The research design

The exploration of silence as thoughts that are consciously not communicated relies upon an ontology in which human subjects can be conceptualised as engaging in activity that is unknown or unreadable to other human beings. The difficulty may not lie in this notion of human beings existing as individuals with inner lifeworlds (Husserl, 1970/1936) but in the challenge this presents for researching the

phenomenon. The methodology requires some means to provoke (Ramsey, 2008) data about the unobservable, unhearable phenomenon of silence as an act of withholding from verbal communication. While my own consciously withheld silence may have been sufficient to have informed an autoethnographic study, I

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wanted to understand better how other people responded to the notion of staying silent as part of an ongoing process of project delivery. I therefore required participants' talk about their silence. It is through the discursive constructions of withholding that the individual practice of it is given some ontological form.

However, taking seriously the idea of silence as withholding requires me to recognise as a possibility that withholding can take place in interviews with a researcher as much as in the other situations, such as project group meetings, about which I am interviewing participants! The underlying theoretical perspective

therefore is social constructionist (Burr, 2003), and the epistemological commitment is one of intersubjectivity (Cunliffe, 2011), that is, that my way of knowing about and interpreting others' actions, including their internal dialogic thought processes, is through my social relationship with them.

In order to generate the empirical data for a rich and evocative account of project delivery in which the phenomenon of silence was embedded, I chose a qualitative, ethnographic approach. Hammersley and Atkinson (2007, p.3), although noting the variability of views about what constitutes the fundamental features of ethnography, provide a list of what they consider to be its common characteristics, namely:

 the conducting of empirical fieldwork to study everyday contexts (rather than, for instance, experimental designs set up by the researcher);

 data collected from a range of sources, but with participation observation and/or relatively informal conversations as the main source(s);

 data collection being a relatively unstructured activity, with categories for interpretation emerging out of fieldwork and analytic processes, rather than being prior to these;

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 an in-depth, small-scale focus on one or a small number of cases;

 and an interpretative analytical stance.

While this list points to some common characteristics, a huge variety of styles of ethnographic work has nevertheless developed from the original anthropological conceptualisation of fieldwork. Van Maanen (2011) for instance, reflecting upon his 1988 categories of realist, confessional and impressionist tales (Van Maanen, 1988), notes how studies have changed to cover multiple sites, to incorporate in different ways the voices of those being studied, and to develop less closed approaches to storytelling. Cunliffe (2011) likewise notes the great range of ontological and

epistemological assumptions that may accompany organisational ethnographic work, and I go into more detail about my own approach over the next few sections in this chapter.

Watson (2011) highlights the benefit of thinking about ethnography not as research

method but as research output, with practical use value of helping to learn 'how

things work' (p.212) rather than a truth value measured simply in the accuracy of reporting. He pinpoints the usefulness of ethnography as the ability to position and study participant utterances and interview data in a detailed empirical context through participant observation of natural settings and the development of

relationships over time between researcher and research participant. Of particular relevance for my research objective, and the contribution that I wish to make to the collection of more positivist social or cognitive psychological examinations of staying silent, is Watson's plea for ethnography to focus on social concerns, and to stick with sociological questions rather than psychological ones:

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'[ironically] if we focus [...] on ‘how things work’ in field settings rather than trying to get "inside" people’s experiences or poke about inside their heads and hearts, we might produce work which will be much more relevant to human experience and, indeed, to practice'. (Watson, 2011, p.213)30

The key point here is that an ethnographic research approach enables an exploratory focus on practice - in this case, a practice of staying silent - as an emergent

phenomenon that develops some social meaning in a particular empirical context, and allows for the active participation of researcher (and my thoughts) alongside that of research participants (and their talk).

Since the central ethnographic premise of participant observation on its own would not allow me to notice anything other than my own withholding, I developed the research design to work with the idea of an intertextual dialogue between different forms of data. The term 'intertexuality' originates in Julia Kristeva's work on

Bakhtin, and points to the way in which the meaning of a text is not contained within itself but is generated from its relationship to other texts (Allen, 2000). The analytic strategy relied on an intertextual approach that moved across different forms of data, that linked participants' discursive constructions of silence to discourse in other social situations, and that was based upon a reflexive and phenomenological understanding of what was going on for participants as they worked through the process of project delivery. My own embeddedness in the research, my active participant observation, is a critical component of the research design. What I know of participants' silence, and my interpretation of the meaning of their discourse about their own practice of silence, arises from my own intersubjective involvement in the

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Note that Van Maanen (2011) explicitly discusses this statement, and disagrees with it inasmuch as he considers the attempt to understand others' subjective experience as part of the ethnographic project.

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social situation. Discourse is conceptualised not as a straightforward received view of the world; it does not simply reflect the reality of what exists. Instead, discourse is viewed as social action, as a resource by means of which participants can actively seek to influence, construct and negotiate meaning in the world (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000). Attention to matters of reflexivity is therefore a core concern, to notice the processes of data co-construction between me and research participants, and the processes of interpretation both in the immediate context of fieldwork and during the subsequent stage of data analysis. The discussion about reflexivity is developed further in Section 4.8.

In the next section below, I provide further explication about three particular strands of ethnographic lineage which have been particularly influential in this research. I suggest that it is useful to discuss these because, although I draw from their

traditions, my work here is also different from them in many respects. I elaborate on both the overlapping and divergent features in order to position my own research clearly.