Marlot Kuiper

112 Connective Routines 4.5 Headwork: Making sense of the findings One of the main benefits of this ethnographic study and the engagement in fieldwork, is the rich and detailed data that I could obtain (Denzin, 1997; Wolcott, 1999). A very important and challenging step in the process then, is to make sense of everything that you have seen and heard. Or as Ybema et al. (2009, p.8) stated: Ethnographers “work to make sense of organisational actors’ sensemaking”. The goal of this dissertation was to elucidate the specific performances, ostensive aspects and artefacts, and to link them to one another to make sense of the ways in which actants create and recreate social realities. I experienced this process as ‘creating structure in chaos.’ The challenge was to bring the data together and identify ‘bigger storylines’ of what was going on, without at the same time losing the sensibility for the “complexities of the everyday in organisational settings” (Ybema et al., 2009, p.1) and reducing the findings into a set of ‘barriers’ and ‘facilitators’. In structuring and analysing the data, I imported all observation data, conversation data and collected artefacts into NVivo software. From there, I coded the data several times and in multiple ways. I started off with open coding, to get a better ‘feel’ of the data and limit the possibility to code in presumed codes. After this first coding phase, I ordered the data into the three analytical foci; routine dynamics, routine interactions and artefacts. This process inevitably involved categorization of the researcher (see earlier notes on routines as an analytical lens). These themes are presented as three separate ‘codes’ for analytical purposes, though I do acknowledge that in practice they are constantly interacting and thus might be more “blurred.” After I divided the data into the three central themes of this study (internal dynamics, interactions, artefacts), I started to code the data for each of the themes separately. I worked with initial coding schemes that were informed by the analytical framework. For the analysis of routine dynamics (chapter 5), I started off with an initial coding scheme listing performative aspects and ostensive aspects as a head codes. Informed by the Sociology of Professions literature, I for example included ‘opportunity’ and ‘threat’ as sub codes at the ostensive dimension, to incorporate professionals’ ideas regarding the new standard. After collecting some data, I inductively added an extra code ‘redundant’ which reflects ideas like “I don’t need a checklist to work safe.” Further, during the iterative process of collecting