The researchers took the approach of reading the Denver International Airport Baggage Handling System document (Montealegre et al., 1999) ‘quickly’, as one would when trying to determine a document’s suitability for a more intensive read. This initial reading created an immediate impression and started off the cycles of understanding.
It is at this early phase of understanding development that the value of critical hermeneutics emerges when considering the power and impact that ‘simple’ texts can have. Demeterio (2001) wrote about the potential impacts of text …
... textuality can be infiltrated with power and forces that are formally considered extraneous to it and practically innocuous. Specifically, Marx argued that textuality can be warped by capitalist and class-based ideologies; Nietzsche, by cultural norms; and Freud, by the unconscious. These extraneous powers and forces are capable of penetrating deep into the text, by weaving into its linguistic fabric. Thus, even without the cultural and temporal distances that made romanticist hermeneutics anxious, or even without the differences of life-worlds that bothered both phenomenological and dialectical hermeneutics, there is no guarantee for the reader to be brought side by side with the truth/meaning of a text, because textuality can be veiled by ideology and false consciousness. The goal of this hermeneutic system is to diagnose the hidden pathology of texts and to free them from their ideological distortions.
In the DIA case study, the initial reading takes the reader into a summary of the case and also prepares the preliminary understanding.
The introduction to the case study commences with a summary of the project, describing it as being beset by risks: ‘the scale of the large project size; the enormous complexity of the expanded system; the newness of the technology; the large number of resident entities to be served by the same system; the high degree of technical and project definition uncertainty; and the short time span for completion’ (Montealegre et al., 1999, p. 546). The bylines at the head of the case study say that ‘No airport in the world is as technologically advanced as the Denver International Airport ‘ (Montealegre et al., 1999), and then almost as an aside in the same headline of the case study – ‘It’s dramatic. If your bag [got] on the track, your bag [was] in pieces’.
So before even the preliminary reading has commenced, the reader has already scanned enough of the first page of this study and already the mindset has been seeded with notions of a highly complex project whose technological demands were so complex that it all went off the rails [sic]. The mind of an ‘experienced reader’[2] is by now thinking about what classic project management problems could have led to this disaster.
The understanding that exists at this preliminary cycle is already deeply prejudiced and biased. Questions have already been (subconsciously) set into the researcher’s mind about what specific failure points will be identified and where blame might be allocated. After all, thinks one researcher, ‘had appropriate project management controls been in place and effective, then this disaster simply would not have occurred’.
It is clear in hindsight that the power of the initial read (or should we say – scan) of the main document has set the mood for the interpretation of the remaining document. Thus, if the case study authors’ original intent was to create a negative atmosphere leading to a classical investigation and identification of project management failure, then this was achieved before even the first page was turned.
An initial prejudice had now been set in place.