The "Qualitative Inquiry in the Business and Management Field" symposium at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Citation

Lee, B. (2006), "The "Qualitative Inquiry in the Business and Management Field" symposium at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 1 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/qrom.2006.29801baf.005

The "Qualitative Inquiry in the Business and Management Field" symposium at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Introduction

There were around two hundred sessions at the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI); in most, four or five papers were presented. However, the "Qualitative inquiry in the Business and Management Field" was the only session dedicated wholly to qualitative research in the different management disciplines. This under-representation appeared to be more attributable to qualitative researchers in management failing to look beyond their normal audiences, rather than any unwillingness of the congress to provide a space for people conducting qualitative research in management. The session was conceived and co-ordinated by Cathy Cassell and Gillian Symon following their attendance at the first QI congress in the previous year when they had met other participants in this session, Michael Humphreys and Mark Learmonth from Nottingham University. Apart from the aforementioned, many of the other authors and presenters – David Boje, Anna Buehring, Ann Cunliffe (who presented a paper with Karen Locke), Christopher Humphrey, Phil Johnson, Bill Lee and Brendan O'Dwyer – were associated with Cathy Cassell and Gillian Symon's establishment of this Emerald journal, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management. The session, thus, created a mix of research-active staff conducting qualitative research in the management fields in the UK and Europe and leading qualitative researchers from the USA.

The symposium sought to draw attention to the issues around qualitative research in the field of management research. Notably, many of the topic discussed reflected issues considered at the conference more generally. The theme of the congress was "Ethics, Politics and Human Subject Research in the New Millennium" and an important concern was how Institutional Review Boards involved in the ethical regulation of research at institutions and at federal level in the US were inappropriate for qualitative research projects and could hinder the development of qualitative research. Correspondingly, the different papers in the session focused on a variety of institutional constraints faced by qualitative researchers in management and the desire to improve the application of qualitative research methods within different epistemological traditions.

The session

Cathy Cassell opened by outlining the motivations for the session before reprising a Cassell et al. (2006) paper. She outlined how an aim of that team's (Cassell et al., 2003) research project was to establish the usefulness of qualitative research in the perceptions of "epistemological gatekeepers" such as journal editors and funding bodies, qualitative researchers, doctoral programme leaders and practitioners. After discussing the backdrop of extant evidence of biases towards positivist and quantitative research in some leading journals, weaknesses and omissions in the training of qualitative researchers and the lack of awareness of qualitative research by some practitioners, Cathy Cassell reported findings on how respondents in the above groups perceived qualitative research methods and barriers to their use. Expressed simply, those findings revealed an absence of agreement on what constitutes qualitative research, a tendency to see quantitative data as more reliable and unsullied by researcher's shortcomings, inappropriate length restrictions and assessment criteria applied to qualitative journal submissions and weaknesses in the teaching of qualitative methods to new researchers. Their conclusions included the need for "contingent criteria" to assess the value of different qualitative contributions by appropriate assessments and the need for continuous training in different types of research methods throughout an academic career.

The paper by Lee et al. (2006) also considered the impact of institutionalized biases towards quantitative research and explored how this might materialize in the ideas of quality used in different countries' research funding regimes.

Taking the UK's research assessment exercise (RAE) as an example, it used a ranking of journals – in which research-active UK academics in accounting and finance had ranked the longer-standing, purely quantitative, finance journals – it explored the potential impact of taking journal quality as a proxy for the quality of an article as a medium for allocation of research funds. The paper explored whether the rankings awarded to submissions by the Accounting and Finance Panel in the 2001 RAE could be justified by reference to the proportion of articles in those submissions that appeared in all of the journals ranked highly by UK academics. One potential interpretation was that some submissions benefited disproportionately either from having a small number of articles in the most highly ranked finance journals that published purely positivistic, quantitative research, or from the willingness of more recently established highly rated journals to publish both quantitative and qualitative research which gave a greater number of publication opportunities to researchers employing quantitative methods. As the grades awarded by the RAE panels were accompanied by differences in research funds awarded by the Government, the RAE may be encouraging the development of quantitative research at the expense of qualitative research.

Humphreys and Learmonth's (2006) paper also looked at how institutional settings were more or less supportive of different academic traditions. They discussed how the contrasts in culture provided by Academy of Management (AoM) conferences and the QI congress were more or less supportive of qualitative research in management. Humphreys and Learmonth compared the 2004 AoM conference in the "party town" of New Orleans and the first QI congress at the mid-western "bible belt" town of Urbana Champaign in Illinois and outlined how, paradoxically, the former tended to complement and enforce the dominant, conservative quantitative traditions of management research in America and the UK. Using photographic evidence and their own impressions of the two conferences, Humphreys and Learmonth highlighted how the AoM conference was fused with the managerial, commercial and formally hierarchical characteristics associated with the organizations to where many management students will head, which tended to promote a conservativism that is not conducive to experimentation with qualitative methods and papers in management research. By contrast, the interdisciplinary nature of the QI congress lent itself to a more informal, open, academic environment, although few management researchers had attended the initial event. Mike Humphreys and Mark Learmonth also examined how the conservative nature of the management disciplines' superstructure of journals and conferences was transmuted into academic institutions giving greater weight to the conferences and journals that accommodate "hard" quantitative research and discouraging qualitative research by ridiculing it as equivalent to "basket weaving".

Cunliffe and Locke's (2006) paper moved the discussion onto ways of seeking meaning in qualitative research. Starting from a critique of Giddens (1991) work on the double hermeneutic whereby knowledge and action is continually constituted through a process of generalized reflection, they instead use Ricoeur's (1992) work to explain how reflective mediation – both on identity and sameness with others and on selfhood and difference from others in specific, situated moments of interaction – is used by social actors to create a narrative identity for themselves. Their account of narrative identity and reflective mediation was illustrated by Locke drawing examples of her research with Executive Partners in a Business School in the USA. The respondents constructed their narrative identity in their reports of both similarities and differences between themselves, the researcher and other members of faculty and in their reflections on their understanding of the role that they had created for themselves. Notably, going beyond the double hermeneutic involves exploring how the narrative identity of the researcher also emerges within the research process, and can be expressed as an autoethnograpy. The site of the research raised an additional issue about how to address the ethical dilemma involved in distinguishing between information that is available for public consumption from that which is not when the colleagues who are being interviewed to generate data also provide emotionally-charged expressions of dissatisfaction.

Boje's (2006) presentation was based on his forthcoming book (Boje, n.d.). It challenged the idea that a story could only be used to convey a chronological account of a self-contained event. Instead, David Boje outlined a typology of four different understandings of a story in organizational research, each of which may be differentiated from the others by the extent to which different parts are combined into a whole account and subjected to sensemaking by the participants/story-teller. The first – which he described as "finalized retrospection narrative" – involved the presentation of a chronological, unified sequence of perceived causally-related episodes that has been created through a process of retrospective sensemaking. David Boje described the second understanding of a story as "unfinalized retrospection narrative". In this, different events are organized into a sequence around a theme, but which has no ending although sensemaking may be introduced by participants to re-narrate fragments of those events into an un-finalized account. The third – which David Boje described as "finalized antecedent story" – involves organizational members grouping events together into a finalized, holistic cognition before any process of sensemaking has taken place. The fourth – which David Boje terms "unfinalized antecedent story" – recognizes events as separate and unfinished incidents that lend themselves to various interpretations and precedes the sensemaking involved in the production of narratives. David Boje emphasised the importance of the different potential types of story for an understanding of the nature of their contribution to organizational research.

Concluding comment

The session had many merits. It provided a space for people to discuss the issues facing qualitative researchers in management and it helped to highlight that many of those challenges and opportunities had international parallels and were shared by people in other disciplines. There were, however, so many issues to discuss that one symposium allowed insufficient time. While it is desirable to address this issue by having two symposia at the next congress, the theme of many of the papers presented suggests that qualitative researchers are caught in a double-bind situation. On the one hand, there is a desire to establish qualitative research on an equal standing with more positivistic, quantitative research by ensuring that conferences such as QI are as well-attended and as successful as possible, not least to allow lessons to be learned from qualitative researchers in other disciplines and disseminated quickly to researchers in management. On the other hand, management researchers who use qualitative techniques may experience some compulsion to use the limited resources available at their institutions to attend the most "mainstream" events, even though their papers will be marginal to the main body of work presented there and they will receive less advice on how to develop their research.

Bill LeeThe University of Sheffield Management School, Sheffield, UK