This article, titled “FROM THE EDITORS: Qualitative Research and the Academy of Management Journal,” was authored by Robert P. Gephart, Jr., of the University of Alberta, and published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2004. Gephart was specifically invited by Sara Rynes, the incoming editor for the journal, to write this editorial due to his extensive experience as a long-serving, award-winning reviewer of qualitative research for AMJ and his status as a world-renowned qualitative author.
The editorial serves as a “minitutorial” aimed at improving the quality of qualitative research submissions to AMJ, thereby enhancing their prospects for positive revise-and-resubmit decisions and ultimate acceptance. It was prompted by a recognized challenge that many authors, despite having interesting data, struggle with analyzing it to its full potential, partly due to the predominance of quantitative methods training. The piece is intended for anyone involved in producing, reviewing, or attempting to glean greater insights from qualitative research.
The article comprehensively reviews several critical aspects of qualitative research:
- Defining Qualitative Research: It characterizes qualitative research as a multimethod, interpretive, and naturalistic approach that emphasizes qualities of entities, processes, and naturally occurring meanings. It contrasts this with quantitative research’s focus on measurement and causal relations, highlighting qualitative research’s inductive, interpretive, narrative, descriptive, and process-oriented nature, often relying on words and talk. A key value of qualitative research is its focus on describing and understanding actual human interactions, meanings, and processes in real-life organizational settings, a domain often neglected by quantitative research.
- The Methodological Importance of Theory: Gephart underscores the necessity of aligning methodologies with theoretical perspectives. He outlines three research traditions:
- Positivism and Postpositivism: These perspectives assume an objective reality, seeking to uncover truth or true reality (probabilistically in postpositivism) and relying on methods for falsifying hypotheses and comparing facts.
- Interpretive Research: This tradition adopts a relativist stance, focusing on understanding local intersubjective realities and the production of meanings used by social actors in real settings. It aims to describe how diverse meanings influence understanding and constructs social science concepts from actors’ “concepts-in-use”.
- Critical Postmodernism: This combines critical theory and postmodern thought, assuming value-laden realities with contradictions. Its goal is to uncover hidden interests, contradictions, and power relations, leading to critique, transformation, and emancipation. It emphasizes historical insights, dialogic methods, and textual analysis to reveal structured inequalities. The article emphasizes the value and welcome of submissions from all three perspectives at AMJ, though interpretive and critical postmodern research are less common than positivist approaches.
- Well-Developed Methodologies: Gephart provides an overview of various qualitative methodologies, stressing the importance of explicit and rigorous methods to systematically analyze data. These include:
- Case Studies: Describing a single event or unit of analysis, often combining archival, documentary, and other data sources.
- Interviews: Situated, face-to-face interactions, including ethnographic interviews, long interviews, and focus groups.
- Observational Methods: Such as participant observation, ethnography (immersion in culture), ethnomethodology (study of methods used to construct social understanding), conversational analysis, and systematic self-observation.
- Grounded Theorizing: An iterative, inductive process of constructing theory from observations using theoretical sampling and constant comparative analysis.
- Textual Analysis: Analyzing texts using ideas from hermeneutics and literary criticism, including semiotics, narrative analysis, rhetorical analysis, and computer-aided textual analysis.
- Challenges and Opportunities for AMJ Submissions: The editorial identifies common problems in qualitative submissions, such as papers not being embedded in ongoing research programs, inadequate literature reviews, unclear goals or research questions, ill-defined concepts, and underspecified methodologies. Specific methodological issues include a lack of “thick, detailed descriptions,” insufficient inclusion of raw data, failure to systematically compare and contrast examples, and presenting findings without adequately explaining their origin from the data. It also calls for better discussion and conclusion sections that revisit research questions and explain broader implications.
Ultimately, Gephart concludes by acknowledging that good qualitative research is difficult, challenging, and often more time-consuming than quantitative research, advocating for its evaluation based on the significance and impact of its contributions rather than sheer volume. He highlights its unique capacity to provide rich insights, thick descriptions, and a deeper understanding of human interactions and social processes, thereby rehumanizing research and theory in management.
APA Reference:
Gephart, R. P., Jr. (2004). From the editors: Qualitative research and the Academy of Management Journal. Academy of Management Journal, 47(4), 454–462.