Martha S Feldman's invaluable text outlines four key strategies for interpreting qualitative data: ethnomethodology, semiotics, dramaturgy and deconstruction.

The author examines the strengths and weaknesses of each strategy and identifies when to use them. To demonstrate, she applies the techniques of each method to a single data set, highlighting the differences in results.

Introduction
Ethnomethodology
Semiotic Analysis
Dramaturgical Analysis
Deconstruction
Conclusion

Martha S. Feldman (Stanford University PhD, 1983) is the Johnson Chair for Civic Governance and Public Management at the University of California, Irvine.  Her current research on organizational routines explores the role of performance and agency in creating, maintaining, and altering these fundamental organizational phenomena.  Her research on public management examines how we can use our understandings of organizational process to create inclusive management practices.  Her research in qualitative and interpretive methods develops ways of gathering and analyzing data that help researchers open the black boxes they confront in theory and in informants' descriptions.  She is a Senior Editor for Organization Science (as of June 2006), the Book Review Editor for International Public Management Journal, and serves on the editorial boards of Advances in Organizational Studies, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies.  She has written 4 books and dozens of articles on the topics of organization theory, public management and qualitative research methods. She received the Administrative Science Quarterly¿s 2009 award for Scholarly Contribution for her work on organization routines.