the purposes of maintaining and reproducing legitimacy. The Divisional Working Practices Handbook gave insights into the production of meaning, as it was intended to be a reflection of espoused reality by HQ, but as one RNLI manager told me ‘you could drive a

horse and cart through it’ (Joseph, RNLI Manager). This was an early insight that control structures were looser than documentary evidence might suggest.

Further data were collected through participant observation (undertaking an exercise in the simulator) and non-participant observation (sitting-in on a five day management communications and command training course aimed at station management personnel) at the lifeboat training college at RNLI HQ. These processes provided a micro-ethnographic (Wolcott, 1995) element to the research as I immersed myself in the organization, observed behaviour and asked questions, albeit not for a long time, and was able to balance this with the estrangement ‘necessary for revealing what is taken for granted’ (Czarniawska, 2008:133). I used these research visits to the lifeboat college as ‘an opportunity to see the organization at work and to ‘feel’ the organization’ (Parker, 2000: 238), recording observations in my research diary.

Collecting data from multiple sources amounted to a form of triangulation in the data collection phase in terms of my methods of investigation and sources of data. These multiple perceptions were used to clarify meaning by identifying different ways the case was seen (Silverman, 1993; Flick, 1998) both in my own perceptions and interpretations as a researcher (Alvesson, 2003) and in the communication of my results (Stake, 2005).