Data Collection as a Journey: A Multi-Step Approach to Navigating Access to an Organization

Background

This study took place in the tourism sector at four hotels in three countries (England, Germany and Spain) as an interdisciplinary project in communication studies. The study used approaches from pragmatics, sociology, and communication sciences. The data needed for the research were video recordings of naturally occurring service encounters between hotel receptionists and guests. The data was analyzed using a conversation analytic framework. Tourism has been described as a natural laboratory for analyzing particular sets of behaviors (Berno & Ward, 2005; Hall, 2010) – a notion that resembles Bourdieu’s sentiment of seeing the field as a natural laboratory (Wacquant, 2004). Interactions or service encounters at the hotel front desk has been deemed a crucial ‘moment of truth’ (Grönroos, 2001) for an organization in which insiders and outsiders interact, which then influences the perception a guest has of their stay at a hotel and thus the organization itself. The author was interested in interpersonal, intercultural, and asymmetric elements in conversation. The aim of the study was to study interaction patterns within these parameters, so the international hotel front desk was deemed a suitable site for data collection.

The author and her supervisors originally believed that accessing data would be straightforward, given the seemingly public nature of such interactions. However, recent literature has begun to challenge the notion of ‘simplicity’ in gaining access to an organization where rejection is a constant risk (Peticca-Harris, deGama, & Elias, 2016). Front-line conversations add an extra challenge to requirements of access, because the customer provides an external element to the site. Further, literature on service encounters distinguishes between public, semi-private, and private interactions (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2006). For instance, according to the results from the PhD study reported on here, conversations at the hotel front desk are semi-private: bystanders actively disengage from interactions underway between the hotel representative and the guest. This understanding only arose after the data had been analyzed. During the data collection, much of the underlying values and implicit understandings that govern behavior in such organizations was slowly revealed. While the author had a strong understanding of the epistemological viewpoints governing the research project, it became apparent that this was not a correct assumption for the organization in the real social world. Academia makes epistemic notions explicit, while organizations also hold their own belief systems, even if they are unlikely to contemplate them in the same way that academic discourse does (Robson, 2002).