Case 4c: Organisational learning in an English regional theatre Dawn Langley, Alchemy Research & Consultancy and Paul Tosey, University of Surrey

The sound of her pen tapping the desk brought Zoe out of her thoughts and back into the room. She had been musing over the questions that surrounded her research project and whether she would adopt an inductive or deductive approach. She had been warned by her supervisor that finalising her research question might take several attempts and that it would probably have to be reworked a few times as she gained a better understanding of the implications of her research philosophy and formulated her research design. Zoe works for a small UK-based training and development consultancy which specialises in the not-for-profit sector and has built a particular niche for itself in working within the cultural industries - museums, galleries, libraries, theatres and so on. She often works with small arts organisations helping them identify and address their learning and development needs. She is used to doing one-to-one development interviews and helping people create their own action plans. She knows this is a sector which does not favour traditional training and often has few resources to dedicate to formal training and development programmes. There are 74,640 organisations in the sector, 87% of which employ fewer than 10 people (Creative & Cultural Skills, 2008). She is currently negotiating with one of their larger clients, TheatreCo, an English regional theatre, to undertake her master's degree research project with them. They have recently been through a change process and are working on a new production, which is set in the 'round' (that is the audience completely surrounds the stage area), something they had never done before. The theatre has two auditoria one of 400 seats and one of 150 seats and shows a mixture of work; some produced in-house and some toured in from other companies. It has a staff complement of 200 people on a mixture of full-time, part-time and casual contracts; most staff are graduates and are working there because of a passion for the arts and theatre in particular. It receives over half its income from Arts Council England (the state body responsible for arts funding in England), some funding from the local authority and the rest it earns through its trading activities. As Zoe sat in on a production meeting the previous week she had heard stories of previous productions and discussions about how to make it a multi-sensory event (how the audience might see, hear, smell and feel the production), concerns were raised about how they would manage the new production, and people contemplated the impact it would have on their particular departments. The Chief Executive, Emma Davis, had talked to Zoe about her interest in how best to develop her team as a whole and that she was keen on Zoe's proposal to look at how people experienced learning across the organisation. Recognising they had recently been through some 1 big challenges she had wondered how they might do things better in future. She was also eager to instil an approach that allowed people to work more actively across departments rather than staying in what she described as 'their comfort silos'. This had given Zoe an initial research question: 'How do people in an arts organisation experience learning and how might this be done better in the future?' She recognised this needed further refining, but at least it was a start. Zoe had studied theatre at university but had found her way subsequently into the training and development field. She had been working in this field for eight years and had decided to go back to university to build her knowledge of management. Initially, she had thought that the research project would be a relatively straightforward proposition; she would do few interviews, analyse trends and identify some strengths and weaknesses. However, in her heart Zoe knew that would never satisfy her need to understand more about the social world that existed in the theatre and her belief that the way the staff interacted with each other shaped their experiences and understandings. Her conversations with Emma also kept nagging away at her. Emma had said she was interested in the organisation's culture, the experiences of her staff and she had talked about the need to better understand how they did what they did. She was not interested too much in why things were happening but more about getting a better awareness of what was actually happening. This suggested to Zoe that a positivist philosophy and testing specific hypotheses was unlikely to capture the experiences and feelings that Emma seemed concerned with. Zoe had been to the theatre on several occasions and she recognised that it was a complex environment; she had seen how the staff members interacted and believed that something important happened amongst the team during the artistic process although she could not specify what it was at this point. She was not convinced that a questionnaire to employees would deliver the depth of awareness and meaning that Emma was looking for. She was also aware that the people she met at the theatre were keen to tell their stories, stories that clearly had meaning for the different staff members and these were most likely to be picked up by qualitative methods. Zoe felt this was important as she believed the rich insights these could give her would help her interpret what was happening. Zoe was concerned that her project tutor might not feel this was a valid area of research but was heartened by some recent reading she had been doing on storytelling in organisations (Boje, 1991; Gabriel, 2000). This suggested 'that a good story itself is theoretical...When people tell their stories, they employ analytic techniques to interpret their worlds' (Ellis, 2004: 196). Zoe had worked with the TheatreCo before and was worried that if she worked within an interpretive paradigm her research project might be judged as subjective and biased. She knew other students in her study group were working within a functionalist paradigm but she instinctively felt her project needed something 2 different. Zoe took her concerns back to her project tutor and described how she felt that a positivist philosophy, and adopting a functionalist paradigm and using quantitative methods, was unlikely to take account of the theatre's complexity or address what she thought the Chief Executive was looking for. She had read a bit about using ethnography to gain an in-depth understanding of culture but was not sure how she would draw any useful conclusions from such an apparently open and in-depth approach. Her project tutor agreed that ethnography would allow her to study people in their own environment, as it is concerned with taking a 'cultural perspective' (Patton, 2002:84) but reminded Zoe that she needed to focus on keeping her research project manageable and to make sure she answered her question. She also asked Zoe whether she was intending to adopt an inductive or a deductive approach.

Questions

1. Why is it important for Zoe to be aware of her values and beliefs as an individual researcher?

2. Why should Zoe have been concerned about her previous relationship with the theatre she was researching?

3. How might Zoe's interpretivist philosophy and approach impact on how she frames her research question?