As noted in the Storyteller-posts, we’ve started to read interviews related to the Kiruna mine. This awoke a discussion between us on how much we should allow theories and concepts to guide our reading. On one hand, lets just read them and trust our reading. After all, we know what we’re interested in. Don’t we? On the other hand, lets fine-tune a coding scheme based on an extended view of labour process theory and ship it all into NVivo. Order in the project! On top of that, reading interviews is fun but really deceptive, isn’t? A full-senses conversation once upon a time reduced to 15 pages of text…
In principle, we’re in favour of the first alternative. In principle, social science is in favour of the second alternative (one clue: Robert Yin’s case study book, on today’s date, has 120615 citations in Google Scholar). Given our bias then, we agreed on a rather simple and open ‘coding scheme’ (for now without NVivo), reminding us to make notes in the texts of the following themes or categories(?):
Context – background descriptions (historical or contemporary) of how it is to live, work, be in Kiruna; how the mine unites and/or pulls Kiruna apart
Labour process – knowledge/skills, technology/technology development, influence/autonomy, identity/subject, global/local, boundaries (time/space, mine, work, society, nature)
Method – when methodological issues are explicitly drawn into the conversations
Stories – highlight all stories that, for whatever reason (don’t have to be labour process connected), have a strong impact on us
These very broad themes are – and should be – amorphous and we try to read the interviews parallel to each other, reading, talking, reading, talking, now and then write a storyteller post so that you’ll get a feel for our material and where we are in the process. So, to be continued.