Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

Research methodology and data
case. The quotations listed in the spreadsheet included many descriptions
of the same activities. In each of the three cases, different interviewees
referred to the same activity, such as certain workshops, meetings or
discussions, and some interviewees addressed a certain activity many times
during their interview, which resulted in several quotations that
represented the same actual activity. To give an example, practically
everyone in Bureau who had been involved in the early program activities
mentioned the series of planning workshops, and some interviewees
mentioned these workshops several times during their interview, resulting
in altogether 19 quotations (i.e. rows in the spreadsheet) referring to these
workshops. To support the calculation of such overlapping descriptions,
one data field in the spreadsheet was reserved for describing each activity
briefly. All the quotations referring to the same actual boundary activity
received the same description. Thus, when all reported boundary activities
of a case program were coded in the same way, it was possible to calculate
the number of different boundary activities manifested in the case data.
When defining the number of distinct boundary activities in each case,
each activity was only counted once regardless of how many times the
activity had occurred during program initiation. For example, the same
kind of joint ideation workshops with the same group of participants might
have been organized three times during the program initiation, but they
were calculated to represent just one mechanism of boundary activity. The
actual number of occurrences of each activity was not analyzed, as for the
majority of activities this information was not available in the data and it
was not viewed as a critical piece of information. Rather, the analysis aimed
to reveal the variety of different mechanisms of how the case programs’
boundaries were managed in the cases.
This analysis generated case-specific counts of different boundary
activities and provided a more in-depth view of the total level of boundary
activity in each case. The total number of boundary activities across the
three cases was not calculated. The reason for this was that somewhat
similar but not fully identical activities were used across the three cases,
and it would have been very difficult to determine whether they should be
treated as the same activity. For example, the key program actors had
interviewed those representing the parent organization in both case Bureau
and case Chain, but the interviews were used in a somewhat different way,
targeted at different persons and aimed at different outcomes, which makes
it difficult to determine whether they should be treated as the same activity.
Figure 7 illustrates the process of coding and counting the boundary
activities described above.
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