The 2nd International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry May 2006

Citation

Learmonth, M. and Humphreys, M. (2006), "The 2nd International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry May 2006", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 1 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qrom.2006.29801baf.003

The 2nd International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry May 2006

Reflections on the value for organization and management scholars

In May 2006 we attended the Second congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI). The previous year we had attended the first congress, and had been so impressed that we decided to write a paper exploring why we had found the experience so rich (Humphrey and Learmonth, 2006). Our paper focused on the contents of the first conference, along with, perhaps more importantly, some of its less tangible aspects – its atmosphere – an atmosphere that we have yet to experience replicated at a management conference. So in this short piece we outline some of our thoughts about why we think future conferences could be valuable for qualitative researchers in organization and management.

It was the interdisciplinary focus on methodology that originally attracted us to the QI Congress. We both teach qualitative research methods to business school postgraduates, and share an interest in research approaches that some of our business school colleagues have been known to describe as “weird” “off the wall” or simply (if less poetically) “unscientific”. However, at QI our mutual interest in autoethnography, for example (Humphreys, 2005; Learmonth, n.d.), would be regarded as part of the mainstream in an arena that encourages reflexivity, performance and self-disclosure.

The impressive array of intriguingly titled workshops and sessions meant that the main problem was deciding what we should attend and what we had to miss. This was a pretty novel experience for us – at some management conferences we've attended, the only session we've willingly gone to is the one at which we are presenting our own paper! The QI programme, by contrast, was littered with engaging words like “critical” “ethical” “political” “narrative” “race” “gender” and “discourse”. Individual sessions with titles such as “The cacophony of silenced voices” or “Emergent knowledge in acts of writing: writing against the grain of dominant discourses” provided welcome ideas for (sometimes) jaded academics like us, and we found that we were going from one session to another without losing enthusiasm! Needless to say, we both gained useful ideas for our own work, not only from the discussions around our own papers, but also from participation in other sessions.

Furthermore, according to the welcome from Norman Denzin, the Congress Director:

... [p]resenters take up alternative conceptions of research, ethics and science. They entertain new ways of decolonizing traditional methodologies, ... [t]hey trouble performative, feminist, indigenous, queer, democratic and participatory forms of critical ethical inquiry ... [to] advance the goals of social justice and progressive politics in this new century (Denzin, 2006, p. iv).

Indeed, the political commitment of researchers taking radical methodological stances within their own field or institution was a stimulating and common experience in many workshops. But what was especially refreshing was that these sorts of values seemed to us not merely to be talked about, they were also embodied in the acts of most conference participants and in their apparent lifestyles. So, for example, and in contrast to the typical management conference, we saw little evidence of the “big names” in QI acting as if they were Hollywood movie stars. Neither were lesser names trying to become bigger names through attempts to “network” with them. Perhaps it was not entirely surprising then, that the majority of participants were women, and, in another contrast to most management conferences, many of the conference goers were from ethnic minorities, and others had a variety of unconventional lifestyles. Certainly, there was not a business suit in sight!

So we feel that it is possible to read the QI Congress as a critique of many of the management conferences we have attended in the past – including, incidentally, some of the ones that describe themselves as critical. These conferences could appear, after QI, to be primarily concerned with (masculine) display and career development, rather than with their ostensible commitment to intellectual pursuit (Burrell, 1993). Indeed, what the atmosphere at QI brought into clearer focus for us is that a concern about career progression for its own sake (not, of course, unique to management academics) can easily become insidiously corrosive both intellectually and morally. For academics, careerism seems often to lead, to an obsession with where someone has published (rather than with what they have said) or even a desire to publish merely to add to one's curriculum vitae (rather than because one has something to say). Such attitudes, under some circumstances, might even make us willing to sacrifice our personal or political convictions for career gain (Collins and Wray-Bliss, 2005). Unfortunately, we detect such careerist tendencies in ourselves. Our hope is that exposure at QI to something different will act as an antidote, if only by reminding us that we like ourselves much more when we do not act in careerist ways!

But perhaps we are being naïve about the QI Congress. Maybe similar sorts of status-obsessed, careerist behaviour is as rife here as it is at management conferences, we were just looking in the wrong places. And there were slightly worrying, if subtle, changes in the second congress compared to the first. For example, in 2006, books and software were being sold, and publisher sponsorship was rather more prominent than in 2005. Such developments suggest at least the possibility of the sort of creeping commercialisation that success often attracts. This entails risk of compromising the goals of social justice and progressive politics that the organizers hold dear.

Mark Learmonth and Michael HumphreysNottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK