The write-up – the form of the ethnographic text

Writing up the material involved translations of the various texts that were available to me (Spradley 1979, 205) as illustrated in the previous section. As a researcher I am present in the material; my social, professional and philosophical (ontological and epistemological) background has influenced how I have chosen to carry out the fieldwork and the interpretations and conclusions are my own and do not necessarily match those of the actors of the field (Scott-Jones and Watt 2010, 182).

When writing a dissertation as this, it is important to make sure that the collective text tells a good story, which takes the reader from introduction, through literature reviews, theory and method and into analysis. It is a well-known organisation of text that most academic readers can relate to. In the same manner the construction of narratives in the analysis of this dissertation is written to tell a story about clashing narratives and the consequences related to this clash. It is a narrating process that involves organizing with the help of plot and characters. The way the analysis is formed is directed by processes of emplotment – meaning structuring the text in a way that makes sense of the events written about (Czarniawska 2004, 123). Czarniawska refers to Ryan (1993) when giving instructions on three useful steps researchers go through in the work of emplotment, without saying they have to come in a specific order;

• Constructing characters (which, in social science texts, are often non-human: an economic decline, growing unemployment, or a new computer technology).

• Attributing functions to single events and actions.

• Finding an interpretative theme (Czarniawska 2004, 126)

The interpretative theme of this dissertation is the barriers to entrepreneurial learning in the incubator context, and as it will be outlined in the analysis, the plot is that the field is loaded with narratives that clash and somehow comes to inhibit learning and new relational constructions. All descriptions, emplotment and meaning making are subordinated to this plot. This analysis is constructed through the descriptions of narratives, representing both characters and functions in the field. The Ryan instructions have been used to structure the write-up in my efforts to make explanations to actions in the field. The empirical material contains a richness of representation (Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000, 552). The field study allows for the narrative constructions in part III, covering a span of themes that all contribute to the narrative analysis of

entrepreneurial support and learning. ‘Some of these meanings are directly expressed in the language; many are taken for granted and communicated only indirectly through word and action. But in every society people make constant use of these complex meaning systems to organize their behaviour, to understand themselves and others, and to make sense out of the world they live in’ (Spradley 1979, 5). The narratives are patterns in the fieldwork, representing the dominant actors and their actions – without reflecting an exact real world, but creating one that brings new perspectives to the field (Czarniawska 2004, 118). I have emplotted the narratives to offer insights into the meaning and values behind actions and processes and to illustrate what the narratives do and do not do (McNamee and Hosking 2012, 51). Trying to capture the interrelated,

interdependent and intersubjective characteristics of incubating activities means exploring the organising of relationships, in the context of incubating processes (Bradbury and Lichtenstein 2000, 551). In the specific context of incubating activities, I have been able to follow the development of both the entrepreneurial actors and the venture by listening to and to a smaller degree interact with the respondents several times, and given that entrepreneurial learning is a continuous process of the actors, and it has been advantage not to rely exclusively on the retrospective sense-making of a single meeting (Rae 2000, 150).

I have chosen to present the material as narratives for two reasons: First, the single case study of individual companies or individuals produces too narrow a description for the analysis that I want to share with the world and leaves out too much of the rich material. The material is both regarded as one text and as a multi-voice compound of texts that may be interpreted and sliced in a variety of ways. Second, I want to focus on the unexpected and incomprehensible in my representation of the field (Alvesson and Kärreman 2007), because I

consider this the most important and interesting contribution I can make from my research journey. It may inspire for critical dialogue between theoretical assumptions, as we saw it in PART I, and the empirical impressions of my fieldwork.

Methodologically, the narratives presented in the following chapters are distillates from observations, participation and personal interviews, they are also constructions created by the researcher and parts of the message I seek to put forward. The interviews and interactions can be said to serve as a narrative production site - and “there is no need for the illusion that ‘these people’ talk for themselves; indeed they do not”

(Czarniawska 2004, 122) as the narratives are my constructions on the basis of what people did and said in the field study, which I claim are interesting representations of practices in the field. As a social science researcher my claim cannot be supported by natural sciences facts, but rely on my ability to make my readers believe in my stories from the field – as they were there. As Czarniawska 2004 writes about how to write a social science monograph the main question is – “Will it persuade”? I hope so!

4.1. Concluding

This chapter has now introduced the thought style of the dissertation – relational constructionism – along with the methodological consequences it implies, as having a narrative approach to the write-up of ethnographic fieldwork. As it is hopefully clear by now, my dialogues and interactions as Industrial PhD in the field of the accelerator programme, has been both intense, time-consuming and provided me with a rich and multi-facetted empirical material. The dissertation is positioned as an organizational ethnography study, with the ambition to include many voices from the field in order to understand what might be called a culture³⁵ of business incubating activities and the barriers to entrepreneurial learning. The presentation of different voices is a way to present the various relationships, as it is hard to ‘see’ the actual relationship, but every interview or dialogue is an effect of a relationship. Law (2004) describes such a research process as slow but valuable in terms of insights into the taken-for-grated, motivation and rationales behind action that make it easier to understand and construct explanations for process outcomes or the lack of them (Law 2004, 10). I find that new, alternative explanations to the actions in the field is actually the outcome of the fieldwork – and also what makes it possible to offer other perspectives on support for entrepreneurial processes.

35 Even though this is not a direct study of an incubating culture, the ethnographic fieldwork implicitly reveals details about the shared belief system and values of the field. Without writing up detailed accounts of the culture of the field, which is obviously included in the material, this cultural knowledge is used in the analysis of the taken-for-granted in order to construct the narratives of the field. For an implicit understanding of culture as underlying contextual meanings, I subscribe to Spadley’s definition of culture as ‘The acquired knowledge that people use to interpret experience and generate social behavior’ (Spadley 1979, 5).

The chapter demonstrates how the dissertation is inductively based, and that the choices for theory, methods and analysis have been empirically derived. Nevertheless, the write-up of the material and the methodology for making the field study are retrospective and cannot in that sense ‘be true’ to the chronological order in which experiences and recognitions occurred. The narrative analysis of the fieldwork, presented in Part III of the dissertation, is not a classic narrative presentation of one descriptive story – but a presentation of a variety of narratives representing different plots and characters. The narrative constructions came to be appropriate as analytical strategy because of my focus on relations and because of the way I experienced that the small stories of the field interacted. The small stories that I have collected seems to perform a certain constructed reality of the actors in the field – as ‘narrative imitates life, life imitate narrative’ (Bruner 2004, 692).

What follows is an overview of the dissertation, Table 4.3, in terms of how literature review, theory and method play along and inform the analysis and further recommendations. It is my platform for working with fieldwork material and telling my story about the barriers to entrepreneurial learning in the incubator context;

Table 4.3 Collaboration between theory and empirical material of the dissertation

Chapter 5: Theories of entrepreneuring and entrepreneurial