This article, together with a companion video, provides a synthesized summary of a Showcase Symposium held at the 2016 Academy of Management Annual Meeting in which prominent scholars—Denny Gioia, Kathy Eisenhardt, Ann Langley, and Kevin Corley—discussed different approaches to theory building with qualitative research. Our goal for the symposium was to increase management scholars’ sensitivity to the importance of theory–method “fit” in qualitative research. We have integrated the panelists’ prepared remarks and interactive discussion into three sections: an introduction by each scholar, who articulates her or his own approach to qualitative research; their personal reflections on the similarities and differences between approaches to qualitative research; and answers to general questions posed by the audience during the symposium. We conclude by summarizing insights gleaned from the symposium about important distinctions among these three qualitative research approaches and their appropriate usages.

____ We would like to thank the editors of the Academy of Management Annals for their support and helpful comments. We also thank the participants in our various topic modeling presentations and reviewers and division organizers (specifically Peer Fiss and Renate Meyer) at the Academy of Management meetings. In addition, we would like to recognize Marc-David Seidel and Christopher Steele from the Interpretive Data Science (IDeaS) group for their role in germinating these ideas, Mike Pfarrer for his comments on a later draft of the paper, and Kara Gehman for her fine-grained edits on next-to-final drafts. Finally, we wish to express our appreciation to our life partners for not only putting up with, but actively discussing this paper as it evolved.

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