The Past Speaks

Dr Stephanie Decker, Dr Carola Wolf
Prerequisites:

This course is targeting PhD students and academics with an interest in qualitative approaches to management and organization studies. We will discuss different traditions and templates for designing qualitative research, data collection and analytical strategies, and publishing results in management journals. The course requires all participants to have a basic understanding of qualitative research methodologies including basic research designs, data collection strategies and analytical techniques (e.g. Flick, 2009; Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Course

Description:

This course will discuss different traditions and templates for designing qualitative research, data collection and analysis strategies, and publishing results in management journals, with a special focus on process‐based studies (Langley & Abdallah, 2011). Qualitative research is now regularly published in top management journals, including those where qualitative studies used to be less common. Alongside this trend there has been an ongoing formalization of qualitative methodologies to fulfil the requirement to show that a consistent and rigorous methodology was applied, in line with the underlying epistemological assumptions such as positivist, interpretive and critical perspectives (Gephart, 2004). We will discuss different methodological approaches and templates for collecting and analysing qualitative data, and for effectively communicating research results. Selected approaches include grounded theory and the Gioia methodology (Gioia et al., 2013), strategies for making sense of process data identified by Langley (1999), comparative case analysis as introduced by Eisenhardt (e.g. Eisenhardt, 1989; Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007), historical analysis and documentary analysis (Rowlinson, 2004; Rowlinson et al., 2014), and extended case method (Wadham and Warren, 2014). In the mornings we will briefly introduce and evaluate different approaches, and discuss published paper exemplars applying a particular perspective, while the afternoon will focus on applying methodologies, evaluating strengths and weaknesses from the individual researchers’ points of view, and identifying publication options.
Length:

2 days

Day 1:

Morning: Introduction to specific methodologies and analytical techniques for process data; Afternoon: workshop in which participants will discuss application of methodologies and analyse the use of different analytical strategies in published paper exemplars .

Day 2:

Morning: Introduction to different approaches and templates for communicating results of process‐based studies; Afternoon: workshop in which participants will discuss application of methodologies and possible publication strategies; discussion of published paper exemplars in terms of templates (“boilerplates”) for publication as well as identifying the right journal or special issue, how to use referencing to guide editors towards “friendly” reviewers.

For more details, see here.