Data Collection

discourse was lacking. I also learnt at the meeting that he had never worked with the term himself. From that time forward, I always had the canvas with me, to use if necessary. His position remained hostile during my entire stay at Pinta Inc., and the information I gathered from Business Unit was all subjected to his review for approval.

I entered the field in April 2013 and I left in January 2015, as shown in table 4.3, when Woodstock was officially declared closed in the R&D department, being moved to BU.

each year. The “other documents” section of the table comprises documents for other meetings outside those mentioned, including budgets, excel files, and proposals for organizational structures.

Year/type of meeting

(End) 2009-2010

2011 2012 2013 2014-

(beginning) 2015

Project Meetings 9 41 41 43 46

Steering Meetings 0 13 7 22 17

Gate Meetings 1 0 3 0 3

Other documents 16 8 11 7 29

Total internal documents: 317 (ca. 1300 pages) Table 4. 1 Total of internal documents analysed

Aside from internal documents, I was a “fly on the wall” at eighteen project meetings, eight steering meetings and two strategy meetings. Furthermore, I conducted 31 formal (Van Maneen, 2011), semi-structured interviews, including feedback sessions with the vice-president of innovation, portfolio manager, and project manager, in order to validate my understanding of development steps. The interviews took place with employees at different managerial levels:

a. Senior managerial level, with the aim of understanding the company’s corporate business model, and context in which Woodstock was developed; Weick (1995) talks about the importance of knowing “what is the story?” first. The purpose of these interviews was to understand the type of vocabularies they were drawing on in their arguments. People were talking both about the company per se, in terms of what was perceived as being “Pinta Inc.’s way of doing things” or “Pinta Inc.’s DNA,” and the difference in mind-sets between business units. I have localized Pinta Inc.’s DNA as

being the ideology, namely the social context of the company (Weick, 1995), while the difference between departments, as paradigms/ vocabularies of work.

b. Project development team and middle management involved in the creation of Woodstock, with the aim of understanding how the identity of the project came into being. Weick (1995:77) affirms, “Who am I and once a tentative answer is formulated, sensemaking has just started, because answers need to be re-accomplished, returned, and sometimes even rebuilt.”

Table 4.3 summarizes the formal interactions I had in the field. The recordings were between 45 minutes and three hours; 58 interactions had been recorded, 1 interaction resulted in notes because recording was not allowed, 50 were transcribed and analysed with Nvivo. The nine files that were not transcribed were project meetings held in Danish. However, I worked with those files as well. The transcriptions totalled approximately 2000 pages.

Table 4. 2 Formal interactions within the field

The informal meetings (Van Maneen, 2011) I attended played an important role in helping me to understand the frame (Weick, 1995). As outlined above, I integrated very quickly into the development team. People were curious about my role, my research, my background, and I was considered “exotic”, as I am Romanian and speak Danish at an acceptable level. Answering questions about my home country and my relocation to Denmark were often a very good

icebreaker. I was honest in my answers, and in exchange received the same level of honesty back. People shared with me their life stories, pictures of their families, their struggles, and their hopes. Often, even in the setting of a formal interview, after I closed the door to the room, the interviewee would begin sharing a painful point or express his/her frustrations, with no fear of the recorder. I was seen as a neutral listener, and I assured them of confidentiality. I attended organized social gatherings and received private invitations to visit people’s homes. I recorded all these interactions, together with my reflections, in a field journal in as much detail as possible after the event, as I did not want to make notes at the time and lose eye contact. I was in the field twice a week, sometimes three times, depending on meetings, with breaks in holidays.

In the last four months, before the handover of the project to the business unit, I only been ones a week for the project meetings, and attended the last three steering meetings.

As mentioned above, the inventor of Woodstock frequently looked for opportunities to speak with me, to share his ideas, and show me his inventions. He also asked me about my opinions and my understanding of Pinta Inc., saying: “you are not an engineer, so tell me what you think?” We had numerous fruitful conversations, and I introduced him to Abbie Griffin’s book, Serial Innovators. He later proudly told me “I could recognize myself in that”, identifying in himself the characteristics of an innovator who sees solutions and opportunities where others do not. At the end of the study, I offered him the book to reflect my gratitude for all the interesting discussions we had had.

An exciting resource for learning about Pinta Inc. history and its developments was the Pinta Inc. museum, located at headquarters. The museum was in a long hallway and a room with walls covered with pictures telling the story of the company, which I visited as a field trip one day.

This visit allowed me to add numerous pictures to my data collection process and attain a better understanding of the almost eighty-years old company I was studying.

I had to exit the field in January 2015, when Woodstock was officially closed in R&D and took over by its business unit. I still had access to the intranet, as a remote consultant. I went back to my ivory tower and used the remainder of the time left to write up the study.