Marlot Kuiper

92 Connective Routines 4.3 Headwork: Starting off As argued, I constantly moved between the different activities (headwork, fieldwork, and textwork) during the research process. This means that the order in which I describe the activities here, not necessarily means that I conducted those in a chronological order. For reasons of comprehensibility, I divided both headwork and fieldwork in two separate sections in this chapter. I use the term headwork to refer to both the conceptual work that informs the fieldwork, and the headwork that is required to make sense of the ethnographic data (see also Van Maanen, 2011). As this research started off with headwork; a thorough consideration of how and where to begin, that is where I’ll start my description. Thereafter, I will discuss the fieldwork, divided in ‘early-stage’ fieldwork and the ‘actual’ fieldwork, collecting data. Next, I will discuss the headwork in terms of sensemaking, followed by a description of the textwork. 4.3.1 Getting into surgical care When I started this research project, I began with reading into theories to demarcate the research topic and get to know ‘the state of the art’. Without a theoretical orientation, the researcher is in severe danger of providing description without meaning (Hartley, 1994). Gummesson (2000) argued that a lack of preunderstanding will make the researcher spend substantial time gathering basic information. This preunderstanding may result from general knowledge such as theories, models, and concepts or from specific knowledge of institutional conditions and social patterns. In this dissertation, I explicitly used theoretical insights to gain knowledge of various theories and concepts. I read into various articles from different disciplines to get to know the ‘state of the art’ of theories from different (sub)fields like Organisation Studies, implementation science and the Sociology of Professions. (An extensive overview of the most important concepts and debates in the literature can be found in chapter 2.) The literature review led to an initial focus on the reconfiguration of professional work through formal standards, with surgical care as an appropriate field to study standards in a professional context. The selection of surgical care as a field to study these issues resulted from high scores on three important aspects, ranked by their importance: (1) appropriateness and relevance of the field to study the theoretical problem (2) access to the field, and (3) personal affinity of the researcher with the field.