Respekt - Der Schlüssel zur Partnerschaft (Klett-Cotta Leben!) (German Edition)
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ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Michaela Pfadenhauer presents her theoretical support for the expert interview as independent qualitative method from an ethnographic design 8 Alexander Bogner, Beate Littig and Wolfgang Menz perspective. In her opinion, expert interviews are a particularly appropriate method in research aimed at reconstructing explicit expert knowledge. Similar issues are discussed in both, such as the problems of gaining access to these groups and the specifics of interaction and interviewing.
Although not identical, even the respective target group definitions experts and the elite for such interviews overlap. This article discusses the commonalities and differences in these two methodological approaches, thereby contributing to a more detailed specification of the methodology of expert interviews. It concludes with a sociology of knowledge based appeal that the professional functional elite — given their positions of power — be considered as a specific group of experts.
Consequently, interviews with the elite aimed at generating explicit, tacit, professional or occupational knowledge should be seen as expert interviews. The second part of the book focuses on methodological practices and the considerations that accompany them. What kind of data can be gathered from expert interviews above and beyond that obtained from the customary qualitative, guideline based individual interviews?
How can the quality of the data be guaranteed? What determines and characterizes communication in expert interviews? Which personal skills, competences and attributes are beneficial in this form of interaction? How can the particular interaction structures be used to benefit the data gathering process? And, last but not least: Which research ethics issues have to be considered? In their opinion, neither the methodological debate nor, indeed, sociological studies take into consideration the fact that different experts with different levels of knowledge and different quality requirements in their work can be expected to provide correspondingly different information.
To reconstruct this information and draw benefit from it in the data gathering and analysis processes, additional information above and beyond the factual information provided in the interviews must be gathered on the interview subjects. In their article, Gabriele Abels and Maria Behrens demonstrate the advantages of analyzing gender-specific interaction effects in expert interviews and putting them to productive use in the interview setting for the collection of practical and factual knowledge. In doing so, they make the assumption that the person of both the expert and the researcher in their case, a female researcher are also always present in the interview.
Correspondingly, the interaction is influenced by various non-circumventable subject-related factors of influence. The results show — and this is their central hypothesis — that, for all intents and purposes, both positive and discriminating effects can serve to generate productive data. At the same time, the authors add two constraints: In a second step, they verify their gender-related conclusions by means of a secondary analysis of their own interview notes from the associated research projects.
Christmann discusses telephone-based interviews, a variation on the expert interview theme in which the possibilities and limitations are determined by technology. Although telephone interviews with experts have long become established research practice not least for economic 10 Alexander Bogner, Beate Littig and Wolfgang Menz reasons , little reflection has been given to the methodology behind them. Christmann refers in her methodological considerations to experience drawn from a methodologically diverse German university project.
Fourteen of the interviewed experts in leading university positions were interviewed in a face-to-face setting, while eight were interviewed by telephone for economic reasons. Even if the telephone interviews in her example research project did produce important information, methodological concerns prevail. Reducing the interaction to a purely linguistic level makes it more difficult to interpret, and the interviewee has far less room for development — an aspect that perhaps carries less weight in information gathering expert interviews than in those intended for reconstructive social research theory building purposes.
All in all, telephonebased expert interviews prove a difficult and taxing undertaking — both for the interviewee and for the interviewer. In this context she discusses the extent to which the propositions of the literature on democratic research practices are relevant for an expert researcher. The third part of the book contains a selection of articles that deal with the importance of expert interviews, the way they are conducted and the particular specifics of interaction in such interviews in concrete fields of application and social science sub-disciplines industrial sociology, interpretative organizational research, labour market research and technology foresight.
One particular question comes to the fore here, namely the methodological consequences that result from the structures peculiar to each respective field of research and their consequences for the success of the interviewing techniques used in an expert interview setting. An Introduction to a New Methodological Debate 11 Rainer Trinczek uses an industrial sociology case study to illustrate that such interviews must by no means generally — as is a common preconception in qualitative research — adhere to the principles of neutrality and restraint.
Although appropriate interviewing strategies can be found in methodological suppositions, the actual structure of such an interview has to follow the rules of normal communication, interpreting these everyday communication rules in line with the actual situation and the purpose of the interview. In the case study analysed by Trinczek interviews with managers , the rules of communication and, thus, the expectations of the interviewees, are based on their everyday work situation; in general, the interviewees expect the interview to follow the question and answer structure predominantly encountered in everyday work situations.
However, the researcher also has to take the actual subject matter into consideration when deciding whether to orient the entire interview on these expectations. Trinczek illustrates this using two thematically heterogeneous research projects as examples. In their article, Manfred Lueger and Ulrike Froschauer illustrate the importance of expert interviews in interpretative social research based organizational analysis. By distinguishing different levels of observation first and second order , they propose the reconstruction of analytically different types of knowledge based on a heuristic of distinct arenas and expertise reflection levels.
The interviewees as experts in the organizational lifeworld have internal organizational experience and know-how. From an expanded observation perspective, they are in a position to provide qualified information on internal knowledge structures and constructions. To ensure the different knowledge forms are contrasted with appropriate complexity, those persons whose professional profile qualifies them as relevant internal or external from the point of view of the actual research should ultimately be integrated into the research.
Pursuant to their analytical perspective, Froschauer and Lueger illustrate the specific individual data gathering and interpretation requirements raised by the different types of contrasting expertise in organizational action. Andrea Leitner and Angela Wroblewski deal in their article with the standing and specifics of expert interviews in an evaluation research context. In the approach they describe, this validity problem is counteracted by references to information from other data sources during the interview.
Examples from labour market policy evaluation research are used to present the determining factors in the expert interview interaction process and discuss the possibilities available for dealing with this bias. The Expert Delphi method presented by Georg Aichholzer plays an important role in the rapidly growing field of technology foresight. In many cases, foresight processes also aspire to offer social networking, voting and consensus building functions that improve the performance of innovation systems.
Following an introduction to the basic elements of the Delphi method, Aichholzer explains its use in the innovative Austrian Technology Delphi, which incorporates a number of modifications to the classic Delphi. The different strategies used to capture expert knowledge in a further example — an international foresight process on the future of European transport systems — allows an interesting comparison between the Expert Delphi and cross-impact analysis.
The subsequent applications discussed in the article, such as a Finnish approach geared towards balancing consensus and diversity and the use of internet assistant Expert Delphis, demonstrate other application-specific adaptations to and combinations of this method. This book should not, of course, be seen as an exclusive compendium and the final word on a fully sanctioned research method.
Far more, it is an invitation to others to reflect on and examine the different forms of expert interview in more detail. Indeed, we expect and hope that an intensified, critical debate on this topic will further increase the practical benefits of this method. The internationalization of the debate is an important step in this direction.
This would ultimately benefit not only a small community of expert researchers, but also qualitative social research as a whole. For a long time even representatives of the qualitative paradigm were undecided as to whether expert interviews actually did represent a discrete method of data collection that could be differentiated from other interview forms. Towards a New Modernity. Ambivalenzen der Beziehung von Wissenschaft und Politik. University of Chicago Press. Lehrbuch, 4th edn Weinheim: Konzepte, Methoden, Analysen Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag , pp.
This page intentionally left blank Part I Theoretical Concepts: However, the authors continue, it is easily overlooked that the expert interview is an ambitious method which cannot be considered to be on a sound footing either in terms of modernization theory or methodologically. We shall argue that expert knowledge is a knowledge sui generis with its own characteristic traits necessitating a particular methodological approach. We shall outline the distinctive features of this approach taking a closer look both at data collection and interpretation of data.
Set forth by the regime of accumulation inherent in globalization, modern societies are facing changing conditions of the production of knowledge in general and more so of knowledge-based expert systems. Following Welsch , these conditions can be described 17 18 Michael Meuser and Ulrike Nagel as constituting a basic plurality, a plurality which cannot simply be dealt with as an intensified coexistence of spheres of knowledge and points of view of experts, but — besides the diversification of knowledge — must also be understood as a trend towards transgressing the borderlines between spheres of knowledge.
However, this definition remains insufficient since it does not provide the researcher with criteria to distinguish between experts and non-experts. In scientific research an individual is addressed as an expert because the researcher assumes — for whatever reason — that she or he has knowledge, which she or he may not necessarily possess alone, but which is not accessible to anybody in the field of action under study.
It is this advantage of knowledge which the expert interview is designed to discover, and it is an exclusive realm of knowledge which is highly potential because and in as far as it is linked with the power of defining the situation. What comes into sight when we combine the pragmatic definition of the expert interview with the sociology of knowledgeperspective, is the distinction between expert and lay person. It is the researcher who according to his research objective decides who she or he wants to interview as an expert; but we have to add that this is not an arbitrary choice but is related to the recognition of an expert as expert within his own field of action.
At the same time not every person recognized as an expert in a particular setting is necessarily addressed as a Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production 19 potential informant. This distinction is based on the specialized knowledge of the expert. Not every special knowledge, however, already is expert knowledge, as Sprondel , p.
Sprondel views this knowledge as linked to the role of the professional. Defining the term expert with reference to the professions does make sense in so far as expertise — seen historically — has become differentiated in the context of the professions, and until today and to a large extent is basically acquired on this basis. Yet more recent analyses of societal change convincingly show that new forms of knowledge production have developed. It is argued that these new forms of knowledge production do not replace the traditional specific relevances established within the various fields of action disciplines, professions, and so on but, rather, complement them.
In the following chapter we will deal with these processes as implying some more characteristics of expert knowledge. In modernization theory, this form is referred to as Mode 1 Gibbons and others, In Mode 1, knowledge is generated according to the cognitive and social norms of a disciplinary context and, in so far, is autonomous Gibbons and others, , p. Mode 1 serves as a point of reference for the analysis of changes in knowledge production towards Mode 2.
In this process the characteristics of Mode 1 — for example, disciplinarity and the distinction between expert and lay person — lose their discriminating power, and knowledge production is observed as taking place within wider, transdisciplinary contexts ibid. In a historical perspective, the beginnings of the changes from Mode 1 to new forms of knowledge production — as in Mode 2 — can be located in the s. This decade reflects the onset of a process in which the problematic, ambivalent consequences of modernization of industrial society and of the belief in the logics of progress as defined by functional differentiation, scientification, and disciplinarity are clearly becoming visible.
The indisputability of the ambivalent side-effects of modernization in the s, as exemplified by the problems related to the civil use of atomic energy, speeds up the establishment of a reflexive attitude towards the plausibility structures of modernity, and in the s this leads to novel — globalized — perceptions of problems: There are two ways of looking at societal change crystallizing from this process. On the Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production 21 other hand, expressing the ambivalences of modernity Baumann, the constructionist and postmodern discourse is taking shape emphasizing the pluralization of knowledge and reason gone plural Welsch, In this context of complex and concealed problems of societal change expert knowledge is confronted with the following dilemma: Various trends mixing together are making up a paradoxical situation: This can be illustrated by the new social movements, NGOs, and networks of civil society — whose members when advancing in years tend to take over positions in the political, social, or cultural system, that is in the institutions of society.
It is of interest for our discussion that in the course of modernity becoming reflexive, and due to the criticism of the expertocrization of society, expert knowledge is also generated outside professional contexts. As it is, the criticism of the expertocrization of modernity itself and of its side-effects is seen to be initiating the development of integrated counter-expert systems which combine non-scientific and scientific knowledge, different knowledge cultures, counter-publics, and alternative structures of participation.
The emergence of new knowledge systems and knowledge cultures; of uncommon commentators of deficits of modernization and responses to problems; of new collective actors and publics and their network-based negotiations in the process of knowledge production, has consequences: The superior problem-solving rationale Mode 1 as claimed by the scientific system is exposed to systematic doubt and put into competition with the expertise originating from heterogeneous knowledge systems and spheres of interest.
The latter themselves, of course, are science-based, but instead 22 Michael Meuser and Ulrike Nagel of being disciplinary they are transdisciplinary and heterogeneous with regard to the actors and their relevances, that is incorporating also local knowledge, experiential knowledge, viewpoints of lay people and others concerned. In marking their belongingness to an alternative culture some of these knowledge systems are surfacing even a new type of aesthetic, new symbols sneakers, rainbow, sunflower. Mode 1-knowledge production does not become outdated. It is, as is stated time and again, indispensable as to some of its characteristics, but it is complemented by Mode 2.
Mode 1 problems are set and solved in a context governed by the, largely academic, interests of a specific community. By contrast, Mode 2 knowledge is carried out in a context of application. Mode 1 is diciplinary while Mode 2 is transdiciplinary. Mode 1 is characterised by homogenity, Mode 2 by heterogenity.
Originally, Mode 1 is hierarchical and tends to preserve its form, while Mode 2 is more heterarchical and transient.
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Each employs a different kind of quality control. In comparison with Mode 1, Mode 2 is more socially accountable and reflexive. It includes a wider, more temporary and heterogeneous set of practitioners, collaborating on a problem defined in a specific and localized context. Gibbons and others, , p. Nowotny states that with the changes in knowledge production the universities lose their privileged status as legitimate sites of the production of knowledge.
The increasing number of academically trained individuals can be held responsible for this process since it is their research competence, which is influencing a variety of institutions. Disciplinarity as a characteristic feature of Mode 1-knowledge production was more and more complemented and also partially replaced by transdicipinarity, that is an integration not only of other scientific disciplines, but of institutions and organizations beyond the field of the sciences as well cf.
Gibbons and others, The new knowledge regime is interpreted by Rammert , p. In defining the term expert this recent development should be taken into account, much to the benefit of the method of expert interview as well.
Overcoming Retroactive Jealousy: A Guide to Getting Over by Zachary Stockill,Frank Morrison
At issue here are new forms of knowledge production and their conditions inside and outside the professions, as well as the newly emerging relevances which have to be taken into account as important aspects while analysing expert knowledge. Gibbons and others and other Mode 2-theorists have derived their hypotheses from the analysis of new, pluralistic ways of knowledge production in cooperation between different spheres of society science and its disciplines, industry, politics, public administration.
In comparison with this approach our starting point is the sociology of knowledge-perspective which we have reviewed in the light of the constructionist-postmodernist or Knowledge Society brand of modernization on the one hand, and with 24 Michael Meuser and Ulrike Nagel a view to the process of differentiation of extra-professional fields of expert knowledge as illustrated by the new social movements and publics on the other hand.
It is not surprising that both approaches, even though within different language games, lead to quite similar findings regarding the transformation of expert knowledge. It must be pointed out again, however, that the Mode 2-phenomenon is not at all unanimously confirmed by the debate on modernization; much to the contrary, empirical researchers have expressed considerable doubt about the mode of transformation as claimed by Gibbons and others.
We are following Gordon , p. The activities of these types of actors are not restricted to local municipal or regional contexts. Some of them are active at the global level, for example within the scope of NGOs. All of these actors acquire a special knowledge through their activity — and not necessarily through their training — because they have privileged access to information. Their expertise, too, is socially institutionalized and linked to a specific context and its functional requirements, even though in a different way from the expertise grounded on the professional role.
Of those who have something to report on account of personal observation and experience, not each and every individual is to be interviewed as an expert. Schmid-Urban and others , p. Such individuals do not meet the criterion of active participation. The contacts and observations from which they derive their knowledge are embedded in structures of relevance, which are not focused on a problem but, for example, determined by economic motives.
The definition of experts as active participants emphasizes the specific functions such individuals have with regard to problems — whether by virtue of a professional role, or as a volunteer. Special knowledge acquired through carrying out such functions is the subject matter of the expert interview. Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production 25 It is reasonable to decouple the term expert from holding a formal position in a hierarchy of occupational status positions and to argue, accordingly, that the expert interview shall be used also with interviewees who are active participants.
In the following, we shall take a closer look at some aspects we believe to be particularly important for the data analysis of expert interviews. In the transition to a pluralized, heterogeneous mode of knowledge production expert knowledge is sensitized regarding stocks of knowledge generated outside the scientific world and acquired, experienced and suffered in extra-professional practice. A co-mingling between expert knowledge of active participants and that of professional-scientific experts takes place, resulting in the formation of hybrids between formerly separated fields of knowledge and symbolic orders; in transgression of boundaries between periphery and centre, everyday experience and systematic knowledge, local and global expertise.
Accordingly, while exploring expert knowledge with the tool of the expert interview, the socio-cultural conditions of the production of knowledge become relevant topics of data collection and analysis. The focus of analysis, therefore, is directed towards the modes and mechanisms of producing knowledge, that is to an understanding of the process, by which knowledge is generated, checked, communicated, reflected upon, modified, and finalized.
The socio-cultural conditions of knowledge production are reviewed as a core dimension of expert knowledge as much as of expert interviewing. We suggest they should be taken into account at all phases of the research process starting from designing the interview schedule, conducting the interview, and analyzing the data. At this point we are going to revise an earlier standpoint regarding the relevances of the expert.
This reflects a point at issue in the discussion about the expert interview, the question of whether and in which way the biographical motivation and milieu-specific embeddedness of knowledge -acquisition should be a subject matter of the interview.
In an earlier article Meuser and Nagel, we suggested to ignore the private aspects of expert behaviour. Bogner and Menz b, p.
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We find this a convincing statement. In addition, a revision of our earlier position is suggested by more recent research in which we used the method of the expert interview. Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production 27 To give an example, in a study on dual career couples Behnke and Meuser, , human resources managers of large companies were interviewed as experts; interviewees who showed a commitment to improve the work- life- balance also reported some concern about their highly qualified daughters who, unlike the sons, had great difficulties in finding employment appropriate to the level of their qualification.
This shows how experiences made in the private sphere influence the perception and, possibly, the handling of work-related responsibilities. This kind of impact should definitely be thematized in an expert interview, at the same time the expert interview is not be confused with a biographical interview.
On the other hand, in exploring expert knowledge, the focus remains on the institutional framework within which the expert moves and on the individual actor involved, her or his position and responsibilities within a particular context. With the development of new socio-cultural forms of knowledge production further relevances of expert knowledge and for its analysis are surfacing.
Since knowledge increasingly emerges by way of negotiation within plural, heterogeneous discourse communities, and networks of experts, the patterns and practices of expert communication, of bargaining over definitions and solutions are gaining importance. They are of interest as a collective practice across institutional, professional, and entrepreneurial boundaries — as well as the practice of organizing such negotiation processes. Determining negotiation and networking as basic characteristics of expert knowledge raises the question whether the analysis must yield to an analysis of epistemic cultures — as is suggested by Knorr-Cetina , p.
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According to Knorr-Cetina, Knowledge Society as structured by epistemic cultures is adequately comprehended by way of exploring the practices of the different knowledge cultures; and she further remarks that in the context of Knowledge Society the inside worlds of knowledge are becoming ever more crucial. Accordingly, and in contrast to older studies focusing on disciplines and specialized 28 Michael Meuser and Ulrike Nagel fields, the analysis of epistemic cultures is concerned with the procedural rationality and the epistemic practice within fields of knowledge and thus with the complex life-worlds at the insides of modern institutions.
While stating that the expert interview plays an important role as an independent method of empirical social research, it can yet be agreed that it is as much open to an ethnographic research design as are other tools of interpretive-qualitative research, for example participant observation. Regarding our concept of the expert interview, it should be added that a basic ethnographic attitude would prove very useful.
Recognizing expert knowledge as a collective project of producing knowledge by way of negotiation, cooperation, networking and teamwork, it has to be acknowledge that the production of knowledge is to be defined as an open ended process. Throughout the actual making of the expertise, the outcome regarding the definition of what is the case and the respective problem solving strategies remains an open question, the productive process itself must be seen as bearing an uncertainty regarding its result.
This practice is to be opposed to a mode of decision-making marked by neglect of ambivalences and uncertainties, the expert relying on her or his authority, freedom of judgement and power to define situations. Their settings, too, are allocating insider and outsider positions, as can be illustrated with regard to the definition of rules of conduct and criteria of validity. It has to be assured that a negotiative model of expertise does not imply that procedures and results are arbitrary. An impressive example is given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Reflecting on this example of transnational and transdisciplinary knowledge production, one might say that claims of validity of expertise can be measured by criteria of plurality, plurality of negotiations, of actors, of knowledge bodies being processed.
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Knowledge production is an open-ended process, moving towards unknown futures, taking into account unforeseen options and developments. Looking at the reciprocal and collective process of discourse among experts with different outlooks and across boundaries of disciplines, professions, and spheres of knowledge, expert knowledge cannot but be recognized as a social construction, as socially created in a societal practice.
Depending on its social location and other factors, such practice may take on different forms, bring about different results and hence must be seen as a contingency, as appearing not inevitably. The constructiveness and contingency of expert knowledge and standpoints is further underlined by the limited duration of expert networks alluding to the temporality of knowledge bodies and therefore limited claim of validity.
The practice of plurality as stated by Welsch , p. Expert knowledge — in classical sociology of knowledge constructed as an ideal type and not reconstructed empirically — is defined as a special knowledge which the expert is clearly and distinctly aware of. Yet in view of the more recent discussion of the term expert in the sociology of knowledge and of empirical research on expert behaviour, this standpoint cannot be maintained. Therefore, an increased level of explicitness of expert knowledge might rightly be expected.
According to Rammert , this is not a zero-sum game; the explicitness of knowledge does not necessarily result in a decrease of implicit stocks of knowledge. However, it is seizable in the empirical data and open to reconstruction from what the interviewee tells. Summing up, what follows from the diagnosis of present-day society regarding the analysis of expert knowledge and starting from the concept of expert interview as an open method which is not guided by a script or a preconceived sequential order but solely by topics to be covered in the course of interviewing: Firstly, the diagnosis of our time leads to adopting a process-oriented analytical view on expert knowledge.
Questions to be posed may regard reference groups, important spheres of knowledge; accounting Experts and Changes in Knowledge Production 31 of the plurality and globalization of knowledge. Relevant aspects refer to the embeddedness of expert knowledge in milieus and socio-cultural settings. Secondly, expert knowledge is defined by the communicative practice of insider groups and networks; the procedures of negotiating opinions; and the strategies of inclusion and exclusion. Thirdly, another element is the biographical mixture of the expert status within life-worldly, private as well as public spheres of experience.
Neither is it a fully pre-reflexive knowledge at the level of basic rules or ethno-methods as analysed by Cicourel , nor is it comparable to the knowledge of grammatical rules, which certainly most individuals intuitively have command of but are only partly capable of making explicit. Experts will report cases of decision-making and state principles they keep to; these are the data necessary for reconstructing the supra-individual, field-specific patterns of expert knowledge.
Against this background, we consider an open interview based on a topicguide to be appropriate for data collection. As regards the reconstruction of knowledge, which underlies expert behaviour, questionnaires would at best allow for knowledge at the level of the discursive consciousness containing rationalist reasoning corresponding with officially accepted standards.
This type of argument is to be found quite often in expert interviews, but apart from the rare case in which the interviewee does not really cooperate, that is answers with semi-official statements, experts do reveal a lot more about relevances and maxims connected with their positions and functions: The open interview provides the room for the interviewee to unfold his own outlooks and reflections. As to data collection interviewing should be based on general topics but avoid closed questions and a prefixed guideline.
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For the interviewer it is a must to prepare the interview topics thoroughly and build up a knowledge base of the field the experts are moving in. Different from the narrative interview, in the expert interview naivety 32 Michael Meuser and Ulrike Nagel would involve the risk of presenting oneself to the expert as an incompetent interviewer. The effort invested into the design of the topic guide provides the interviewer with the thematic competence enabling him for productive interviewing.
Most of the time the researcher cannot afford to be too naive and ignorant. When collecting expert interviews with managers, Trinczek , p. Much the same is due to crucial events being published in the media. To be short of knowledge of events inside the respective institution is forgivable.
The expert interview and the biographical interview differing clearly with regard to objective and methodical design, narrative passages are not excluded from the expert interview. Methodically, this can be put to good use by eliciting narrations through the mode of interviewing. Narratives provide insight into the tacit aspects of expert knowledge, which she or he is not fully aware of and which, on the contrary, become noticed only gradually in the course of the narration. Through this narrative about a particular case, general criteria of decisionmaking in recruitment become as clear as it becomes apparent how criteria of decision-making in an organization, in connection with gender-related structures of prejudice, bring about a practice which is typical and not unfamiliar.
While narrating his story the interviewee becomes aware that he is being recorded and by and by is tangled up in a narrative the unfolding and outcome of which he could not clearly foresee from the start. In doing so he reveals more about the relevance structures underlying his behaviour than he would actually do — and would be able to do — if he were asked directly. It can be presumed that the knowledge coming to light is located at the border of practical and discursive consciousness. Apart from narratives, reports about breaches of routine activities are particularly instructive Walter, , p.
Mechanisms of orderly functioning become apparent by looking at how breaches and conflicts are controlled. This corresponds to the logic of breaching experiments in early ethnomethodology Garfinkel, It is obvious that the occurrence of such reports cannot be anticipated when designing an interview schedule. Therefore, it is all the more important to carry out the interviews in such a way that a does not prevent the expert from addressing unforeseen aspects of topics and b utilizes such aspects in subsequent interviews. From our experience it is crucial for a successful outcome of an expert interview to use the schedule in a flexible, non-bureaucratic way — that is as a thematic guideline and not as if it were a questionnaire to be administered.
It is the relevance structures of the interviewees, which shall be elicited, not those of the interviewer. Questions should be focused on the how of decision-making and acting. In this way, general principles and maxims can be grasped, and a reconstruction 34 Michael Meuser and Ulrike Nagel of the logic underlying a decision is facilitated.