The Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research Structure, Materiality, Reflexivity

1. Introduction. Why Proclaim Another School After the Era of Schools and Their Monolithic Ideas has Ended?

Katharina Miko-Schefzig, Dennis C. Jancsary, Jo Reichertz

Part 1: On the Development of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research

2. Cornerstones of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research

Jo Reichertz

3. The Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research and its Social Context

Ulrike Froschauer, Manfred Lueger

4. Interpretive Social Research: Methodological foundations

Manfred Lueger, Ulrike Froschauer

Part 2: Methodological Concretizations of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research

5. Hermeneutic Interpretation in the Vienna School

Renate E. Meyer, Dennis C. Jancsary

6. System Analysis: A Text-interpretive Approach to Understanding Social Dynamics in Complex Fields

Cornelia Reiter

7. Artefact Analysis

Ulrike Froschauer, Manfred Lueger

8. Refining the Concept of Visual Knowledge: Insights from the Sociology of Knowledge in the Vienna School

Katharina Miko-Schefzig, Dennis C. Jancsary, Jo Reichertz

9. Observing Fledging Researchers’ Participation in a Viennese Coffee House

Larissa Schindler, Rixta Wundrak

10. Research with Vignettes: Situations and their Materiality

Katharina Miko-Schefzig

Part 3: Illustrative Examples from Empirical Research

11. Digging deeper: Making a case for the Hermeneutic Approach in Research and Practice

Oliver Vettori

12. Materializing Management Knowledge: Illustrating the Analysis of Visual and Multimodal Artefacts

Dennis C. Jancsary, Renate E. Meyer

13. Observations on Choir Singing. A Dialogue Between Lifeworld Analytical Ethnography and Focused Ethnography with Reference to the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research

Michaela Pfadenhauer, Theresa Vollmer

14. Multi-Person Interviews in the Field of Work Research: Potentials, Varieties and Applications of a Process-Oriented Method

Karin Sardadvar

15. Using Vignettes as Tools for Exploring Intersectional Discrimination: Methodology and Analytical Insights

Hazal Budak-Kim, Manja Dimitra Kostas, Tina Spies

Part 4: Connections to International Discourses

16. The Multiperspectivity of Social Structure. Interpretive Insights from the Vienna School

Boris Traue

17. Self-Corrective Research Process and Reflexivity—How to Ensure Research Quality

Katharina Miko-Schefzig

18. How do Artefact Analyses fit Into Social Research on Materialisation Processes? An Attempt at Systematic Classification

Andrea D. Bührmann

19. On the Power of Artifacts

Jo Reichertz

20. Situation and Context: The Subject and its Situational Embeddedness

Katharina Miko-Schefzig

Part 5: Reflections from the Outside

21. Artefacts and Ethnography

Patrik Dahl, Paul Atkinson

22. Interpreting as Ventriloquizing: Reflections from a CCO Perspective

François Cooren

23. Elusive Materials: Artifacts, Technology, and the Making of Sense

Timon Beyes

24. Reflections on the Vienna School from the Perspective of Situational Analysis

Rachel Washburn

25. Discourses, Materiality, and Affect as Epistemological References in Interpretative Subjectivation Research

Lena Schürmann, Lisa Pfahl

26. Reflections from Applied Statistics

Thomas Rusch

Biography

Katharina Miko-Schefzig is Associate Professor and Head of the Competence Center for Empirical Research Methods at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.

Dennis C. Jancsary is Professor and Chair in Organization Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK, and Senior Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Urban Management and Governance at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), Austria.

Jo Reichertz is a sociologist, communicative constructivist, and Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

'A very timely volume from some of the leading scholars in the field. It will be an invaluable resource for those who work directly with interpretive methodologies from the Vienna School but also for anyone whose interests encompass approaches such as storytelling in interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and the inclusion of material analyses.'

Mark Learmoth, Emeritus Professor at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

'The Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research – with its hermeneutical treatment of artefacts, materiality, and multimodality – builds a solid and important conceptual and methodological basis for institutionalist theory. Grounded in the phenomenological tradition of Schütz, Berger, and Luckmann, it assembles not only methodological cornerstones but also critical dialogues with adjacent paradigms. What distinguishes this assembled articulation of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research for neo-institutional scholars, in particular, is the paths it charts for future advancements of institutionalism’s multiple variants, with import to the debates around translation theory, inhabited institutions and actorhood, sensemaking, institutional logics and any analysis that moves beyond text-centric accounts of institutions.'

Gili S. Drori, Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.