Going with the flow: shadowing in organisations.

McDonald, Seonaidh

Abstract

In 1997 I undertook my first shadowing in an organisation. I had already been researching the organisation with a team of colleagues for more than a year. Despite the fact that I had already spent many long weeks in the organisation, travelling to all their sites in the UK, interviewing over 100 individuals, observing hours and hours of meetings and taking part in project feedback sessions to middle and senior management, nothing prepared me for the shadowing data. It is well documented that shadowing is a physically and mentally exhausting process and at first I thought it was this, and the richness of the torrent of data that was unleashed that was what made the experience so different. However as the weeks passed I began to realise that I was 'seeing' the organisation in a new way. That the data I was collecting were somehow different than the data I had collected before. This shed new light for me on the limitations of other methods and started a process of trying to articulate these subtle and slippery differences to myself and to others.

Citation

MCDONALD, S. 2018. Going with the flow: shadowing in organisations. In Cassel, C., Cunliffe, A.L. and Grandy, G. (eds.) The SAGE handbook of qualitative business and management research methods. London: SAGE [online], volume 2: methods and challenges, chapter 13, pages 205-218. Available from: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526430236.n13

• Online Publication Date: Dec 14, 2017
• Publication Date: May 4, 2018
• Deposit Date: Feb 12, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 15, 2019
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Pages: 205-218
• Series Title: Qualitative techniques for business and management research
• Book Title: The SAGE handbook of qualitative business and management research methods. Volume 2: methods and challenges
• Chapter Number: Chapter 13
• ISBN: 9781526429278
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526430236.n13
• Keywords: Shadowing; Organisations
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/2739