Generating Valid Data through a Fusion of Aesthetic Approaches

The aim with this paper is to outline different approaches that enable the researcher to analyse the learning processes in an organisation through emotional situations without asking direct questions. Analysis of emotional data related to learning processes is enriched by supplementing the traditional semi-structured interviews with more creative and aesthetic approaches. The approaches include interviews based on photography (Petersen & Østergaard, 2004), interviews based on drawing (Vince & Broussine, 1996) and interviews based on ‘the double’ (Gherardi, 1995). First traditional interviews were conducted, but the data failed to answer the questions about learning processes, and so the three approaches were applied to generate three different kinds of data. 1 THE ANALYTICAL CONTEXT The project is a joint venture between The Danish University of Education and the Danish Bankers Association (DBA). DBA’s interest is to investigate how to develop organisational learning in the financial sector. The financial sector has traditionally educated their staff inhouse instead of using the public education system (Prahl et al., 2000). One consequence of this is that the sector prefers to recruit bank clerks and rarely recruits academics. This has the serious draw back that they prevent the potential innovation that might result from recruiting people educated in other traditions (Smistrup, 2003). Plenty of research has gone into securing diversity in the employment structure in relation to gender, age, education, cultural background, experience, nationality and personality in order to facilitate innovation (Bantel & Jackson, 1989; Brewer, 1996; Justesen, 2005). In recent years, the sector has begun to use the public education system, and at the same time it has become commonplace to use academics in corporate headquarters, but it is still rare to see academics in retail banking, and therefore there exists a very homogeneous employment structure in the retail banks. Unemployment for academics peaked in late 2003, and at that time government presented what they called an ‘academic campaign’, which was aimed to ‘sell’ academics to the business community. The logic behind the campaign was that the academics, through the knowledge they have acquired at universities would generate innovation in companies. At the same time, a consultants’ report documented that recruitment of academics resulted in growth because the academics initiated product innovation (Rambøll & IDA, 2004). It was * Bente Rugaard Thorsen, The Danish University of Education, Tuborgvej 164 DK-2400 Copenhagen NV, Phone + 45 28 26 65 50, E-mail: [email protected] † In this paper, the term 'academic' denotes a person who has completed a post-graduate study at a university. Due to the great variety of post-graduate studies, I question the validity of the use of 'academics' as a descriptive term in the financial sector. Proceedings of OLKC 2007 – “Learning Fusion” 923 also at that same time that a Danish bank, Sydbank, implemented a trainee program for academics. The argument for introducing the trainee program was partly that Sydbank wanted to experiment with this new type of recruits to determine whether they would live up to the expectations and would stay in the company, and partly because there was a drop in the number of applications from traditional bank clerks. Several other banks eventually followed their example. But no one has evaluated whether the academics is a good alternative to the bank clerk because the banks’ recruitment strategy is unclear. According to top management, they focus on innovative employees, but in recruitment, they actually want to find substitutes for the reduced number of applications from bank clerks. So one of the purposes with this project is to find an answer for the question: “Will the academics turn out to be good substitutes for bank clerks, or will they be good innovators”? According to the campaign for more academics it is the government’s assumption that a transfer of the academic qualifications to the industries will spark innovation, but is this really the case and if it is could we identify the qualifications the academic must possess to re-invent the industry? In the consultants’ report there are no answers to these questions, so we have no evidence for a connection between hiring academics and product innovation. It is, therefore, interesting to determine whether academics transfer the latest research based methods to the retail banks and develop new routines there. This is particularly interesting when you realise that most of the employed academics in the retail banks do not have an economic or financial background, but are hired because of their social communication skills. So another relevant question is: “What can the university academics bring to retail banking?” The four Danish banks who constitute the empiric field for the analysis are Danske Bank, Sydbank, Forstædernes Bank and Ringkjøbing Bank. The urgent question in all the participating banks is whether they will manage to maintain the academics in the retail banks, because if not, the cost of their training is wasted. But a far more interesting question is whether the academics have to be a gamble, or an investment who can help develop the retail banks. The purpose of the analysis is therefore to investigate whether the employment of academics in retail banks could instigate a change in the banks’ community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 2003). I aim to produce knowledge about the learning processes that play out between academics and bank clerks. This is an interesting meeting because they have two completely different educational backgrounds and the diversity may produce new learning (Justesen, 2005); others would question a connection between change and learning (Antonacopoulou). My approach is based on situated learning in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 2003) and the object of analysis is the way academics fight their battle of legitimacy and symbolic power (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 2002) to acquire the symbolic, embodied and encultured knowledge (Collins, 1995; Tsoukas, 2006) before they become a genuine part of the community. To that end, I have interviewed academics in retail banking in order to understand how they perceive the learning environment they meet in the bank and how their educational background enable them to influence the community of practice. I examined whether the academics’ induction process results in a natural integration in the community of practice because the experienced bank clerks creates a positive learning environment or not. Proceedings of OLKC 2007 – “Learning Fusion” 924 2 THE TRADITIONAL SEMI-STRUCTURED INTERVIEW A semi-structured interview seems to be a viable method to generate useful data. I wanted to generate a qualitative interview that was neither a free conversation nor a tightly structured questionnaire (Kvale, 1996; Rubin, 2005; Schostak, 2005). The term ‘semistructured’ implies developing an interview guide which is meant to be a list of themes that you seek to address in the interview. I set up two primary research objectives, because I believed the academics’ induction could be described in terms of the learning environment in the retail banks and whether or not the academics can influence the community of practice (CoP). The first objective was broken down into three sub-objectives; the first was to reveal the induction process of the academics. The second was to reveal situations where the academics might have acted critically towards the existing routines in the bank. The third was to determine whether academics had experienced that colleagues had encouraged the academics to apply their university knowledge to the work processes in the retail bank. The second objective was broken down into two sub-objectives: To produce a description of situations where the academics have used knowledge from the university in the work processes, and an outline of the possibilities for further education in the bank. The structure of the interview guide is illustrated below and was inspired by a case method described by Lone Karpatschof (Karpatschof, 1984):