Research path

It was decided to explore whether employees can be said to aim to ‘increase their presence’ when their companies decide to re-organise and what will help others do the same. To collect the necessary experiences—the data (or names) in the context of the present study –, a series of interviews was organised. As it was expected that such data would depend on the interviewees’ aims and commitments, a qualitative form of analysis was deemed appropriate. It was used to group the responses and order the groups into a sequence of steps as part of a story, the story of ‘increasing presence’. Interviewees (51 in total) were selected based on their organisations having recently gone through some restructuring on a regional and/or national scale. Four sets of employees (from four companies; see next section) were categorised as either managers or employees. This classification emphasised differences in roles and in experiences of organisational change. The companies present a relative wide range of activities.