Reflexive Conversations: Constructing Hermeneutic Designs for Qualitative Management Research

Abstract

Responding to calls to widen the range of qualitative approaches used within management research, this article addresses perceived difficulties in applying hermeneutics to interview based research and suggests ways forward for management researchers to develop their own hermeneutic derived research designs. Firstly, it reviews how tools from the hermeneutic tradition have been utilised, demonstrating specifically how a sub-branch, critical hermeneutics, is particularly well suited to the complexities of management research offering a flexible means of exploring complex research relationships between 'texts', contexts and the researcher.

Constructing Trustworthy Historical Narratives: Criteria, Principles and Techniques

“…16–17) famously stated, ‘when we take up a work of history, our first concerns should not be with the facts it contains but with the historian who wrote it’. It is no surprise, then, that social scientists have expounded source criticism as a vital procedure in producing credible interpretations of historical sources (Bryant, ; Bucheli and Wadhwani, ) and called for close attention to the context of sources (Robinson and Kerr, ).…”

Leveraging Social Networking for Talent Management: An Exploratory Study of Indian Firms

“…Though in HR research it has not been used frequently as a research inquiry method, still, development of new theories on how HR is being practiced, especially in current environments, can be made with the use of grounded theory (Murphy, Klotz, & Kreiner, ). As our research phenomenon (SNSs) lacks a theoretical explanation on the specifics of the usage of SNSs by HR professionals in organizations, the grounded theory approach is expected to allow this to be examined in greater depth, providing insights on the HR strategy of present‐day organizations (see Robinson & Kerr, ). In this study, HR professionals—namely, HR managers, senior HR managers, and HR consultants—were purposefully selected as the sampling frame due to their critical role in providing HR solutions and services in their organizations (applying the “theoretical sampling” strategy following grounded theory approaches; Strauss & Corbin, ).…”

Observing to Coproduce a Collective Narrative: Emplotment of Multiple Parallel Stories

“…Observation is an immersive approach whose principal contribution is the richness of the data collected: in addition to words -and the risk of recreating sense -the researcher can observe interactions and the implicit mechanisms inherent to organizing: "most work practices are so contextualized that people often cannot articulate how they do what they do, unless they are in the process of doing it" (Harper, 1987;Schon, 1983;Suchman, 1987in Barley & Kunda, 2001. One difficulty with observation, identified in the literature review, is that it is often difficult to make sense of all the material collected (Allard-Poesi & Perret, 2004;Czarniawska, 1998;Robinson & Kerr, 2015). In such cases researchers may: (1) be tempted to exclude observation from their methods; Panel 3.…”