Thoughts on Reflexivity

In this final part of a qualitative thesis I intended to include a brief reflexive account. Having spent a certain amount of time in the studied organisation, despite not having conducted ethnography in its traditional sense, I would like to acknowledge and reflect on the research process.

According to Weber (2004), “interpretive researchers understand that their research actions affect the research objects they are studying. They also understand that the research objects in turn affect them. The researcher and the research object are interdependent” (p.7). As such, I have made attempts to document the iterative processes throughout the thesis. I included descriptions of these processes where appropriate to the flow of the argument, having highlighted iterations of the research focus and methodology (sections 3.3 and 3.4), as well as theory building (section 4.5 and 5.1).

All social research absorbs some of researcher’s identity, particularly in the case of this research that involved an element of me embedding myself in the studied organisation (Schultze 2000). Having switched between awareness and

non-awareness of this fact over time, as I entered and left the organisation, was an interesting observation in itself.

As I switched between the roles of a researcher and practitioner, I wanted to explore both of these ‘voices’. The separation between the two had a less straight forward distinction in the write up process. Parts of my data and analysis iterations were done through discussions and presentations. In those settings it was easy to fall into a trap of painting an exciting picture for the case. Over time, it was pointed out to me that my accounts of the studied digital venture were resembling marketing pitches, rather than academic empirical accounts. This

‘tone of voice’ was something that I had to address, as I developed my academic writing and research practice. Switching between the two data collection phases and allowing time between data collection, transcribing, and analysis helped to create some distance, and to gradually develop a more critical stance.

Observations that formed a part of my data, helped to shape my understanding of the case, and were used as means to conduct rich interviews. As such, I did not follow a rigorous ethnographic research process or methodology. Rather, through my diary notes I developed an awareness of organisational identity, key terms and notions, which I used to build up a vocabulary, and a preliminary understanding of the scaling organising logic.

When conducting the interviews, participants treated me as an insider.

Indeed, having taken the role of an active-member-researcher (Schultze 2000, p.

10), I worked as part of the Communications and Events team, and developed an identity closely associated with that of BlaBlaCar. Working in a user facing role required me to follow BlaBlaCar’s values, and be the embodiment of company’s identity and brand. This allowed me to sense parts of the organising logic that were tacit, whilst making the detachment and distancing process a challenging one.

Nevertheless, having developed such high level of commonality with the teams helped to establish a level of trust and rapport with participants. This familiarity with some of the concepts and team members helped to uncover insights that would not be otherwise shared with an outsider, and perhaps my

sample would be significantly lower, had I not been placed in the organisation beforehand. Having said that, in the context of the interviews this also had its drawbacks. I had to be really aware of participants assuming I understood or knew of everything they were revealing in an interview. Participants were at times surprised that I seemingly wasn’t aware of certain topics or explanations.

I took this stance in order to move from a mere descriptive nature of the conversation to an explanatory one, drilling deeper into the interview explanations. This created a level of suspicion and some initial participants questioning my work at BlaBlaCar and research intentions. In order to mitigate this, I structured the interviewing process by starting with local teams and some of my immediate colleagues from the UK team. I did this to give myself an opportunity to practice and refine the questions before moving to interviewing members of the global teams. In some cases, I also tried setting this expectation at the start of the interview, asking participants to treat me as a newbie. I found that this helped in terms of participants’ reaction when I was asking follow up questions, they were more patient with answering and clarifying. Nevertheless, I did not notice much difference in the level of details revealed or the themes covered by the participants where this technique was used.

At the analysis stage, once again my proximity to the case helped to optimise the transcription and interpretation process. I was also able to kick start my coding process with provisional and in vivo coding. On the other hand, moving to second level coding was harder. I had to constantly challenge some face value concepts and interpretations made prior to analysing, and during first level coding. Informal discussions and mind mapping, particularly Saldana’s (2016)

“top ten” and “trinity” techniques, were helpful in abstracting from data.

As the findings, my ability to explain them, and the contributions matured, I relied less on having to paint an exciting picture for my case, and instead switched to the significance of the research findings and implications.

Developing implications is a challenging and creative process, which requires another level of reflection upon data and findings. With time, I detached from the organisational identity that I had developed, and naturally adopted a more

critical, outsider perspective to both the venture, the findings, and my abstractions of the observed and reported in this thesis.