Analyzing in the Present

Commuting Highway E45 Reflexively

For both authors of this article, it is a fact of our researcher working life that we need to travel the best part of an hour to and from the university “where we work,” meaning “where our offices are located.” Everyday commuting is part of working life for many researchers. However, we have found that the constraint of many traveling hours behind-the-wheel on Highway E45 has enabled a research practice of extensive listening to case study interview recordings, beyond the listening we would usually do to create interview transcripts. Our usual way of analyzing interview material would be to read and evaluate the written transcripts, and perhaps occasionally re-listen to bits of recordings, motivated by curiosity arising from the work with the transcribed texts. In the case we describe in this article, we found ourselves listening to interview recordings extensively, without any particular motivation to search in a particular part or for any specific content. Listening to one research interview from beginning to end took approximately the hour needed to arrive at our university offices.

Although we use the first-person plural, our practice has more often been listening to the interviews when driving alone, often with different aspects of the work in mind, both those relevant to the case study and otherwise. Casual but attentive listening to the interview recording while driving, with a voice recorder as the only supplementary remedy at our hand to capture any possible significance coming to mind. To see what further life the voiced associations would later gain through our writing.

The practice of re-listening to interview recordings, while commuting to and from work, started out as a way of immersing ourselves in the empirical material. Repeated listening to the recordings made us aware of the process of thinking, imagining, recalling, remembering, and associating occurring when we found ourselves getting caught up with a specific, peculiar aspect of an interview. Our encounter with the recorded interview in those incidents constituted a small-scale “breakdown of understanding” (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011), eliciting our associations across the empirical material, our experience of being in the interview conversations, situations of presenting our work to others, recollections of theoretical fragments, incidents from our own lives, and other things of some importance and apparent relevance. An experience of flashbacks akin to what Jegatheesan (2005) describes as a fieldworker “trying to make sense” (p. 668) during fieldwork, only in our case, occurring during the listening to interview recordings.

As such, a practice of noting our evoked recollections and associations situated in the listening present and related to the interview incident catching our attention emerged as a strategy in our data analysis. It is this strategy that we share with the reader in the present article. All listening was done in the context of making sense of our inquiry and trying to understand what and how the recorded empirical material could inform us. And we were indeed informed by the responses evoked while attending to the recorded material, through the process of listening. We were informed in a way that reflected not only the inquiry at hand, but also our relationship to the work.

In this article, we attempt to understand this process of thinking/analyzing that emerged from being attentive listeners to recorded research material. In doing so, we draw on G. H. Mead’s (1932) Philosophy of the Present and “temporal paradox” to explain our notion of “analyzing in the present” and the process of analyzing in terms of the researcher’s past experience being reconstructed and reinterpreted from the standpoint of the emergent present. ¹

Three Decades of Springsteen

We start out describing an everyday case of the “listening experience” that we find characterizes our notion of analyzing in the present. The illustrative case refers to the common experience of listening to a cherished piece of music, familiar to us, perhaps from childhood, unexpectedly impinging upon us one day, as the music is played on the car radio, sparking memories from our past, and for some reason “speaking” to us at this present moment, when we accidentally come across the tune.

A situation parallel to the “living present” of analyzing that we describe in this article regarding listening repeatedly to interview recordings throughout the process of analyzing qualitative research interviews would be the event of listening to music you have previously encountered and been affected by, say, during your youth or childhood. There are pieces of music that, whenever you come across them in your adulthood, they seem always to be connected with this particular situation in which you as a younger person listened to it, enjoyed it, and made sense out of it in relation to what you were immersed in at the time.

To me (first author), one of those pieces of music is a Springsteen track from his 1987 release. It is not really important, except to me, which specific track it is. The point made here is not about interpreting texts as much as about interpreting situations. It is about interpreting past situations to understand the present situation. The lyrics of the Springsteen track did matter in the childhood situation, in which the track first gained significance to me. I was 11 years at the time, so my understanding of English lyrics was greatly limited, yet the words “I got a Dollar in my pocket; there ain’t a cloud up above” had to mean “I don’t have much, but life is beautiful anyway!”

Listening to that same piece of music as an adult, not often but occasionally, takes me straight back to the childhood situation, where and when I was listening to the track, on my own and celebrating having overcome a huge obstacle, although fearing in advance I would not be able to. Feelings of being strong, capable, and free were dominant sentiments back then, 11 years old. Listening to that music bringing me back to my childhood is like re-visiting the situation. The sentiments which the “re-visiting” brings back appear to belong to my childhood, but are now again “available” to me, I am back “with them.” The memory flashes are alive and in this adult situation, listening to this music from my childhood and being reminded of the associated sentiments, association with another significant situation of my life appears. This one is in my youth, on high school graduation day in 1996, alone after the ceremony in the schoolyard, with only my graduation papers in my hand and the exact change in my pocket to catch the bus outside the school. Again, the world was at my feet, I didn’t have a lot to bring, except for what I was and would do, and with a sense of certainty that this would be enough, “There ain’t a cloud up above.” Now, back in my car, in the adult present, driving to work at the university. I am currently struggling to complete my doctoral work, but there is no guarantee that I will succeed. That is my sentiment, my concern; I am trying to find a path between trying to understand what I am doing and have done and creating the work. There are choices I am taking and they will be questioned. If I make other choices, they will also be questioned, though perhaps by other people. Is there a choice that I will not question myself as much in hindsight? And would this guide me in creating and completing the work. This is researcher reflexivity in play. In the car, on the way to work, listening to the radio, coincidentally hearing the Springsteen track that immediately takes me back to the childhood situation, to the sentiments, the graduation day, the “dollar in my pocket,” and the “cloud’s not above.” I now have a perspective to understand and come to terms with the sense of being stuck in the work at hand, thinking differently, changing my analysis.

And so, listening to the Springsteen track in 2013, interpreting my past in terms of the present, anticipating my future, of submitting my doctorate, hoping the work will be deemed a “contribution,” and that I will be accepted as a qualified “researcher.” Both the childhood experience from 1988, the graduation day experience from 1996, the uncertainty I am currently experiencing with my doctoral work, as well as the lyrics from Bruce, which reach beyond my memories and current troubles, are part of my thinking, when I listen to the track driving to work, that day.

Locating Data, Understanding Analysis—Placing Ourselves in the Interpretative Tradition

What we consider data in our inquiries and how we understand the process of analyzing are thoroughly intertwined. Most handbooks on qualitative inquiry include chapters on methods for analyzing data. These books generally emphasize analysis as reading transcribed or written material, not necessarily following any prescribed procedure: “By reading and rereading their empirical materials, they try to pin down their key themes and thereby, draw a picture of the presumptions and meanings that constitute the cultural world of which the textual material is a specimen” (Peräkylä & Ruusuvuori, 2011, p. 530). St. Pierre (1997) problematizes “data” as something necessarily “textualized” for it to be interpreted, arguing instead to think differently about “data” by identifying “transgressive data” such as emotional data, dream data, sensual data, and response data. St. Pierre thus demonstrates the rupture of a long-held category of “data” inherent in humanist qualitative methodology. Resonating with pragmatist views of data as “takens” (rather than givens), selected for a purpose (Dewey, 1929/1960 in Brinkmann, 2014), St. Pierre considers data as “identified during analysis and not before. Until one begins to think, one cannot know what one will think with. In that sense, data are collected during thinking and, for me, especially during writing” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 621). Hence, writing, and we would add listening, is a method of inquiry and “crystallization” (Pelias, 2013; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005).

Whereas St. Pierre (1997) suggests to preserve and resignify the concept of “data” “even as we attempt to escape [its] meaning” (p. 175), Brinkmann (2014) points out that “data”-related methodology vocabularies tend to lead us “back to an outdated logical positivist account of ‘sense data’” (p. 721). Brinkmann relates the notion of “data” to inductive and deductive forms of analysis describing both as addressing the relationship between data and theory. Data-driven inductive analysis thus emphasizes the “collection of data,” whereas theory-driven deductive analysis is “framing data.” Abduction is, instead, “a form of reasoning that is concerned with the relationship between a situation and inquiry. It is neither data-driven nor theory-driven, but breakdown-driven” (Brinkmann, 2014, p. 722, referring to Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011). Situations causing us to stumble become data, requiring our abductive reasoning. Hence, the analysis of situations, not texts. “Stumble data” are then what drives breakdown-oriented research and “inquiry is thus the process of trying to understand the situation by sense-making” (Brinkmann, 2014, p. 722).

To engage with the process of analyzing (recorded qualitative interviews) in terms of “analyzing in the present,” as we do in this article, is a matter of troubling non-reflexive reliance on methods of analyzing (Tanggaard, 2013), and acknowledging the entanglement of data, data collection, and data analysis (St. Pierre, 2011) in a way that brings researcher subjectivity to the methodological forefront considering researcher as his or her own most important instrument of research in comprehending human existence (Hasse, 2011; Lave in Lave & Kvale, 1995).

In the following sections, we illustrate the experience of listening to recorded research interviews in the process of interview analysis and the researcher reflexivity elicited in such situations of listening. From time to time, the one-person reflexive commuting listening to case study interview recordings was substituted for “supervisory drives.” As doctoral student (first author) and supervisor (second author), we would drive together to the university campus, discussing our analytical experiences and emerging strategies, as we sought to understand the value of repeated listening to interview recordings for the construction of rich empirical material, taking the researcher into account as a participant in the process of inquiry.

The Case Study Context

The analytical strategy and the following two cases outlined in this article originate from a research project on organizational entry processes and newcomer innovation in a large production company in Denmark ² (Revsbæk, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2014). Many studies on organizational socialization and induction exclusively include newcomers, and not veterans as informants. As a result, the effects of entry processes on organizational veterans are given far less consideration (Feldman, 2012), and organizational entries are considered in terms of newcomer socialization and learning, more often than newcomer innovation (Revsbæk, 2011). In response, the present case study applies a multi-perspective interview design in which newcomers, veteran coworkers, and hiring managers are all interviewed on their experience of shared work during the process of newcomers entering the organization. In the longitudinal design, comprising six separate entry cases, including a total of 34 interviews, all interviewees are interviewed twice: 1 month after the newcomer’s entry and 3 months later. The theoretical perspective of complex responsive processes (Griffin, 2002; Mowles, 2011; R. D. Stacey, 2010; R. Stacey, 2012), drawing on Mead’s theory of emergence (Mead, 1932, 1934) and Elias’ process sociology (Elias, 1994/2000), informed the analysis of the entry stories of newcomers, veteran coworkers, and hiring managers. The radical temporal perspective in the complexity stance, along with Mead’s and Elias’ philosophies, has founded an autobiographic research practice of reflexive narrative inquiry (R. Stacey, 2012). ³ In our case, it inspired the notion of “analyzing in the present.”

We now go on to present two cases of “analyzing in the present,” that is, the lived experience of listening to recorded material. As we do so, we discuss Mead’s Philosophy of the Present (Flaherty & Fine, 2001; Mead, 1932) and relate to reported experiences of listening to recorded research interviews, otherwise done only in the process of transcription (Bird, 2005; Tilley, 2003).

Re-Listening to Interviews as a Source of (New) Data

The case study interviews were conducted (by Author 1) on location at the case study organization (and not in her researcher university office). Revisiting the interview situation through listening to interview recordings offered rich “transgressive data” (St. Pierre, 2011), informing the overall analysis and inquiry. We found that listening to a recorded interview evokes responses with the “previously interviewing–now listening” researcher that are similar to responses in the initial interview situation, but informed by the analyzing present.

Bird (2005) describes her recollection of being in an interview situation and how it informed the analytic and interpretive choices she was doing while transcribing. Interviewing a non-researching transcriber, Tilley (2003) shows the listening transcriber to be emotionally touched by listening to recorded material and how his listening evokes memories from his own life: “what he hears on tape sometimes serves as a reminder of those experiences” (Tilley, 2003, p. 765). Transcription as an analytical and interpretive act has indeed been emphasized (Lapadat & Lindsay, 1999). In our case, we make explicit use of the listening experience and its evocative potential in the service of data analysis. We might say that new data are collected as we listen to the recorded interview.

The following is an example from the case study on organizational entry processes in a large production company in Denmark (Revsbæk, 2011, 2013a, 2013b). A recently hired and now hiring manager is interviewed. Researcher (first author) is listening to the interview recording some time after the interview.

I am listening to her describe handing out the book she has cowritten with colleagues in her former workplace to members of the board of directors in her new organization, and thinking that they will benefit from the theoretical perspective introduced in the book. Suddenly, her recorded talk evokes the same hypothesis with me as it did in the interview conversation and one I had not kept in mind. Something not actually on the tape comes back to me—similar to what had happened in the interview situation:

Will she be able to connect well enough with the veteran members of the organization or is she deafening herself to possible signals from veteran management coworkers and employees by hiring new people with views similar to her own and preoccupying herself with the changes she wants to introduce?

In a flash, I recognize that the (hypothesizing) question in my mind resonates with the question raised by Cooper-Thomas and Burke in their 2012 paper: “Newcomer Proactive Behavior: Can There be Too Much of a Good Thing?”

The data concerning the researcher’s evoked response are not a matter of visible, textualized, and fixed data (until described in this article). Still, it very much informs the process of analysis as it feeds into researcher reflexivity. As it turns out, the interview incident, with the evoked hypothesis of newcomer being possibly too proactively innovative, constitutes a “deviant case” (Flyvbjerg, 2011) relative to the motivating research question of researcher. The researcher is questioning a dominant focus on newcomer assimilation in research on organizational socialization and induction, which largely portrays newcomers as “unsure,” “unaware,” “strangers ( . . . ) who must learn,” “if they are to become accepted and effective” (Saks & Gruman, 2012, p. 27). Thus, a focus that substantially reflects the discourse in Van Maanen and Schein’s (1979) initial work on organizational socialization strategies:

The more experienced members must therefore find ways to insure that the newcomer does not disrupt the ongoing activity on the scene, embarrass or cast a disparaging light on others, or question too many of the established cultural solutions worked out previously. (p. 211)

Instead, the current case study approaches organizational entry processes from a perspective of “newcomer innovation” (Levine, Choi, & Moreland, 2003; Revsbæk, 2011, 2014), perceiving newcomers as possible change agents (Hansen & Levine, 2009): “firms can use the entry of newcomers to ‘unfreeze’ the workgroup, that is, as an opportunity to rethink work processes, patterns of social interaction, and even the group’s core values and beliefs” (Feldman, 2012, p. 215). Now, in the listening present, for the researcher to identify with the concern that the innovation drive of the new manager might be “Too Much of a Good Thing” (Cooper-Thomas & Burke, 2012), the incident inevitably ignites the researcher’s reflexivity, leading her to consider the game of induction ideologies inherent in her research question.

The spontaneous sparking of associations through listening to interview recordings is not constrained by any chosen analytical strategy or even consistent with our current dominant analyses (although related to them in some resonant/dissonant, direct/indirect, significant/insignificant way). They are just as likely to oppose, contest, or supplement our strategies. Besides occasioning researcher reflexivity, the repeated listening to recorded interviews throughout the process of analyzing is a way to continuously open up the material, destabilize configuring understanding, and/or “thickening” written descriptions of the material.

How might we understand the listening and re-listening to interview recordings as a source of (new) data in the process of analysis? The evocation and weaving of “flashbacks of lived experience” that Jegatheesan (2005) describes on the basis of her fieldwork experiences resembles the kind of elicited recollections that we attempt to describe by the notion of analyzing in the present:

Each flashback is a lived experience embraced by the mind, like snapshots, bringing into focus similar phenomena, words, rituals, beliefs, or issues from elsewhere in the past. Each flashback is triggered by the evocation of a sense at the time of observing, speaking, listening, and simply being there at the place of inquiry. (p. 667)

What we are suggesting here is to think of the process of analyzing as an interpretive practice of the researcher making sense of his or her past experiences (gained through a process of inquiry) while analyzing in the present, dealing with specific empirical materials on hand.

We turn now to explore Mead’s (1932) understanding of the “specious present”. In a later section, we return to illustrate another case of analyzing in the present while listening to research interview recordings.

Mead and the Present

We have been referring to the experience of “getting caught up with” a specific part of the interview, implying that this experience is fundamental to how we understand analyzing in the present. This creates the evocative potential of listening attentively. As evident from the newcomer manager’s story and the “three decades of Springsteen,” our “unreflected expectations” were shattered, triggering our abductive reasoning:

The world reveals itself to have shattered our unreflected expectations; our habitual actions meet with resistance from the world and rebound back on us. This is the phase of real doubt. And the only way out of this phase is a reconstruction of the interrupted context. Our perception must come to terms with new or different aspects of reality; action ( . . . ) must restructure itself. (Joas, 1996, on Pierce’s notion of abductive reasoning, pp. 128-129)

This is how we perceive of the “breakdown in understanding” (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011) in our analysis in the present and the elicited associations that help us reconstruct “the interrupted context” (Joas, 1996).

Returning then to the question posed earlier: How might we think of the listening and re-listening to research interviews as a source of (new) data, and of the evoked associations in those moments of “getting caught up” with particular incidents when listening to a research interview? The “three decades of Springsteen” already suggests that analyzing in the present through listening to research interviews and having associations spring to mind is similar to the experience of recalling past experiences from the standpoint of current concerns, in situations of listening to childhood music in adulthood.

When one recalls his boyhood days he cannot get into them as he then was, without their relationship to what he has become; and if he could, that is, if he could reproduce the experience as it then took place, he could not use it, for this would involve his not being in the present within which that use must take place. (Mead, 1932, p. 58)

What Mead exemplifies in the account of recalling childhood days in present times is the paradoxical temporality, which is central to his philosophy of time as simultaneously irrevocable and revocable. Mead (1932) acknowledges the notion of time’s irrevocability: “That which has happened is gone beyond recall” (p. 37). But that which we recall as “a past” is only ever looked at from the standpoint of the present. He otherwise states the revocability of time:

It is idle, at least for the purposes of experience, to have recourse to a “real” past ( . . . ) for that past must be set over against a present within which the emergent appears, and the past which must then be looked at from the standpoint of the emergent, becomes a different past ( . . . ) It is the “what it was” that changes. (pp. 36-37)

More than for any other social theorist, temporality is central to Mead’s philosophy (Flaherty & Fine, 2001). Mead’s notion of time is “the most radical of all social science conceptualizations of time” (Adam, 1995; quoted in Flaherty & Fine, 2001, p. 148), though the “least well elucidated part of his work” (Joas, 1980/1997, p. 167; quoted in Flaherty & Fine, 2001, p. 148). His notion of the “specious present” relates to his theory of emergence (Joas, 1996). “The world is a world of events” (Mead, 1932, p. 1) a “temporal world” (Mead, 1938; quoted in Flaherty & Fine, 2001, p. 147). Our everyday conception of time is most often in terms of irrevocable linearity moving from past to present and into future, with causes preceding effects in temporal determinism. Mead’s notion of time is otherwise paradoxical. Responding to the “ill-conceived” determinism in Watson’s behaviorism (Flaherty & Fine, 2001, p. 149), Mead claimed that any philosophy of the present should account for the appearance of novelty (Flaherty & Fine, 2001).

A present ( . . . ) is not a piece cut out anywhere ( . . . ) Its chief reference is to the emergent event, that is, to the occurrence of something which is more than the processes that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have possessed. (Mead, 1932, p. 52)

The emergent is itself a conditioning as well as a conditioned factor. (p. 46)

It is said of Mead’s account of the past interpreted in the present that “the past is a resource” that we use “to make sense of the present and imagine the future” (Flaherty & Fine, 2001, p. 153). More so, the past informs our anticipation, and our anticipation feeds back to select the past that will enable it. In this way, the past is reinterpreted from the standpoint of the emergent event. “If there is emergence, the reflection of this into the past at once takes place. There is a new past, for from every new rise the landscape that stretches behind us becomes a different landscape” (Mead, 1932, p. 42). “The novelty of every future demands a novel past” (Mead, 1932, p. 59). This is the insight claimed from acknowledging the simultaneous irrevocability and revocability of time. When making a gesture, we are already anticipating the response, and this very anticipation forms our gesture.

So how do we understand our evoked associations from analyzing in the present? To St. Pierre (2011), inquiry is “a simultaneity of living, reading, and writing” (p. 621). We found the metaphor of a “lived database” helpful in illustrating the instantaneous associations springing to mind in specific situations of inquiry. A database of our past experiences—all of them—doing empirical work, reading theory, living life, taking part. They are all part of our repertoire of possible recollections in any present situation. Furthermore, they are selected from the perspective of our work at the specific time, dealing with specific materials and specific parts of our writing. Mead (1932) claims the present as “the seat of reality” (p. 61), viewing the past and future as hypotheticals to be found in the present as memory and anticipation respectively. The emergent event of the present “marks out and in a sense selects what has made its peculiarity possible. It creates with its uniqueness a past and a future” (Mead, 1934, p. 52). The eliciting, small-scale “breakdown in understanding” through listening to an interview is the “emergence in the present reflecting into the past” that “selects” recollections resonating with present experiences.

Accordingly, situating understanding in the reality of the living present, Mead (1932) states, “We carry our analysis as far as the control of subject matter requires, but always with the recognition that what is analysed out has its reality in the integration of what is taking place” (p. 51). This sensitivity, of situating analysis in what is taking place by “analyzing (in) the present,” is what we present in this article. The use of brackets in the preceding sentence suggests the simultaneous process of “analyzing in the present” (of empirical material/lived experiences) and “analyzing the present” in which this analysis takes place.

Analyzing in the Present: Ethnographic Voice in Interview-Based Study

Writing on the interplay between newcomer, veteran coworker, and hiring manager in the case study on organizational entry processes I (first author) had been struggling for some time to “arrive at a place of resonant articulation” (Pelias, 2013, p. 548), portraying the actors’ experience of relating during the period of entry. The following case illustrates how my listening to a recorded interview with the hiring manager informed my analysis of the interplay between him, the veteran employee, and the newcomer. The newcomer and veteran coworker are project managers and colleagues in a team of five, led by the interviewed manager. The interview is the second with the manager, following the first interviews 3 months earlier with each of the three actors. The case is a second entry from the mentioned case study in a large production company in Denmark.

It was the phrase about the resigning veteran having “read the writing on the wall” in the manager’s words, that caused me, as an interviewer, to consider and anticipate that he might be talking of the case study veteran coworker. I was interviewing the entry case manager before I planned to meet up with the veteran coworker and newcomer of this particular entry case a second time, 3 months after my first interview with each of the three actors. The first thing the manager did was start talking about a veteran project manager who had left the department since I was last there.

I had recently experienced a case study veteran coworker of another entry case leaving and being replaced by a second coworker within my interview design. In another case, I arrived at the interview with a hiring manager, only to learn there and then, in the interview, that his newcomer had left the company, leaving my inquiries short of a second interview with this newcomer. As it turned out, the rigor of the interview design taught me a valuable lesson about the circumstances of the entry period collaborations in this particular organization. Very often, there was a flow of employees and managers—both newcomers and veterans—entering, leaving, or moving to other business units. This was part of everyday life in the organization and it was part of the collaborations between the newcomers, veteran coworkers, and hiring managers whom I interviewed.

Having been through these instances of participants resigning, being replaced or just vanishing from my interview design, now faced with the entry case manager reporting that a project manager from his department had left, I feared that this resigned project manager would be the case study veteran coworker. The resigning veteran was said by the manager to have “read the writing on the wall.” He was perceived by the manager as failing to fit the requirements of the new kind of project management required in the department. Apparently noticing this himself, he had applied for a position elsewhere in another company.

Listening to the hiring manager talk in the recorded interview, I was reminded of the uncertainty, in the interview situation, of not yet knowing whether it was my veteran coworker who had left the department. Expecting that it might be. I realized in the present of listening to the interview, how the history of my research process with participants resigning and being replaced was informing my perception and anticipation in the interview, as I heard the hiring manager’s opening story of a veteran having left the company.

Having only fleetingly acknowledged these concerns of mine as an interviewer, at the time not knowing what I know now, that all three informants of this particular entry case would continue their employment with the organization beyond the case study period, I was then, still listening, instantly reminded of the veteran coworker’s story when I was first interviewing all three. The veteran coworker expressed insecurity. It concerned having two new colleagues arrive in their team at a time of announced future layoffs that might also affect their department. “Well, we know what’s about to happen,” he had said about the future layoffs, “It creates an insecurity at some level . . . having two newcomers arrive at the same time.” “What tasks will I get?” Closing off his statement and creating a picture of his professional background as diverging from everyone else’s in the department, he said,

I feel uncertain about what is going to happen, because, this is just my own self-image but, I am an economist by education and the others are engineers. I was transferred from the business department to this department, so this is not really my original field. This means I am left with the fact that, well, I am an economist and the others are engineers.

Still listening to the second interview with the hiring manager, instances from the first interview with the manager spring to mind, resonating with the recalled insecurity expressed by the veteran coworker, as if explaining why the manager’s phrase of the resigning veteran having “read the writing on the wall” would cause me to anticipate that he was talking about the case study veteran coworker. The manager had stated in his first interview that he did not regard the department veterans as having the necessary capabilities to transform the departmental practice in the direction he envisioned. He made explicit that the case study veteran coworker lacked “hands-on logistic expertise,” adding that the veteran coworker could learn this from the case study newcomer. A bold statement originally intended to calm company newcomers just a few days into their employment, in the aftermath of the announced future layoffs, was repeated by manager, that any possible layoffs affecting their department would be based on evaluated professional capabilities and not seniority.

Understanding the dynamics between hiring manager and veteran coworker to be “tense” and “unsettled” to some degree, at the time of the first interviews, I was inclined, from the manager’s opening story in the second interview 3 months later, to keep open the option that it might be the case study veteran coworker who had left the department. In the listening present, becoming aware of this anticipation of mine reminded me of the impression from the first round of interviews, of the relations between the newcomer, hiring manager, and veteran coworker, as marginalizing the latter.

Reminded that “we are unable to reveal all that is involved in any present” (Mead, 1934, pp. 54-55), this case story is in part about how our past interactions with specific people inform our present interactions with the same people (Mowles, 2011). In this case, it is the history of interaction in a longitudinal interview design. From listening to the recorded interview in an analyzing present, these fragments of interview materials/past experiences are perceived as brought together by association in the eliciting instant of becoming aware of the researcher’s anticipation in the interview, raising the question: Why did I think it might be the veteran coworker resigning? Instantaneous associations spring to the mind of the researcher’s prior disappointment in losing other informants and of the impressions from the actors’ related experiences coping with a period of organizational entry.

There may be and beyond doubt is in any present with its own past a vast deal which we do not discover, and yet this which we do or do not discover will take on different meaning and be different in its structure as an event when viewed from some later standpoint. (Mead, 1932, p. 40)

In this way, part of the prior interviews gained significance through the experience of listening to the second interview and became important in telling a significant story of the case study material.

Having identified the incidents in the recorded interviews that elicited such associations with us, we would then go back to search out these instances in the transcribed text and combine them to tell the story which occurred to us in the analyzing present (much as the presented case, perhaps more elaborate). The aim was to see what narrative would emerge when these pieces of material were put together and how this informed our overall analysis. In doing so, we construct an ethnographic account of interview-based data, taking the interviewer into account as a participant. In this way, we perceive analyzing in the present, listening to recorded interview material, as a starting point for reflexive writing allowing “researchers to turn back on themselves, to examine how their presence or stance functions in relationship to their subject” (Pelias, 2013, p. 554). In this sense, researcher reflexivity is an integral part of the process of analysis informing all evaluation, rather than a final stage in a linear progressing and sequenced research.

From “Data” to “Empirical Material” to “The Living Present”

The act of interpreting implies that something is there, a text in the world, waiting to be discovered or approximated (see Daft & Weick, 1984). Sensemaking, however, is less about discovery than it is about invention. To engage in sensemaking is to construct, filter, frame, create facticity (Turner, 1987), and render the subjective into something more tangible. (Weick, 1995, pp. 13-14)

Embracing post-modern epistemological challenges within the practices of qualitative inquiry, Alvesson and Kärreman (2011) state that they prefer the term “empirical material” rather than “data” as they depart from “dataistic” methodologies. In their approach of “mystery as method,” Alvesson and Kärreman argue that working with empirical material is not a matter of the correct representation of data and reality, but of constructing empirical material as the “critical dialogue partner” for challenging existing theory and thinking, bringing about a “breakdown of understanding” eliciting abductive reasoning. We have found their notion of “breakdown in understanding” useful with respect to the eliciting specificity of listening to an interview recording, the “getting caught up with” an incident, which constitutes a challenge to our current habitual thinking, causing the sparks of association across material and prior experiences. We should emphasize, though, that Alvesson and Kärreman warn that a “breakdown in understanding” should be cultivated or converted into a “mystery” confronting traditions of thought and current research in the field in question, before being dealt with as the eliciting potential to drive theory development. In our work, we found that not all written materials produced from “analyzing in the present” of listening to interview recordings proved central or important to our research. Rather than framing the entire research process in terms of generalized “breakdowns in understanding” or “mysteries,” we use situational abductive reasoning to produce written empirical material inclusive of the researcher as a participant.

The research process must, as much as possible, find ways to trace its own entanglements in the system that it engages. This is not just a question about hypervigilant attunement to one’s footprint in the system(s), nor just about recording transactions as observantly and reflexively as possible. It is also about representing the materials and knowledge produced through the research, as well as the process through which they were produced, in ways that clearly delineate the researcher’s presence, voice and framing. A narrative is always somebody’s narrative. (Fenwick, Edwards, & Sawchuk, 2011, pp. 43-44)

Situating analysis as “analyzing in the present” is just such a way of delineating the researcher’s presence and tracing entanglements within the research process.

Moving from “data” to instead considering “empirical material,” as Alvesson and Kärreman (2011) advocate, concedes the social construction of research material, but leaves the notion of analysis as a matter of relationship between subject and object (and the community of inquirers), without attributing any mentionable consequence to the passage of time. Kärreman writes on his own ethnographic work that in the end, he only used 5% of all material gathered throughout his doctoral study (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011). Yet, we argue that the empirical “material” feeding into our work far exceeds the bits of data presented directly in our final texts. Keeping in mind that “material” is a reifying choice of words on what makes up the substance of our inquiries, we suggest instead that 100% of a researcher’s “material” goes into choosing and interpreting the incidents that are made focal to our analysis. The way this 100% goes into our analysis and interpretation is in being part of our lived experience and of our past, evoked and recalled in the present of analyzing where we deal with specific parts of the material. These evoked recollections in the living present of analysis are patterning associations across memories and material. Perceiving the process of analyzing in this way allows for an integration of “transgressive data” in analysis, not only as an “add-on” to more codifiable and reifiable data, but as the medium of all data.

It is of course evident that the materials out of which that past is constructed lie in the present. I refer to the memory images and the evidences by which we build up the past, and to the fact that any reinterpretation of the picture we form of the past will be found in a present, and will be judged by the logical and evidential characters which such data possess in a present. (Mead, 1932, p. 57)

We suggest that it is helpful to think of the process of analysis in terms of “the living present” and researcher understanding from past experiences, faced with present issues anticipating a future outcome of the work. Situating our inquiry in the present of analysis, thus being ethnographers to the experience of listening to our recorded material, is a radical reflexive stand toward interview analysis in which researcher is bringing her recollection of past experiences (during the process of inquiry) to bear on what she is listening to and trying to understand in the present of analyzing.

We argued earlier that it is likely to add to the “transgressive data” of listening to interview recordings, if the researcher herself has conducted the recorded interviews. In a similar way, the value of approaching empirical material in the analyzing present, explicating the interdependency between researcher and researched, is likely to increase when the research is built “on questions and problems that are of genuine interest to the researcher herself” (Brinkmann, 2012, p. ix). “What you use is your own life and your own experience in the world” (Lave in Lave & Kvale, 1995; quoted in Brinkmann, 2012, p. 49). St. Pierre (2011) challenges the concept of “data” from the sensitivity of post-structural thinking, beyond replacing a notion of “brute data” with a notion of “empirical material.” Data are that with which we think, she claims, making no distinction between the words of informants and those of theorists (St. Pierre, 2011).

I imagine a cacophony of ideas swirling as we think about our topics with all we can muster—with words from theorists, participants, conference audiences, friends and lovers, ghosts who haunt our studies, characters in fiction and film and dreams. (p. 622)

In our notion of “analyzing in the present,” this “cacophony of swirling ideas” responds to some eliciting specificity in the analytical present of the researcher listening to an interview recording and getting caught up with a particular incident. The cacophony of swirling ideas becomes a momentary narrative, a responding pattern of associations, in a living present of the researcher analyzing and understanding the work at hand. We suggest that the “eliciting” of associations (which are essentially memories of reading, writing, listening, watching, taking part, etc.) happens in situations of “breakdown-in-understanding” (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011), as we “stumble” (Brinkmann, 2014), requiring abductive reasoning on behalf of the researcher. The notion of “analyzing in the present” emphasizes that the most interesting aspect of our empirical material (recorded interviews, transcribed text, field notes, etc.) is not in our material, but in our encounter with the material.

Concluding Remarks

A colleague suggested the metaphor for identifying the described method of analysis: “You are ethnographers of your empirical material.” ⁴ In the process of analyzing by listening to interview recordings, experiences of being in the interviews, reading through the transcripts, and listening to other parts of the interview recordings all informed our analysis in the sense that they were part of our repertoire of possible recollections. These were then iteratively reinterpreted in the light of the analyzing present in which we found ourselves. It is that which happens between you as a listening researcher and the interview listened to that makes up the analyzing present.

We found that our patterning associations across the material were more vivid and rich in periods of intense work and immersion with the empirical material. The associations afforded us in such a present of analyzing took into account everything that we had experienced, though selectively chosen from what we were trying to understand at the time.

The notion of “analyzing in the present” contributes to the ongoing debate of “troubling” data and method (Brinkmann, 2014; St. Pierre, 1997, 2011; Tanggaard, 2013) in emphasizing that the substance of our qualitative inquiries—rather than considered as “data” to be found “out there” detached from us—is our lived experiences (during the process of inquiry and beyond) as recalled by us in the present of analysis/understanding. Throughout the article, we have illustrated an autobiographic approach toward interview analysis.

In the reverberation of a notion of “analyzing in the present,” where do we go next? First, from our experience of emerging methodology in the act of doing analysis, and in resonance with Mills’ famous suggestion to “let every man be his own methodologist” (Mills, 1959, p. 224; quoted in Brinkmann, 2012, p. 49), we encourage qualitative researchers to do breakdown-driven accounts of their actual research practices as these emerge in specific research projects—much as we did ourselves from the practice of extensive listening to research interviews. Writing on such methodological breakdowns-in-understanding, brought about from applying (traditional) research methods while framing our inquiries in terms of emerging philosophies of science, ⁵ holds much promise for the development of methodology.

Second, a notion of “analyzing in the present,” as presented in this article, has implications for how we understand validity, making validity a matter of resonating experiences. Such implications need to be further explored if a notion of “analyzing in the present” is to be elaborated.

It seems only natural, in our future situations of analysis, to attempt to include others in the process of “analyzing in the present” while listening to the recorded material. One way of doing this could be to ask our interviewees to participate with their analysis in a (shared) present of listening. Added to this, it would be relevant to think of other situations, such as research reporting or teaching, in terms of “analyzing in the present” to understand the situational dynamics of such practices. And as is hinted in the case of taking an “ethnographic voice in interview-based study,” the practice of interviewing itself, and interviewer responsiveness, could be understood from the notion of “analyzing in the present,” as could ethnographic field observations and interactions, thus facilitating autobiographic accounts of engaging in such research practices.

We have attempted to demonstrate how our understanding of the process of analysis in terms of “analyzing in the present” emerged from a practice of extensive listening to interview recordings. We do not mean to suggest that such analysis could not be evoked from reading through transcripts, watching videos, writing text. We only argue that the listening made us aware of this process of remembering and recalling.

Parallel to calls for extensive reading of theory and literature (St. Pierre, 2011) and for writing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005) in the process of analyzing data, our call is for re-listening to recorded interviews and events. We propose listening and re-listening to interview recordings as a practice aiding “the creative moment in the interpretative process” (Brinkmann, 2012, p. 46). Listening that is not motivated deliberately by not knowing or not having listened to the interview before, but just by listening, although (at first) thinking you have a (clear) sense of what the interview is about in relation to everything else in your work. Yet listening to it again, while driving to work, going on the tube or train to and from work, doing the dishes after tucking in the kids before returning to do your last writing of the day, has much to offer. The work we do, when we are not truly working, the ordering and re-ordering we do when we are not consciously ordering and re-ordering things, are all part of this process. You have your whole body, your whole memory, your whole sense of what your study is about, interpreting the significance of some incidents in the interviews, compared with others, at specific times of listening, marking where you are currently with your work and how this resonates with specific incidents in the recorded material. It is listening that teaches you about both your research material and the constituting relationship between them and you, as a researcher engaged in understanding your field of research. It is particularly compelling to notice why you come to reflect on certain things when listening to a certain sequence in an interview. It is all about researcher reflexivity integrated into the analysis of material rather than being a retrospective “add-on” to a completed research process. Enjoy!