Media Review: The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication

Abstract

Handbooks capturing a particular segment of a field have become abundant on the academic landscape of late. Publishers have come to favor this form because they're profitable vehicles, despite the challenging economics of the publishing business. But their proliferation should urge us to pause and ask about the need for any additional handbooks. That's the question I brought to reading the Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication.Any skepticism I harbored evaporated immediately. The expert guidance of editors Boris Brummans, Bryan Taylor, and Anu Sivunen makes this an essential volume, one that does significantly more than mark the maturity of the (sub-)field, as the late James Barker celebrates in his Foreword. The handbook is clearly aimed at an organizational communication readership, but it is equally essential for (and speaks meaningfully to) the broader management and organization studies field-as reflected in Silvia Gherardi's Afterword. In this review, I'll detail why I believe that both audiences, overlapping as they are, will benefit from this masterfully crafted book.In their Introduction, the editors draw attention to the contemporary dominance of qualitative methods in the organizational communication field. They note that the most recent edition of the Sage Handbook of Organizational Communication (Putnam & Mumby, 2014) featured a section devoted to research methods, and none of its four chapters were focused on quantitative approaches. Additionally, an internet search by the editors found that the amount of qualitative organizational communication scholarship is about 150% that of quantitative work. (I conducted a similar search using "organization studies" in place of "organizational communication," and the ratio was almost exactly the same.) The amplification of qualitative methods represents something of a sea change because, mere decades ago, the field's dominant voices relegated researchers who pursued alternatives to quantitative reduction to the sidelines. There is, in other words, a need to reflect on scholarship built on qualitative foundations while also providing scaffolding for its future, which is the dual task the editors tackled.In a word, this handbook is superb. It gathers, for the first time in a single source, the wide array of onto-epistemological stances undergirding existing methodologies. It also provides a compendium of data collection and analysis techniques while imagining the futures to which scholarship working from these assumptive bases must speak.