THEMATIC INTERVIEWS

Thematic interviews were selected in order to give space for the interviewees to con-centrate on the themes and issues they consider important but within selected themes (Eskola & Suoranta, 1998, p. 88). Qualitative interviews are more like conversations than formal events with predetermined response categories. The interviewer is a central and active participant in the interaction (Rapley, 2001). The researcher explores a few general themes to help uncover the participants’ meaning perspectives, but otherwise respects how the participants frame their responses (Marshall & Rossman, 1995, p.

80). All in all, qualitative interviews are suited for explorative research approach: they

“permit us to see that which is not ordinarily on view and examine that which is looked at but seldom seen” (Rubin & Rubin, 2005, p. vii). Four sets of transcribed thematic interviews have been used as the data in this study. Table 4 describes how the four sets of thematic interviews were conducted and what the main focus areas were. The lists of the interviewees, their job role and gender can be found in the appendices.

4. The survey was sent altogether to 1413 employees. 80% of the respondents were male and 20% female. 31% were between 20-30 years, 48% between 31-40 years, 16% between 41-50 years and 5% were over 50 years. 70% of the respondents had studied engineering/technology, 17% had studied computing sciences, 4% economics, 4% humanities, 3% natural sciences, 1% management, 0.5% social sciences and 0.5% remained “undefi ned”. 81% of the respondents were located in Finland, 18% in other European locations, 1% in various other locations (e.g. Japan and U.S.). The location does not tell about the nationalities of the respondents. 3% of the respondents had been with the company for less than 1 year, 10% between 1-3 years, 41% between 3-6 years, 25% between 6-9 years and 21% over 9 years. 81%

of the respondents worked in R & D, 7% in produt marketing/product management or marketing, 3% in process, tool or quality development, 5% in support (e.g. in assistance or HD/HRD) and 4% in delivery operations. 62% of respondents worked in specialist type of tasks, 31% were of management, 1% worked in support and 6% remained

“undefi ned”.

Interview

Table 4. Description of the four sets of interviews

Set I interviews were conducted as part of a European Union IST (Information Society Technologies) research project and both sociological and tool improvement related research themes were included. The overall perspective was knowledge creation, sharing, codifying and retrieving with a special focus on partner interface. This data was partly expected to provide knowledge of the type of boundaries in the organisa-tion and possible boundaries between different organisaorganisa-tions. The interviewers came from Helsinki University of Technology and the interviews were conducted both in Tampere and in Helsinki/Espoo area. All 13 interviews were recorded with Windows Media Encoder and transcribed by the same researchers. The present author was one member of the team that prepared the thematic questions and also acted as the overall project manager for the whole IST project in the case company. I participated in the interviews conducted in Tampere.

Set II interviews were prepared based on what knowledge had already been gathered from the set I questions. The perspective in the set II themes was collaborative work practices, job roles, careers and expert work. 24 thematic interviews were conducted by the researcher and recorded with a Minidisc device. The Set II interviews were transcribed by a Tampere University Master’s level student who was working on her own master’s thesis in the case company.

The Set III interviews were conducted by the same student who transcribed the Set II interviews. They formed the corpus of her master’s thesis (Kankaanpää, 2004) and acted as an additional input to this study. I acted as the supervisor of the master’s thesis on behalf of the company. It was separately confi rmed with all Set III interviewees that it was possible to use the data in this dissertation.

The Set IV interviews were fewer than the other sets. With this fi nal set I wanted to gather further insights into the careers and boundaries in the case organisation. In these areas the data gathered previously did not seem suffi cient. The interviewees were mostly the same people as in sets II and III. There was one new interviewee in set IV.

The check interviews conducted in 2006 focused on the careers and boundaries but they also enabled me to check some issues and fi ndings related to the earlier material.

In this phase of the study the focus areas had already been sharpened so that there were no longer questions on multi-professional collaboration which had not brought out any valuable output in the previous sets.

The author of this study arranged to recruit all the interviewees for all four sets.

The interviewees were from different functions and process phases in R & D. There were 14 projects managers, 11 engineers, eight senior managers, nine managers, four specialists and one assistant. 25 interviewees were females and 22 males. Four interview-ees in set I were from partnering companies working closely with Nokia. 16 had been or were in R & D boundary roles at the time of the interviews. Two interviewees in set II had recently been employed by the case company but were employed by another organisation at the time of the interviews. Their contribution was equally important;

their insights on the case company were fresh because they had just recently stepped

over the organisational boundary. The intention was to gather data to the point when there is no remarkable new information arising from them (saturation point.) The interviews yielded important data related to the boundary practices, job roles, careers, expert work, expertise and features of self-organising. The research topic was relatively challenging and quite extensive. For some points it seemed as if the saturation point was reached but for some others it did not seem to saturate. The interviews proved to be the most valuable source of results compared to the survey, observation data and the documents. There were several external readers who familiarized themselves either with the data or the research report. The student of adult education who transcribed the Set II interviews wrote a summary of her fi ndings on the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewees (Kankaanpää, 2003). During the process one person from the case company has read through the report several times and commented on the fi ndings. Two more have read through the report at different phases of the process and provided some additional comments.

All interviews were conducted in meeting rooms on Nokia premises, very close to where the interviewees engage in their normal everyday work practices. The length of the face-to-face interviews was from one hour to two hours. The open-ended thematic questions were planned to give space to the interviewees’ associations and thoughts about the topics. In interview sets II and IV the theme was fi rst given to the interviewee to consider and talk about. The more specifi c questions were available in the interview frame if needed. The interviews were more like free discussions around the selected topics rather than structured interviews around a fi xed questionnaire. The master’s thesis worker who transcribed the Set II interviews concluded that the interviewees seemed to talk very openly about both advantages and drawbacks of their work environment when they noticed that the interviewer was also familiar with the environment. The other remark was that in some cases the interviewer stuck to some familiar common touching points, like products, and got to grips on them, possibly leading the conver-sation in a direction of the common interface (Kankaanpää, 2003).