Master's Series on Field Research
A series of interviews with major figures in field research conducted in the early 1980s by Peter Blanck
Transcript of an interview with Ed Schein
Peter Blanck:  I am talking with Professor Schein.  I will start with your general operating definition of field research - if you could just describe how you view what you do and what it means to you.
Ed Schein:  I think the assumption from which I start is that understanding organizations and what goes on in organizations can come about from lots of different sources and, for me, the term “field research” implies that one is going out deliberately to understand.  That is not how it really happened for me.  It has come about more as a byproduct of being asked, for example, to be a consultant in an organization and finding myself essentially in the role of clinician, finding opportunities to observe things that ordinarily I might not have had access to.  For me, the important thing is to take an inquisitive point of view toward whatever opportunities arise in one’s life in organizations, rather than seeing research as a discrete separate activity that one engages in.  In a sense, I do research by observing what goes on around me at all times just as any clinician would.  It is that point of view that for me is the important one.
Peter Blanck:  So issues like site selection, choosing specific sites if what I am hearing from your saying, is not as important to you because the problem you are interested in is really located in the site.
Ed Schein:  The notion of site selection implies that you already understand enough about different organizations to know what kind you want to study and in many respects I view the problem of organization research to be much farther back to even figure out what the relevant variables are that are common to most organizational situations.  In that sense, any site is at some level equivalent to any other site and that if organizational events are taking place there, I am interested in those that are general enough that I would see some examples of that going on in whatever setting I am in.  It is very similar by analogy to the individual clinician working with a client or a patient.  There are certain human elements that are common across all human behavior and until you know what precisely you want to study, you don’t get concerned about sample selection.  You can find out a lot about how the human mind works or how an organization works, by in a sense studying any organization.
Peter Blanck:  How in the past have you come about developing these general structures that you see or general variables across the organization, if you use the clinician analogy just seeing patients, and going out and coming back and organizing general variables?  How in the past have you developed this approach?
Ed Schein:  I think for me the key is that there is a big difference between being a clinician and being a journalist.  I think a journalist just goes out and essentially observes and let’s say he lets the events speak to him.  I think the clinician goes out with a point of view, with a theory, with the framework, so the initial frameworks that I started with came from my own education as a social psychologist, sociologist, a smattering of anthropology.  I became very curious about organizations as a result of other people’s research that I had read, so I came into those situations with already some things that I was looking for, but I wanted to observe them for myself, in order to understand what some of those variables really meant - that is, they are rather dry and abstract if you take a theory in a book, but that theory, if it is based on data, becomes a very lively real thing, if you begin to see for yourself what that researcher really was talking about.  A good combination of theory and observation is what I am really after. 
Peter Blanck:  The first thing when you say you would like to differentiate the journalist from the clinician - William Whyte’s Street Corner Society which is certainly considered one of the classics, at least that most undergraduate sociologists read, how would you classify that piece of work or the works that people really go in and just live with the culture?  It is really cultural anthropological approach.  How does that fit into your classification?
Ed Schein:  To me that is first rate clinical type research, in the sense the kinds of ethnographies that today are really considered good ones, like Whyte’s Street Corner Society or some of the ethnographies of the pre-literate cultures - those were not done by journalists, they were done by trained anthropologists who not only learned how to go into those settings and make some sense out of them, but who had a lot of prior theory, about what to look for, what culture was all about, so even though they may write as if it was all atheoretical, just what I happened to observe, those observations are in fact highly tuned to a particular theoretical framework that the person brought with them, even if he is no longer conscious of that theoretical framework.  I think it is very important to have a point of view and to be conscious of your point of view as a way of organizing and making sense out of the data that you see around you. 
Peter Blanck:  How do you specifically organize and make sense of the data around you?  Do you use notes or a tape recorder or do you keep a diary?
Ed Schein:  Paradoxically, you are limited by the reality of the situation you are in - that is, I started out as a researcher, trying essentially to do experiments with small groups, where I really controlled everything and was able to observe the kind of behavior that I really wanted to observe.  My problem with that was I found that in order to get the experimental controls needed I had to study problems that increasingly struck me as more and more trivial.  Early in my career I happened to have been in the army at the time of the Korean Repatriation of prisoners of war and found myself plunked into Korea, when a lot of people were coming back during the repatriation with an opportunity just to sit down and talk to them.  Well, in that instance taking notes was appropriate, but a tape recorder would have been or would have stultified the talking and also incidentally was not available, so I learned a lot from that experience, just being opportunistic, getting what data I could from the people that happened to be available.  Years later, if I happened to be asked to attend an executive group meeting say, in a company, whether or not I take notes really will be guided what is appropriate in that situation.  Often I am in a situation where I would certainly not bring a tape recorder, because I am not there to be tape recording them and even taking notes might distract people.  I have to sense what is appropriate and if I am finding important things that I think I am going to lose memory-wise, what I then have to do is bring a little tape recorder with me and debrief myself immediately after the meeting or after an interview, so if there is any kind of methodology that has emerged, it is to gather the data face to face and with minimum of props, but then allow yourself a piece of time right after you have been in a meeting or had an interview, to then put down as best you can remember everything that happened, because an hour or two later, you will already have forgotten some crucial things. 
Peter Blanck:  Does the situation also influence the type of role you take in an organization?
Ed Schein:  Absolutely.  What I am really saying is that the roles in a sense come about naturally in a sense that somebody will ask me to come in and be a consultant on a problem, or if I am curious about something I may from time to time find myself having an opportunity to interview somebody about something, which I have created and depending on for example, who has the initiative, did I take the initiative to ask for the interview, or did a client ask me to come in and I am interviewing on his behalf.  Those two roles are totally different and I have to act according to that role.  For example, if the client and this is very important to data gathering, if the client has asked me to come in, he has in a sense licensed me to ask all kinds of private and pertinent questions, because I am there to help him solve his problem.  If I have asked to come in, and interview him about his company works on something, I can’t ask those same private and pertinent questions, because in a sense he is doing me a favor and might be affronted by questions of the sort that the consultant or the clinician can ask, because he is trying to help, so that being sensitive to one’s own role and what is allowable within the role, is absolutely crucial.
Peter Blanck:  In terms of what you are just talking about, is there a difference then between consulting and field research?  You often hear that there is consulting and there is field research.  It sounded to me like when you were called in, that is more like consulting role and when you went in to study a problem, it is more of a typical field research approach.  A lot of people differentiate between the two roles, need the roles be differentiated or can you really do both, is the distinction necessary?
Ed Schein:  It is asymmetrical.  If I am being brought into an organization as a consultant, it enables me to do field research.  I can then systematically observe while I am in my consulting role, as a field researcher would do and I can even go a little beyond my role having gotten access to the company and ask some questions that might be particularly pertinent to my academic interests.  The other way does not work.  If I ask to come in as a field researcher, I can’t arbitrarily turn myself into a consultant and ask those more difficult private personal questions, so the thing that has struck me over the years is the power of the clinical role, because you can ask questions that the researcher cannot ask because the client is the one that took the initiative.  Do you see what I am driving at?  By the client taking the initiative he opens himself up much more to certain kinds of data, that the field researcher is not privileged to ask about.
Peter Blanck:  You use the word “clinical” role, what does that mean for you?
Ed Schein:  That means that the client has initiated around something that is bothering him or her.  Therefore, the initiative for my being in the organization is from the client rather than from me and what I have been struck by, as I have been saying, is that that opens up all kinds of possibilities for observing and asking questions that are not possible in the field researcher role, as it is traditionally defined.  
Peter Blanck:  To push a little further on that - that opens up because as this underlying notion of exchange, the person is opening up to you, and so you are getting better data in a sense.  
Ed Schein:  Different data, at least.  Better data gets dangerous, because the clinician also gets dumped on him a lot of pathology that might not be relevant to the day to day functioning of that organization.  You have to be careful, not to take what comes out in the clinical interview as being necessarily better data, but I view it as deeper data and different data and the exchange notion is correct in the sense that if the client has invested in asking a helper to help him, then the client is in a sense obligated to open up and respond to questions that under other circumstances, the client might turn off and say “No, I don’t want to talk about that.”
Peter Blanck:  In the consulting realm, you also here that usually when you are doing consulting, you are responsible to come up with an end product or you are responsible to make some change, I wonder how you deal with that.  I don’t know  how the therapist would really deal with that.  They don’t guarantee change.  Certainly they guarantee some insight into the person or the corporation.  What does that mean to you?
Ed Schein:  I started with a consulting model like that, but found that it did not really work in the human behavior area, that is, I would be invited into a group to make recommendations on how they could be more effective or a manager would ask me what he should do about a problem subordinate and give him some advice and this kind of thing.  I found almost without fail if I thought about it and listened and investigated and then gave a recommendation, the very next thing that would happen after I gave the recommendation as I would be told why that is not going to work in that particular situation, so then I would get defensive and defend the recommendation or add to it and I found myself getting into these loops, where the client would keep telling me that it was irrelevant what I was recommending, that it would not work, he had already tried that, etc., etc., so I finally figured out that there is something wrong with the model itself.  It was not that the recommendations were so off, that maybe the client even though he was hiring me to tell him what to do, really did not want to be told what to do and I remembered the psychiatrists and clinicians have gone through this same loop and they have had to learn that just telling patients what to do does not really solve anything and that the relationship really is one which I came to call “process consultation” and wrote a little book about - that what the client really wanted from me was to be a sounding board, a helper in the problem solving process, such that after talking to me for a while or having me in the group for a while, the client or group could better solve its own problem.  So, the focus increasingly for me came to be on the process of how we together solved the problem rather than the client dumping a problem on me and my giving him an answer which he then rejects.  We both zero in on a problem that becomes externalized and I help him solve his problem.  
Peter Blanck:  How do you know then when to end the relationship or if you are making progress, or what is progress in that sense?
Ed Schein:  Progress is very much defined by what we both observe to be progress, that is if the client feels this group process is feeling better or what motivated me to call you in, that problem is disappearing, or I have never been able to figure out what to do with that subordinate and now I have gotten some good ideas of what I can try next that is the most important criteria, in that the client himself sees a path to follow, whereas before, he did not know what to do, he was paralyzed.  I have to also see that that path makes sense, that is if the client says O.K. I now see what to do and suggest something very silly, I might have to still hang in there, and say well now wait a minute, is that really going to work and keep probing and testing, until he not only feels he can do something, but it makes sense to both of us, that what he would do is likely going to improve the situation.  So it is kind of a joint evaluation and then I found the need for the relationship kind of evaporates automatically, he begins not to invite me back I begin to lose interest and we kind of often end up mutually agreeing that all right, this has been very useful, but it should now end.  It is a mutual decision usually.
Peter Blanck:  When you say client, do you mean usually one person or a group of people or an organization?
Ed Schein:  This has gotten very complicated and is itself an issue that I have had to think through.  Initially, you never get called by an organization or a group, you get called by a member of that organization or group, so there is always an individual client, but that first person who telephones you or who writes you a letter or who makes an appointment to see you, you have to treat as the contact client, not necessarily as the ultimate client.  He or she is coming in with something that is bothering them, for which they think you can be helpful, so the first thing I have to work is that relationship to make sure that I understand what the person is after, because, for example, the kind of thing that often happens is a person will say, "Will you come to my company and talk to some people, because we think we have gotten this big moral or productivity problem and we think if you talk to a lot of people, you can help us figure out what it is."  I have to learn not to say, "Yes" and show up, because in fact I am being set up in a power play or a political process or something that I know nothing about, so I have to keep working with the person who is asking me this and say "Well, why do you think that I can learn something that you can’t learn, why did you come to me and we have to jointly reach a decision, whom I will talk to next and he will have to own a piece of that decision, so we may agree that the next step is to talk to the company president?"  Then, after you go through that same process with that person and we have to jointly decide on the next step, if he says, “Why don’t you really talk to this group that is worrying me”, I might agree, but I might say, "Well, you will have to give me the entree, I am not going to just show up, because we don’t know what they will think, what kind of an intervention that will be."  I learn that the people will get defensive and clam up.  We have to work out a process that you own, with me, that will get me into that group and in a sensible organic way.  Ideally, they should be asking for me to join them and if they don’t want me there, I do not think that your forcing me to go there will be very helpful.  The client’s system enlarges in these successive steps that the earlier client always has to own the next step.  I do not ever go off on my own and decide what to do next, because I have learned the hard way in an organization that that is very dangerous.  
Peter Blanck:  How realistic is it - a strategy like this in most organizations, where you have to really run after the coattails of these executives who are so busy that they do not have time to sit down, do they make the time?  
Ed Schein:  They make the time, because they are usually owning [sic] a problem that is bothering them.  Again, if I am the field researcher, there for my own purposes, then indeed I am chasing them and they squeeze me in here and there, at their leisure and I find myself never quite feeling that I can get what I need, whereas if they have asked for my help to work their problem, then for me to say, "Well, O.K., when do you want to meet?", they are likely to say, "The sooner the better."  So, who has the initiative turns out to be the crucial thing, just as the clinician benefits from the fact that the patient wants some help.  Therefore, the patient will invest time and will invest energy in trying to talk out whatever is going on.  If that group or that organization wants help, they become energized to reveal themselves to you in order to get the help.
Peter Blanck:  What about the old claim or the biases that the people who are really going to get better anyway are the ones who really want to get better are the ones who want to improve, are the ones that are going to approach you, how do you deal with it?  There is a whole other world of companies out there, they are just not sophisticated enough to come to you?
Ed Schein:  I think it is a very good question.  In terms of whether I can generalize from what I find in these companies to all organizations, the answer is "no", because you are quite right that there is a systematic bias that arises from who is going to ask and I think one might assume that it is the sick companies that will ask for help, but in fact that turns out not to be the case, because asking for help is a symptom of health as it turns out.  So, you are much more likely as an organizational clinician consultant to see healthy companies.  So, what you can infer - I think you can generalize around organizational processes, just like you could from an individual client about personality processes that are in a sense independent of health or illness, that are general processes.  As I can observe leadership or how a group designs or how an organization designs its products or its structure, and that process can be a general process across all organizations even though the healthy company may do it differently from the unhealthy one.  I can’t assume that the healthy version is the general version.  I can only assume that if every company I have ever met, differentiates for example, divides labor, and starts out with a functional kind of organization which gradually moves towards more of a divisional kind of organization, if that is a hypothesis I form from seeing X number of healthy companies, I can then at least say, maybe that is characteristic of all companies and then one could systematically look at others and take a sample that would ensure that you would get a cross section and check whether that process is indeed general or not.  But, the initial hypothesis about what goes on in the organization can come from looking at just the healthy ones, so long as I know I can’t now generalize until I have checked it, just as the clinician can’t generalize from seeing a string of sick people to what goes on in healthy ones, but he has good hypotheses now, about how the mind works which can then be checked.  
Peter Blanck:  In terms of the types of interpersonal skills you have developed in this role over the years or that you try to teach to your doctoral students, what do you think are some of the most important skills?  Or is it more of a holistic quality that you have to develop?  Some people who went through early training here like Lombard and George Holmans talk about this holistic sense and they feel very uncomfortable when I say, "Do you have to be a good interviewer", or. "Do you have to be sensitive to nonverbal cues?"  What sort of things do you stress?  What sort of things are you aware of and try to make your doctoral students aware of or people who use this approach?
Ed Schein:  Thinking about it historically, to me by far the most important learning experiences came from the workshops and the experiences that I had in the national training lab, sensitivity training and leadership training kinds of activities.  I was a doctoral student in Harvard Social Relations and had more than enough theory and practice in designing experiments and observing groups like Bales groups in the experimental environment, but I do not think I had a clue as to what was really going on, until I found myself in a training group being forced to observe not only other people’s behavior in this more relaxed clinical manner, but to look at what was going on inside me.  So, to me the most crucial learning is the general category of learning to observe what is out there and what is inside you and how they interact which I think the anthropologist de facto learns from a series of field work experience, which most clinicians learn from the practice of being clinicians, which I think the field-oriented sociologist learns by doing it and may later deny that it can be segmented as interviewing and non-verbal, so in that sense I agree with the holistic.  I do not think there is any magic to it.  I think it is an experience-based apprenticeship kind of thing.  You have to do it and senior people can point things out to you that you may have missed, you have to work at it.  It is a learned trainable skill to go out and observe what is really out there.   
Peter Blanck:  Do you take your students with you occasionally, or how do you develop training methods for them?
Ed Schein:  I send students out and try to create training experiences for themselves, where they will be put into observer situations.  So, for example, we do something that actually, Dick Walton and I here developed years ago for a workshop, something we call an “Empathy exercise”.  We asked people to go out and in pairs and think first of all of someone who is most different from themselves, as a pair, which itself is kind of an interesting creative process.  Then go to find such a person and spend as many hours as it takes with that person, to see whether you can really feel what it would be like to be in that person’s shoes.  People get very anxious and nervous and say what am I going to do and how am I going to talk to that person, but every group we ever sent out has come up with some really interesting ideas of whom to go see, and has somehow managed it.  They take people out to dinner, they follow them around, they get into their world and then they have to write up and talk about what kind of experience it was from both the point of view of that individual and what they experienced in trying to develop that empathy.  If you did that three or four times, and if you sent people out to interview, and then I like to send them out into organizations just to observe, like going into two different supermarkets from two different chains and see if you can see any differences or go into a dozen bank lobbies and try to infer something about those organizations just from visible cues.  Talk to people.  When the recruiters come around and give you their sale pitch in the business school, figure out some clever questions to ask them that will break them out of the sales pitch and get them to tell you something real.  For example, one question like that is to ask the recruiter to talk about his own career.  How does he happen to be in recruiting?  Why is he going around to the business schools giving these sales talks?  It is surprising how sometimes the person then drops the sales facade and starts talking to you.  I think there are a lot of skills like that but they are skills that are based on sociological theory and knowing a lot of about the nature of human interaction.  Again, it is not just good journalism, it is a trained theoretically based set of observation skills that are involved here.  I would advocate taking psychology courses, taking sociology, taking anthropology as a theoretical base for doing organizational research.
Peter Blanck:  In terms of an undergraduate course, an undergraduate sociology course, would you mix in these training exercises with basic theory, readings, etc., in developing a course for undergraduates?
Ed Schein:  Absolutely.  I teach a course, but it is actually for graduate students, but they are first-exposure kinds of students so they are operating at a very elementary level and what we do is, we read a lot of interpersonal dynamics theory and go out and do these exercises and read some of the sociology of human interaction, so that they have a good theoretical understanding of exchange theory, “dramaturgical” theory, of how one would analyze interpersonal and group events and then we move into group dynamics and they meet in a group every week and analyze their own behavior taking turns being observers, we use video taping to let the group look at itself, that is very powerful, but it is this combination to me of theory and practice that really produces the results.
Peter Blanck:  In terms of the actual presentation or the write-up, some people would say the write-up is influenced by the audience, you are projecting to and that is certainly true, but I think maybe from what I am hearing from you, saying the write-up would be even more influenced by the theory or the theory that you are coming from, the theoretical base you are operating.  That might set it aside from journalism, sensational journalism or interesting journalism for that matter....
Ed Schein:  In my experience that really proved itself to me that if I can go back again to the Korean prisoners of war.  Everyone else happened to be a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist or social worker.  I was the only social psychologist there, so I got curious about the social organization of these camps and I had a lot of theory in my head.  I started to ask people to tell me what happened to them, not in terms of psychodynamics, but in terms of what did they do, how did they organize the camp?  Were there any leaders?  That produced an article that really hit, because it was a description of the social organization of the Chinese indoctrination methods and essentially a social-psychological argument, which at that time when it was first published in 1956, was unique, because nobody knew what went on these camps and I had not gotten myself pre-occupied with what had gone on inside people’s heads, but merely focused on the social organization of the camps and that is clearly due to my theoretical background, so I couldn’t agree more that it is the theory you come with that really structures what you look at, what you ask and in the end what you write about.
Peter Blanck:  What sort of things are you working on currently and generally and what sort of things to do you hope to do in the future?  How do you hope to develop your process, theoretical and experimental process further in the future?
Ed Schein:  At the level of data-gathering, I am just continuing to do what I have been describing - to try to learn from the opportunities that are provided to me by primarily consultation kinds of things, but my focus has shifted away from group and organizational dynamics in the sort of here and now to really try and understand the concept of organizational culture, because more and more I am struck by the fact that you can’t understand what is happening in the here and now without knowing the historical antecedents of where that group or where those people have been.  We have gotten very interested in the origin of groups and companies.  The work with entrepreneurs, and with family firms has made us aware how much the value system and the basic assumptions of the founders of companies get built into the structures and processes of those companies and we are also getting increasingly aware that these basic assumptions, beliefs and values really dictate and constrain what the organization does, but often without awareness on the part of either the participants or the outsiders looking in, so I am trying to translate a lot of the sort of more formal anthropology and the understanding that we have gotten of culture in the larger sense and bring that into the domain of looking at organizational culture, trying to decipher the underlying assumptions that managers make about the nature of truth, about their relationship to the environment, their basic assumptions about people and relationships, to see how those were formed and how those effect their present day-to-day behavior.  It is very difficult to do and again I find I need theory, just last night I was reading a paper on semiotics - the science of how people give signs.  If I can just give an anecdote, the funeral director, for example, as someone that has been recently studied more, is very concerned with presenting a scene that will be natural and smooth, so something like the way in which the body is laid out in the casket is very much a process of managing the right kinds of symbols and signs.  The position of the body, the cosmetics, the clothing that are put on are all very carefully designed to look natural and as life-like as possible in order to minimally disturb the relatives, in order to make it a smooth event that will not be too emotionally upsetting and that can all be studied in a sense from the cultural semiotic point of view and unless you take that point of view, you can’t really understand some of what the funeral director does.  Now, what if we were to take that to a stockholder's meeting and claim that that is a very similar kind of process.  There are executives who are trying to manage themselves and the meeting and the process to create a certain impression of organizational health, of profitability, optimism and so on.  How do they do it?  What signs and symbols do they manipulate?  I think there are very fruitful areas of research there that are beginning to intrigue me more and more, which also illustrates a lot of field research you don’t need access or entry.  The events are happening in front of your eyes, if you know how to decipher them.
Peter Blanck:  One thing that stands out is you mentioned early in that answer, often the people are not aware of the processes that are going on.  Maybe you can talk a little more about not only why they are not aware, but how that has evolved?  Why do you think they are not aware?  
Ed Schein:  I view both the concept of personality and the concept of culture as solutions to prior problems -that is, the person as they evolve their personality and their defenses in order to solve the particular problems that they had as a child, etc., of surviving their environment.  Similarly the organization develops its assumptions about we do best with high quality products or we do best with low cost products or whatever, if these initial problem solving attempts work, and get confirmed, and continue to work, I think what happens is people begin to take them for granted.  If we’ve had a string of ten successful large cars and that is what the consumers wanted, we begin to take it for granted that the consumer wants large cars and that is the nature of our business.  Because it has worked and has worked repeatedly, we have forgotten that at one time, it was only a possible solution rather than the only solution, but we begin to believe in the things that work as being part of nature.  Rather than an option, so it is not necessarily that these things are unavailable to consciousness, they can be surfaced, but something that works for me, day after day, after day, I take it for granted, I cease to think about it and unless someone challenges me on it, there is no incentive for me to surface it.

Peter Blanck:  This may be a little off the track, Chris spoke the other day, he talks about the single loop and the double loop, processes, where the double loop are really....
Ed Schein:  Checking your own assumptions.
Peter Blanck:  Is that similar?
Ed Schein:  Absolutely.  I think his model of double loop learning and what I am talking about surfacing your assumptions, so you can examine them and possibly change them, are essentially this same idea.  I think we are both finding how difficult that is, double loop learning is very hard, because it is hard to even get the person to pay attention to that.  Changing an assumption which may have served me very well for X years, is going to be very difficult, because it is going to be hard for me to accept the fact that the environment has changed, or that something is different or that I am really having some negative consequences, just as we are now seeing in the auto industry, how hard it is for them to change their assumptions about what the consumer wants, what is the right kind of a car, how important this short run financial results.  At the national level, we have this problem with our sense of time.  We have always been a short run culture in terms of our planning cycles and we are discovering that the reasons some other cultures do better is because they are able to take a longer time horizon, but the reason we don’t or won’t is because we have always been successful with short time horizons, so just because somebody says you should do it differently is not going to change the cultural element.
Peter Blanck:  A very general question, I just want to know what you find most personally satisfying about what you do.  Can you talk a little bit about what you are doing in the future and what you are doing now, and any general comments you may have in terms of how you would like to see this field go in the future?
Ed Schein:  I love that question, because I think it is the right question in terms of enjoyment.  I think we should enjoy our work.  For me, the enjoyment and why this process is exciting for me is the insight and the discovery of how things really work.  I think one of the things that plagues the field of organizations is that you can read a book and not have the slightest sense of how things really work.  You read about centralization and decentralization, formalization, but it gives you no feeling for what goes on and I find if you just observe carefully with the theoretical frame of reference and really let yourself experience organizations, you suddenly discover real insights.  You discover how organizational politics work.  You discover what power is really all about.  You see incidents.  You see how it works.  So, you then go back to some of the traditional variables like centralization which is a valid variable, but once you know what that really means when a company says we’ve got to decentralize, we have to push profit responsibility out into the field.  What agony that is in terms of delegation and loosening controls and changing people’s jobs.  It gives you a totally different feeling about it, than if you simply read that when the environment changes in a certain way, that puts on pressure for decentralization.  For me that is very important, that personal insight, that sense of understanding that I really know what is going on and I think that is where the field needs to go.  I am convinced that we have gone way too far into operationalizing everything, trying to cram everything into a traditional experimental model, dehydrating the variables to the point where we may have weak relationships between things that we do not understand.  I’d rather have a sense of understanding and suspend generalization at this point.  I think just as clinical psychology needed years and years of real observation and a few Freuds to put things into better frameworks.  I think the field of organizations needs its Freuds and people who really from the years and years of observing come up with better variables, better insights that enable us all to see more clearly.
Peter Blanck:  Is there anything else that you want to talk about that we have not touched upon?
Ed Schein:  I feel that this has been a very good interview in the sense that I have gotten all my biases out.  Can I get an unedited version of that tape for my own use?

Master's Series on Field Research 		12