Interviews

One-to-one, face-to-face interviews formed the main data collection method. In phase one, 12 deans were interviewed before and after ABS executive meetings in London or in individuals’ offices (Herzog, 2005). The interviews with the seven deans of Warwick Business School were conducted on site, at conferences, and one follow-up transatlantic interview was done via Skype. Interviews with

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colleagues of these deans were carried out wherever this was convenient – in two cases in individuals’ homes. The majority of the filmed interviews were held at ABS offices, at Warwick, at Imperial College where a lunch for women deans was organised, and in the British Library before a lunch for companions of ABS. The total number of respondents and repeated interviews with WBS deans allowed for data saturation whereby it was felt that sufficient data had been collected to explain the phenomenon of upper middle management strategizing, including negative cases, within the resource constraints of a lone researcher sponsored by a small trade association. Ragin (in Baker and Edwards, 2012: 34) advises: ‘You should stop adding cases when you are no longer learning anything new.’ Warren (2002) recommends a minimum of 20–30 interviews for interview-based

qualitative studies that are published (Bryman, 2012: 425).

Kvale (1996) suggests that successful interviews include a knowledgeable

interviewer. Over time, my expertise about the business school sector grew, as I had been appointed at ABS two years prior to embarking on this doctorate. I aimed to adopt a clear, structured format with a relatively gentle style, allowing for silence, which gave the interviewee time to think and I probed to clarify issues. I knew from experience of conducting on-line surveys at ABS that deans are very busy and a 20% response rate was typical. I found that asking someone in person for a diary appointment to interview them for up to 90 minutes guaranteed their full attention in a way that other methods did not. Participants in the main study were re-interviewed on several occasions to ensure a more complete dataset.

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All interviews were voice recorded with the interviewee’s permission and notes were taken during the interviews. Several times, individuals asked for the voice recorder to be paused while they made a comment off-record, usually a jibe or aside about someone’s personal domestic difficulties. It would have been a breach of trust not to respect this (Punch, 1994). Such remarks were often part of a stream of consciousness and humour (Hatch, 1997) which made the respondent more relaxed and open to discussion. Often I would write up these field notes of quotations, facts, and my observations while travelling back to London

immediately afterwards. For the first dataset, all transcriptions of recordings were outsourced, partly as I felt the emotions were quite raw in places and the volume of interviews in a short time was quite high. Subsequently, I preferred to write up transcriptions myself of interviews with the deans who were the main subjects of the study. By doing this I was able to detect nuances and to gain greater familiarity with the data. For interviews with deans’ colleagues in the second study, detailed notes and verbatim quotes were made but not full transcriptions. Howard Thomas was interviewed in the first two datasets and Andrew Pettigrew was a respondent for phases 1 and 2b, i.e. as a dean and as a former colleague of WBS deans. Although this cannot be described as a longitudinal study, the repetition of interviews with WBS deans over three years, particularly in the case of Howard Thomas in the pilot study, represents more than the single snapshot research design that characterised Floyd and Wooldridge’s (1996) cross-sectional survey.

For the second phase of interviews, a preparatory discussion with the Dean of Warwick Business School, Howard Thomas, who had taken an interest in the

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findings of the first phase of the research and agreed access to the School for this project, scoped out the following issues:

(i) Path dependences at the school, critical incidents in its history, and the founding ideology of the University.

(ii) Background reading on the University and internal documents, with support from the Dean’s Personal Assistant.

(iii) Potential respondents.

(iv) An overview of key challenges in the institution, higher education industry, and business and management education.

(v) Confirmation of access but no agreement on shadowing opportunities. A total of 29 interviews were held with current and former members of the School and University to collect mainly retrospective data, as well as live data for two incumbent deans. It was decided not to include one former chair, Roger Fawthrop, as it was generally considered that the role had been a ‘non job’ before George Bain started. Robert Dyson was included, however, although he had preceded Bain, because he had been so active in the leadership of the Business School and within the University for over 40 years. No particularly sensitive areas were highlighted in this thesis, although there were inevitably inherent tensions between the dean and registrar over administrative faculty numbers in the

business school which are common in many universities. At an early stage, a focus group lunch of the current and two former deans of WBS and its long-serving administrator was conducted. On reflection, I felt that while the discussion was interesting, it was difficult to control and so this method was discontinued in favour of one-to-one meetings.

To obtain rich data for interpretive coding, interview guides (Appendices 7, 8 and 9) were used to ensure consistency in asking questions (Burgess, 1984). Time was

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allowed for open and follow-up questions and reflections. Five key questions were strictly applied for the filmed interviews where there were tight time constraints. They were intended to produce outputs of around 10 minutes each after some editing. Inevitably, unplanned and unsolicited conversations that covered some of the interview material took place at social events such as at the Academy of Management meetings, even over breakfast and in airports. Unsolicited insights were gained in the course of my job at ABS and while these were logged as a barometer of different opinions, they did not form the main focus of this study. Clearly, as many of the respondents are management researchers themselves, for many informants the research process was well understood and they did not find the voice recorder obtrusive. Several checked about confidentiality and one former WBS employee requested anonymity. In the empirical chapters of this thesis, direct quotations are attributed to deans who are identified by number and listed by name in Appendix 10. While Guenther (2009: 412) acknowledges that ‘the dominant paradigm in the social sciences is to protect confidentiality,

disguising the names of organizations and places is taken for granted in published work’, she views this as problematic. In this study, the deans of Warwick Business School are difficult to disguise and so the decision was taken not to anonymise them throughout. For most of the questions, in line with Weiner-Levy and Popper- Giveon’s (2011: 2178) advice: ‘[c]ertain topics that arose during field work, data analysis or writing were suppressed, obscured and omitted from the final report, despite their relevance and significance’ because of their personal nature.

Interviews with respondents other than the 24 deans, especially with individuals who had left Warwick a long time ago, were more conversational and

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impressionistic. Sir Bob Burgess, for example, had worked in Sociology as a counterpart of several of the deans before he became a vice-chancellor but he was not actually based in Warwick Business School so provided very general perspectives. One person refused to be interviewed as he felt he could not comment on his current dean. There were three non replies from a former vice- chancellor and two retired professors who had been at WBS, but these individuals were not central to the research. While one filmed interview had been planned with Sue Cox at the women’s lunch (I had previously interviewed her to provide information on a tribute to her at the lunch), an impromptu decision to maximise the opportunity on the day resulted in two additional interviews which were very useful for the third dataset. Overall, responses were positive and encouraging, with offers to read drafts of my thesis.