What Does it Mean to Teach Interpretively?

The ‘interpretive turn’ has gained traction as a research approach in recent decades in the empirical social sciences. While the contributions of interpretive research and interpretive research methods are clear, we wonder: Does an interpretive perspective lend itself to – or even demand – a particular style of teaching? This question was at the heart of a roundtable discussion we organised at the 2014 Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) International Conference. This essay reports on the contours of the discussion, with a focus on our reflections upon what it might mean to teach ‘interpretively’. Prior to outlining these, we introduce the defining characteristics of an interpretive perspective and describe our respective experiences and interests in this conversation. In the hope that this essay might constitute the beginning of a wider conversation, we close it with an invitation for others to respond

Shifting repertoires:Understanding cultural plurality in policing

The police is one of the most prominent organizations in the frontline of public administration. In order to deal with high external expectations, the organization has been said to develop and nurture multiple police cultures. Applying Grid Group Cultural Theory, or GGCT, we address the following questions: what sets of values, beliefs and practices has the police organization developed to deal with high expectations stemming from their publics? How do cultural tensions play out in real-life practices of policing under pressure? We find that cultural patterns described in the general literature on policing can be plotted on the GGCT map. Zooming in on the case of policing in the Netherlands, cultural plurality appears to be not only prominent in the police organization as such, but can also be found in the form of continuous cultural tap-dancing - swift, flexible and improvisational shifting - at various levels of active policing

Understanding extended narrative sensemaking : how police officers accomplish story work

Extended narrative sensemaking consists of (a) agents generating actionable stories when faced with unexpected situations to which they need to respond in real time, and (b) emplotting actions that were undertaken and events that occurred during their response, in order to make deeper sense of them afterwards. When sensemakers revisit critical incidents in which there were involved, they join (a) and (b) through story work. In this article, through the study of stories told by police officers in relation to unexpected, impactful incidents, we show how story work is accomplished. We argue that sensemakers simultaneously enact situations, emplot events, and renew identity. Specifically, we demonstrate that police officers strive to accomplish three different things: first, show how, as engaged responders, they were involved in the ongoing enactment of an actionable story (situated agency); secondly, seek to deeper understand, after the event, what happened to them through emplotting their experiences (complexified sense); and thirdly, update their narrative identity by weaving their experience of the handling of the unexpected situation with the rest of their life story (identity renewal). Our account extends current understanding of ongoing narrative sensemaking by showing how agents construct agency, meaning, and identity at once, and how all three are part of an extended, ongoing sensemaking process

From What to Where: A setting-sensitive approach to organizational storytelling

Extant literature on organizational storytelling assumes storytelling to be context-bound, but does not empirically detail or theorize how storytelling might differ across organizational settings. In the context of members’ everyday work lives, organizational storytelling research tends to focus on the content of stories and not on the actual telling. By addressing this omission, this paper makes three contributions. First, we offer a generic framework for analysing storytelling in situ by zooming in on the situated occurrence of storytelling through a focus on four questions: (1) What makes an event tellable? (2) What triggers its telling? (3) What form does the storytelling take? (4) What work does it do? By using ethnographic data gathered on storytelling in everyday police work, we empirically substantiate this framework. Our second contribution, then, is to show how a setting-specific approach to studying storytelling may help to flesh out a fuller, more grounded account of story life in organizations. Finally, we propose a typology of different forms of setting-specific discourse – meeting-room talk, workstation talk, canteen talk and closed-door talk – which allows researchers to further sensitize organizational research to the situated nature of organizational discourse

Working the urban assemblage:A transnational study of transforming practices

This article places those working for change in urban neighbourhoods at the centre of debates on urban transformation, directing attention to the importance of human agency in the work of assembling urban transformation. Drawing on cross-national qualitative fieldwork undertaken over 30 months shadowing 40 urban practitioners in neighbourhoods across four European cities – Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow – our research revealed the catalytic, embodied roles of situated agents in this assembling. Through exemplar vignettes, we present practices in a diverse range of socio-material assemblages aimed to address complex problems and unmet needs in the urban environment. The practices we studied were not those of daily routines, but were instead a purposeful assembling that included nurturing and developing of heterogeneous resources such as relationships, knowledges and materials, framed through an emerging vision to inform, mobilise and channel action. This article brings together assemblage-theoretical and practice-theoretical ideas, with rich empirical insight to advance our understanding of how the city may be re-made