Qualitative Research and the Academy of Management Journal

Abstract

I invited Robert Gephart of the University of Alberta to reflect on his observations as a long-serving, award-winning reviewer of qualitative research for A!vII Over the past two and a half years, I have developed a tremendous respect for Bob's keen eye for evaluating qualitative research submissions, and great admiration for the painstaking advice he provides authors about how to improve their work. As a world-renowned qualitative author himself, Bob is in an excellent position to provide observations about how authors might increase the chances of having their qualitative research accepted for publication at AMI In a three-way electronic mail conversation about the challenges and opportunities of qualitative research, Bob, Tom Lee, and I all concluded that many authors with potentially very interesting data sets don't seem to know how to analyze them to their full potential. This is perhaps not surprising, gi ven the clear predominance of quantitative methods and statistics courses over qualitative ones, particularly in North America, as well as the inherently greater subjectivity involved in designing and analyzing qualitative research. As such, we encouraged Bob to provide a bit of a minitutorial-complete with reference citations and examples of high-quality papers that use particular qualitative approaches-in addition to his observations about qualitative research submitted to AMI The result is a longer-than-usual "From the Editors" column. but one that we believe is well worth the extra reading time for anyone interested in producing, reviewing, or attempting to coax greater insights from qualitative research. We are fortunate to have someone with Bob's expertise share his observations, and we hope that his thoughts will prove useful to researchers for many years to come.

Middle managers' knowledge of strategy: antecedents, cognitive accuracy and self-awareness

“…Study 1 was therefore conducted as interpretive research with the goal of describing meanings and understandings of firm strategy as presented in the words, talk and text of top managers (Gephart and Rynes, 2004;Yin, 1994).…”

Coherence and transparency: some advice for qualitative researchers

“…Conboy et al (2012) state that qualitative research aims to empirically investigate a variety of phenomena through qualitative data from a variety of sources, such as interviews, observations, design efforts, interventions, and archival materials. Gephart, (2004) stresses that it studies phenomena where they naturally occur, and it strives to grasp the meanings social actors give them. Thus, Borrego et al (2009, p. 56) emphasises the textual nature of many qualitative data sources and " [...] by its emphasis on the context within which the study occurs [...]".…”

The recycling of electronic waste: regulations and corporate strategies in Brazil and in Europe.

“…Therefore, while the quantitative research has a larger number of representative cases, the qualitative research focus on fewer cases, so that to study them more deeply. Gephart (2004) further explains that a qualitative research usually emphasizes qualities of entities, studying phenomena in the environments in which they naturally occur and using social actors' meanings to understand the phenomena. It is often designed at the time it is being done and requires highly contextualized individual judgments, offering different views of realities that cannot be reduced to few variables.…”

“…It may, for example, result in bases for understanding social processes, examples of important issues and concepts that enrich the field and highlight the human interactions and meanings of a specific phenomenon (GEPHART, 2004).…”

“…According to Gephart (2004), qualitative data may be collected using one or more research approaches, such as studies, interviews, observations, grounded theory, and textual analyses. For the present research, different approaches have been applied so to have a more holistic view on the subject.…”