Phenomenology.

Phenomenology is a method in which researchers focus on studying human experiences, including the way people conceptualize their lived, shared experiences (Braun and Clarke, 2013; Sokolowski, 2000). Phenomenology concentrates on the perceptions and communications of people regarding certain events or objects. This approach can be used to analyze individual cases or to develop cases from a small group of research participants (Braun and Clarke, 2013).

Phenomenology's popularity in the US has waxed and waned with initial enthusiasm for the method from scholars in the 1960s and a resurgence of interest from cognitive scientists in the 1990s (Gallagher, 2012). Dall'Alba (2009, p. 7) noted that “as the impact of phenomenology extended beyond philosophy to fields such as sociology, education, anthropology, politics, linguistics, psychology and feminist studies, it has challenged taken-for-granted assumptions and prompted new insights into what it means to live, work, play and learn in our world.”

Braun and Clarke note that while there are a number of types of phenomenology, the method can generally be described as concerned with understanding people's subjective experiences (2013). The two primary types of phenomenology are transcendental (also referred to as empirical or psychological) and hermeneutic. Transcendental phenomenology is built on the philosophical work of Husserl (1931) and applied specifically as a qualitative approach by Moustakas (1994). It is descriptive and focuses on how experiences are structured and organized. This approach “analyzes the essences perceived by consciousness with regard to individual experiences” (Padilla-Diaz, 2015, p. 103). Hermeneutic phenomenology, based on the work of Heidegger (1972) is defined as research centered on personal experiences and requiring interpretations or descriptions of the meanings and significance of phenomena which participants experience (Padilla-Diaz, 2015). This approach requires a historical analysis of the phenomenon and its effects on participants.

An example of a transcendental phenomenology in education is Moerer-Urdahl and Creswell's (2004) study of nine participants in a US college mentoring leadership program which sought to understand the meaning of the mentors' experiences. This study may be especially helpful to researchers planning to undertake a transcendental phenomenology as it describes in detail the process of organizing and analyzing data according to Moustakas's (1994) tradition. While hermeneutic phenomenology is used much more commonly in the health professions, DeGagne and Walters (2010) have applied the approach to a study of the lived experiences of 11 online educators from varying locations in the US. From the study results, the authors proposed recommendations for the improvement of online learning communities. Padilla-Diaz (2015) offers a clear discussion of basic concepts and essential elements of phenomenology for those seeking further guidance to this qualitative research approach.

While phenomenology allows for the in-depth exploration of the meaning of a lived experience or a phenomenon using a small group of participants, there are challenges to this approach. Finding participants who have experienced exactly the same phenomenon may prove difficult. Additionally, the bracketing (also called epoche) of the researcher's experiences and assumptions, required in transcendental phenomenology, may be onerous to inexperienced scholars.

Phenomenology is a versatile qualitative approach. It can be employed to explore a single concept or to analyze that concept as it is experienced by a group of people. Phenomenology can assist in discovery of new facets of experiences and phenomena that are so common as to be considered mundane. As Laverty (2003) explained, phenomenology can aid in a re-examination of an experience or phenomenon that may reveal different perspectives, helping to cast them in a new light. For more information about phenomenology, see the chapter on Phenomenology and Education: Researching Pedagogical Experience by N. Friesen in this volume.

Richard Thorpe & Robin Holt

In:The SAGE Dictionary of Qualitative Management Research

Definition

Phenomenology is a method of explaining meaning that strips out reference to abstracting, historical or structural influences, and instead looks to the experiencing subjects’ direct and unmediated awareness of phenomena.

Discussion

Any adequate theory of meaning, including that of science itself, has to account for the nature of consciousness; it is only by a conscious, intentional act that a world is brought into life from amidst the hurly-burly of experience. It is this acknowledgement that transcribes the edges of the phenomenological worldview. The use of objectifying criteria, such as exactness, generalized explicability and validity, takes researchers away from this intimate configuration of meaning because as accounts of meaning they tend to privilege the observer above the observed [individualism; phronetic organizational research; positivism and post-positivism; structuration theory]. One of the originators of phenomenological approaches, Edmund Husserl (d. 1938), argued that to fully understand meaning we have to restore the originating influence of persons who experience it. What is being restored in the researcher's analysis is a condition of the intentionality of what is being researched; hence the primary concern of the phenomenologist is not whether things or objects actually exist, but whether these are intended in consciousness. This levelling of objects dissolves the implicit hierarchies of meaning - the symbols of epic stories are as ‘real’ as tables and chairs and equally as valid as a source of data for researchers [aesthetics; semiotics]. Meaning is the meaning given to objects by those in whose intentional states the objects are known in what Hussurl calls ‘meaning acts’. So to understand an object such as ‘a firm’ the researcher looks to the specific episodes of thinking, perceiving, believing, etc. (Smith and Smith, 1995: 21) by which a firm is experienced. From the perspective of employees, or regulators, or shareholders, an object such as a ‘firm’ may differ according to the different ways their meaning acts ‘bracket-off’ (epoche) their experience. Hence a firm can be understood as an opponent, as opportunistic or as an opportunity (or a blend thereof) without contradiction.

At its transcendental extreme the loneliness of this sense-giving consciousness can provoke an almost existential (q.v.) indifference; why, if reality is nothing more than what we as individuals impute to it, should we care about the everyday meanings of others [relativism]? But if consciousness and intentionality (as meaning acts) are taken not to refer to private mental states informing agency, but to the ways our conscious life is embodied in things and relations and symbols through action, and if objects are seen as having a presence that somehow invites, or elicits conscious focus, then what has meaning arises from the complicity of subjects and objects [practice theory]. This ‘prosthetic’ development of Hussurlean phenomenology stems from Merleau-Ponty's (1988: 194-199) ‘philosophy of nature’, requiring what he calls an awareness of the ‘encroaching’ field of subject and object in which the subject is understood as both an object (an object amidst a world of objects) and a subject that sees and touches objects. This phenomenological approach involves getting behind our observer conventions to invoke a raw or more basic appreciation of what can be meaningfully felt, or intuited; to trace the rhythms of how the world opens itself out on to subjects and of how subjects open out on to the world.

A basic example would be our human intentional interest in the object ‘warmth’, which prompts inquiry into identifying and controlling sources of heat, and thence adequate generalizations concerning the properties and classification of these sources. While subject awareness is rooted with intentional acts of interest, these acts involve active orientations around already established modes of understanding. So the associated ‘need’ for power to provide warmth might, if experienced by a consumer in a western market economy, might be configured using the object of a commodity (rather than, say, an emblem of divine power). This market economy background then elicits specific actions in relation to the object ‘warmth’, such as purchasing, expending, storing and so on [hermeneutics]. As subjects, we are both temporally and spatially configured; experience from which we cannot wrest ourselves as separate, phenomenologically distinct beings (Derrida, 1973). Yet despite market economy upbringings, the need for heat need not be commodified in toto; the subject flows back on to the world; and so, for example, silent vents are passed over for fireside aesthetics which in turn may restore a more direct, less commodified relationship with the object warmth.

Thorpe, R. and Holt, R. 2008. Phenomenology. In: The SAGE Dictionary of Qualitative Management Research. Richard Thorpe and Robin Holt Editors, London: SAGE Publications Ltd. pp. 153 Available at: <https://doi.org/10.4135/9780857020109> [Accessed 30 Nov 2024].