Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research

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.

• 1. Introduction. Why Proclaim Another School After the Era of Schools and Their Monolithic Ideas has Ended? Part 1: On the Development of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research 2. Cornerstones of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research 3. The Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research and its Social Context 4. Interpretive Social Research: Methodological foundations Part 2: Methodological Concretizations of the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research 5. Hermeneutic Interpretation in the Vienna School 6. System Analysis: A Text-interpretive Approach to Understanding Social Dynamics in Complex Fields 7. Artefact Analysis 8. Refining the Concept of Visual Knowledge: Insights from the Sociology of Knowledge in the Vienna School 9. Observing Fledging Researchers’ Participation in a Viennese Coffee House 10. Research with Vignettes: Situations and their Materiality Part 3: Illustrative Examples from Empirical Research 11. Digging deeper: Making a case for the Hermeneutic Approach in Research and Practice 12. Materializing Management Knowledge: Illustrating the Analysis of Visual and Multimodal Artefacts 13. Observations on Choir Singing. A Dialogue Between Lifeworld Analytical Ethnography and Focused Ethnography with Reference to the Vienna School of Interpretive Social Research 14. Multi-Person Interviews in the Field of Work Research: Potentials, Varieties and Applications of a Process-Oriented Method 15. Using Vignettes as Tools for Exploring Intersectional Discrimination: Methodology and Analytical Insights Part 4: Connections to International Discourses 16. The Multiperspectivity of Social Structure. Interpretive Insights from the Vienna School 17. Self-Corrective Research Process and Reflexivity—How to Ensure Research Quality 18. How do Artefact Analyses fit Into Social Research on Materialisation Processes? An Attempt at Systematic Classification 19. On the Power of Artifacts 20. Situation and Context: The Subject and its Situational Embeddedness Part 5: Reflections from the Outside 21. Artefacts and Ethnography 22. Interpreting as Ventriloquizing: Reflections from a CCO Perspective 23. Elusive Materials: Artifacts, Technology, and the Making of Sense 24. Reflections on the Vienna School from the Perspective of Situational Analysis 25. Discourses, Materiality, and Affect as Epistemological References in Interpretative Subjectivation Research 26. Reflections from Applied Statistics