Fieldwork in Business Contexts

Go-along interviews, also known as walk-along interviews, involve interviewers and interviewees moving through an environment that has relevance for the specific interview in question. These types of interviews are useful in many different business contexts. From a communication perspective, this form of interviewing also represents the most extreme form of interviewing practice. The physical environment effectively becomes a participant in the developing interview, shaping the interview by “suggesting” new topics or imposing thematic constraints on the interview. Any transcript reflects this shaping through references to its wider world. From the perspective of communication, the physical environment—natural or built—imposes specific situations with respect to communication that can, in turn, be used to trigger certain factual and narrative canonical genres. These communicative situations link to relevant textual strategies and canonical genres as well as situational information that can be recovered. They also provide engagement practices for go-along interviews and interviewing.