Interviews

Between 12/9/1997 and 28/12/1997,1 conducted interviews with nine of the IPDs selected by the questionnaire analysis described above. To these I added the notes of my

discussions and observation of Meredith Belbin, which had taken place earlier - 11/6/1996.

The interviews, like the conversations discussed above, were not tape-recorded. My full, hand-written notes were transcribed to read coherently. They were then checked with the interviewee and amended according to their feedback. My argument for this procedure echoes Case, 1995, who suggests that, ‘If we dryly transcribe what is ‘there on the tape5, for all intents and purposes we kill the conversational creature there and then’ (p. 439).

My analysis o f the interviews follows two branches. On one hand I characterise each o f the respondents as individuals, bearing in mind Moustakas’s (1990) advice:

Transcriptions, notes, and personal documents are gathered together and

organised by the investigator into a sequence that tells the story o f each research participant. Essential to the process of heuristic analysis is comprehensive knowledge of all materials for each participant and for the group o f participants collectively, (p. 49)

Having re-read the individual’s transcript I wrote descriptions to capture the essence o f my experience of each of my respondents. I introduce each of the descriptions with a brief biography, which is part official record, part description of their impact on my personal and professional life. I then add my personal bibliography, selecting from their writings those that have had an impact on me. These are often, though not always, their

seminal works. Finally, I characterise the respondents in the light o f my interview with them. These three elements are presented together for each IPD in Chapter 4.1, in the sequence in which they were interviewed.

The second branch of my analysis seeks to make generic sense o f the accounts of the IPDs. Quotations from the interviews are clustered around themes selected by the coding process outlined below. These quotations and the accompanying commentary are

presented in Chapters 4.2-4.4.

Coding o f themes

The interview transcripts were read and themes were noted. I then reviewed all of the interview notes to find other references to similar themes. In some of the interviews I had specified the themes which had emerged for me when I conducted the interview. In others, I went over them and spotted themes retrospectively. Then, in beginning to write up the results of my interviews, I assembled all these themes, starting the verbal

statement of the theme with a key word so that similar themes would be brought together by alphabeticising. I also noted in brackets where I had recalled others commenting on the same issue. These I listed, by respondent, in the order in which they were conducted.

In retrospect, it is interesting to note that the new issues arising from this process take a couple of interviews to reach a peak, and then show something of a decline, with a bit of

an increase for Alan Mumford5s (see Exhibit 2.2). His interview was interesting, like many of the others; but it was also exceptionally long (over four hours). It is a criterion for determining sample size in some ethnographic traditions, that you carry on until you are getting little new from each subsequent interview, and then stop. My sample seems approximately to meet this criterion, though, in practice, I came to a halt because I had interviewed 100% of the British IPDs (including Roger Harrison, who had worked long in Britain) identified by the AMED survey, who were under the age of 90.

Exhibit 2.2 Number of issues arising from each interview of intellectual property developers

Name New ideas Repeated ideas Total ideas

Meredith Belbin 8 0 8 Mike Pedler 5 0 5 David Clutterbuck 13 3 16 Tom Boydell 4 3 7 Roger Harrison 13 4 17 Andrew Mayo 1 5 6 Peter Honey 2 4 6 Alan Mumford 6 5 11 Bob Garratt 2 3 5 John Burgoyne 4 0 4 2.4.6 Documents

The published writings of the IPDs identified by my survey offer a rich source to illuminate their thinking. Some of them were hugely productive, David Clutterbuck for example, has written more than 40 books. Others - Meredith Belbin, Roger Harrison and Andrew Mayo - had written less, but with no less effect.

I was familiar with the writing of all the authors in the list, so the place of this

documentary source was to use it as a verifier of the comments made by the IPDs during the interviews. I set the documents against their stories in coming to an individual characterisation of each of them as EPD.

It is interesting that Miles and Huberman (1994), in so many ways a comprehensive compendium of qualitative data analysis, does not treat the analysis of existing

documents at all. They have a section (pp. 280-287) on documentation, but this is focused solely upon the documentation produced by researchers themselves.

Similarly, Weick (1995) has only one reference to documentation. That is in the context of documenting statements by respondents, and he is following Shotter’s (1983) argument about indeterminacy of even a partially completed sentence, which I alluded to earlier in this chapter in arguing against a dramaturgical perspective. The indeterminacy of text is a preoccupation of many ethnographic and postmodern scholars (see for example,

Atkinson, 1992, pp. 37-38). Atkinson, however, is only concerned with the texts produced by ethnographers. Watson (1987) has a chapter on manuscripts, but his interest is in the historical hand written document. Moustakas (1990) restricts himself to one cursory paragraph (p. 49). However, in contrast to these several blanks among sources that have shaped my methodological view, Gill & Johnson (1997), give documents a fair airing. They cite three main studies that used documents - Dalton (1959), in his groundbreaking and illuminating Chicago school study of managerial behaviour; Frame (1991), in his study of management response to expenditure cuts; and Beynon’s contentious 1973 study of working for Ford. Gill and Johnson’s view is the same as mine, that Dalton found

documentary sources useful, Frame did not, and for Beynon they were essential to get at aspects o f the experience simply not accessible by any other means.

In this study, documents in the form of the IPD’s published books, are crucial to an understanding of how they deploy their IPs and they also illuminate how IPDs gain access to sources o f influence through publication.

There are also two accounts in the IPDs’ writing which particularly contribute to this research. These are Harrison (1995) and Mumford (1995). Both of them are

autobiographical accounts of the authors5 production of their IPs. Harrison’s lengthy and candid biography is particularly thoughtful and disclosing of the issues involved in setting up a business to exploit IPs. Mumford’s is interesting in describing his motives for

writing. It is tantalisingly brief about his working relationship with Peter Honey.