Doing Critical Management Research

Citation

Hoe, S. (2002), "Doing Critical Management Research", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 23 No. 2, pp. 104-106. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.2002.23.2.104.1

Qualitative and critical research perspectives have increasingly been applied to the study of organisations. These perspectives are clearly distinguished from more functionalist, managerially driven research. While many researchers know quite a lot about qualitative research methods and about critical management theory, few have carefully integrated these understandings. Consequently, critical research methods have not been carefully developed. In practice, most researchers with a critical bent conduct a qualitative study and later add critical concerns.

Contemporary management researchers must consider the constructed nature of people and reality, the problematic status of discourse, and the fluid boundaries of knowledge and action in the contemporary world. In this book, Alvesson and Deetz suggest a rethinking of how the basic ideas of critical theory, postmodernism and related critical orientation may inspire qualitative research. They also show how methodology may benefit from an ambitious incorporation of critical‐philosophical insights.

The book is divided into eight chapters.

Chapter One begins with an introduction to the critical research perspective.

Chapter Two provides an overview of alternative social science research perspectives and the differences between the various orientations to management research. In this chapter, the authors discuss how critical orientations deviate from mainstream, functional‐normative and interpretative orientations and some possible values guiding critical research.

Chapter Three presents a critical overview of mainstream quantitative and conventional qualitative methodology. The critique focuses on the over‐reliance on the robustness of “data” and the denial of the constructive, interpretative nature of all empirical material. In so doing, Alvesson and Deetz point out the basic limitations and shortcomings found in most common methods employed for management and social research. They suggest that the challenge is to develop a way of thinking which is not overburdening, a method with naïve expectation and unrealistic purposes or which tries to interpret all empirical material in terms of multiple meanings.

In Chapter Four, the authors more fully discuss the critical tradition developed in critical theory and postmodernism as possible responses to difficulties in conventional quantitative and qualitative research. Their discussion is on the differences between these theoretical positions and how these positions can productively complement one another.

Chapter Five offers some general methodological guidelines of relevance for all qualitative research and outlines some principles that further frame the kind of critical research the authors are advocating. The authors have developed a set of new general rules on the level of reflection and a guiding framework rather than on the level of procedure, protocol and technique, for method.

In Chapter Six, Alvesson and Deetz provide a more detailed framework on the actual process of critical research. The authors identify three elements in critical research: insight, critique, and transformation redefinition. These three elements are illustrated at length in a case study on social relations and hierarchy in an industrial company.

In Chapter Seven, they explore two interpretative tactics in critical research: de‐familiarisation and dissensus reading. The authors also investigate some of the difficulties within critical management and social research, including the problem of “hypercritique” involving unfair descriptions and other problems associated with a biased negativity. They further discuss the possibility of making critical research less anti‐management and more relevant for organisational practitioners.

Chapter Eight focuses on four issues of specific interest for critical management research: access; reflective approaches to interviewing; the possi‐bilities and pitfalls of ethnographies, as well as a more concentrated form of ethnographic work that the authors labelled as partial ethnography.

This book is about how one may think creatively, reflectively and critically in qualitative management research. It provides a detailed discussion of the practice of doing critical research in organisations, utilizing both qualitative research processes and critical theories of organisations. However, this is a moderately advanced work and not an introductory book for the novice. It is suitable and recommended for all those involved in interpreting and researching contemporary institutions and organisations.