Module Structure and Context
ISO5 introduced qualitative inquiry through three sequenced assignments: a critical assessment of a theoretical framework (Essay 1, taught by Jochen Runde), a methodological reflection on fieldwork design (Essay 2, taught by Virginia Leavell), and a full analytic memo drawing on primary and comparative data (Essay 3, also Leavell). The fieldwork component centered on Cambridge Market, where traders face uncertainty amid a disputed City Council redevelopment plan. The sequence moved from theoretical critique to methodological self-awareness to sustained interpretive analysis, building the capacities that qualitative research demands in practice rather than in the abstract.
Of the three assignments, the first proved most consequential for my PhD trajectory. Runde is the co-author of Faulkner and Runde (2019), a paper that provides one of the four theoretical resources in my Proxy Seduction Framework. Working under his supervision on a critical assessment of sociomateriality gave me direct exposure to the form/function debate at the center of my own theoretical contribution, and forced me to articulate a position on it rather than simply citing it.
Essay 1: Critical Assessment of Sociomateriality
I chose to assess sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2010) because its core commitments (constitutive entanglement, practice-based ontology, performativity) run directly through the intellectual terrain my PhD occupies. The essay laid out sociomateriality's strengths, particularly its ability to explain how identical artifacts produce different organizational realities through different enactment practices, and then turned to the critical realist challenge. The central move was to bring Faulkner and Runde's (2019) form/function distinction into direct contact with Orlikowski's refusal to separate the material from the social.
To make this concrete, I developed a comparative table mapping enactment limits across three artifact types: a turntable (physical determinate form), a DRM-protected file (digital determinate form), and generative AI (digital indeterminate form). The table showed that the nature of material constraint itself changes as artifacts move from physical to digital to probabilistic, and that this gradient matters for organizational analysis. A turntable physically forbids certain functions. A DRM wrapper logically forbids them. A generative AI model makes certain functions (like guaranteed factual accuracy) statistically impossible. The form/function distinction does real analytical work here that sociomateriality's flat ontology cannot do.
This exercise clarified something I had been circling around in my own theoretical development. The PSF argues that AI's "fertile form" (its capacity to produce outputs that look like competent work across an enormous range of functions) makes proxy metrics irresistibly legible. The form/function framework explains why AI is different from previous technologies in this regard: its indeterminate form means the gap between what it appears to do and what it actually does is structurally harder to detect. The enactment limits table was an early attempt to articulate this gradient, and the conceptual move has carried through into my AMR submission.
Essays 2 and 3: Fieldwork and the Analytic Memo
The fieldwork centered on Jerry, a twenty-year-old trader who runs a fossils and crystals stall. I conducted a fifty-minute semi-structured interview and a seventy-minute observation session, including the end-of-day teardown and a visit to the underground storage facility. The analytic memo (Essay 3) extended Jerry's case with comparative data from eleven interviews conducted by classmates.
The fieldwork was valuable as practice. Two moments stood out. An unprompted lecture Jerry delivered on malachite (its geological origins, copper chemistry, and use in Russian church ornamentation) revealed how, in a university town where status is tied to degrees, expertise functions as an identity claim. The insight came because I let the conversation drift rather than redirecting, a Charmaz-influenced instinct I would not have trusted without the module's framing. The underground storage facility, with its wet stairs, peeling safety strips, and lingering smell of a former public toilet, grounded Jerry's complaints about the Council in physical evidence and made Geertz's distinction between thin and thick description operational.
Leavell's feedback on Essays 2 and 3 encouraged a more personal and narrative register than the analytic style I brought to the work. The cohort was predominantly masters students and early-career PhDs, and the module rightly prioritizes developing interpretive voice in that context. My instinct to build structured frameworks around the data reflects twenty-five years of presenting findings to stakeholders, a habit that has real strengths for the kind of research I am doing but that can crowd out the more speculative interpretive moves qualitative inquiry also rewards. The useful takeaway was not that my approach was wrong, but that it needs to be complemented: the framework gives shape to the analysis, but the interpretive reading is what gives it life.
Methods Reflection and Forward Path
The module exposed me to observational and ethnographic methods that I do not expect to use as primary approaches in my PhD. My research examines how AI engagement transforms organizational evaluative capacity, a phenomenon that operates through technical contexts, practitioner discourse, and institutional logics rather than through the kind of embodied, place-bound dynamics that ethnography is designed to surface. The Cambridge Market study was a productive rehearsal for semi-structured interviewing, which will be central to my empirical phase (roughly fifty interviews with software practitioners and boundary activity performers). The practice of letting informants lead the conversation into unexpected territory, as with Jerry's malachite lecture, transfers directly.
Where the module pointed me forward was toward the importance of choosing methods suited to the theoretical work the research needs to do. My PSF contribution is primarily theoretical, and the empirical phase is designed to test and extend a conceptual framework rather than to build theory inductively from observation. Semi-structured interviews are the right instrument for surfacing how practitioners experience criteria shift and proxy elevation. Discourse analysis is a method I am considering as well, given that the PSF's mechanism operates partly through how organizations talk about AI engagement, through the language that naturalizes proxy substitution. I have not committed to discourse analysis yet, but the module helped clarify that my methodological choices need to serve the theoretical architecture rather than default to whichever qualitative tradition the training happened to emphasize.