From Convention to Alternatives: Rethinking Qualitative Research in Management Scholarship
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Author | Pawan Budhwar,Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12464 |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 32, 3–6 (2021)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12464
From Convention to Alternatives:
Rethinking Qualitative Research
in Management Scholarship
Emmanuella Plakoyiannaki1and Pawan Budhwar2
1Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, Vienna,
1090, Austria 2Aston Business School, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK
Corresponding author email: p.s.budhwar@aston.ac.uk, emmanuella.plakoyiannaki@univie.ac.at
Introduction
The eld of management is a rich, open and
complex area of scholarship that allows for
various philosophical, theoretical and method-
ological perspectives. Traditionally, the British
Journal of Management (BJM) has embraced this
diversity and proactivelyshaped research practices
(through empirical and methodological contribu-
tions) to promote different genres and styles of
writing and theorizing. As a result, qualitative re-
search in BJM proliferates, providing further op-
portunities to explain management phenomena in
the research environments in which they naturally
occur from the perspective of those who experi-
ence them (i.e. key actors). The beauty of qual-
itative research is that it draws from a range of
paradigmatic lenses, methods, means of inference
and theorizing styles. Despite its promising diver-
sity, qualitative inquiry is often reduced to a sin-
gle template or disciplinary convention,stiing au-
thors’ creativity and hindering novel theorizing in
management scholarship (Pratt, Sonenshein and
Fieldman, 2020). While conventions can be useful
for legitimizing academic discourses, they are also
meant to be problematized so as to help scholars
capture changing phenomena and drive the eld
forward.
The purpose of this editorial is to offer alterna-
tives on how to rethink qualitative research and
question the disciplinary convention in manage-
ment scholarship. In doing so, we extend recent
discussions on revisiting conventions by address-
ing four key challenges confronted by qualitative
researchers. These are linked to the role of th eory,
sampling practices,quality criteria and theorizing
styles in qualitative research. Our aim is to inspire
prospective authors to design and write quali-
tative submissions, moving beyond conventions
and drawing on alternatives that foster novel
theorizing.
The role of theory in qualitative
research: From induction to abduction
Conventionally, qualitative research has been as-
sociated with induction. Driven by Glaser and
Strauss’s (1967) grounded theory and the legiti-
macy crisis of qualitative inquiry in the eld of
management studies, scholars have strongly em-
braced inductive theory-building by allowing con-
ceptual categories to emerge from data. While the
label of ‘induction’ has been loosely used and re-
visited in numerous contexts, it has largely invited
researchers not to constrain themselves by pre-
existing theory at the outset of a study limiting the
theorizing potential of qualitative research to ex-
ploratory or discovery purposes. Despite the con-
siderable inuence of inductive theory-building in
qualitative scholarship, critics from different dis-
ciplines and philosophical traditions suggest that
in order to develop a richer understanding of the
world, weneed to connect to prior theory (Johnson
and Duberley, 2015).
© 2021 British Academy of Management and Wiley Periodicals LLC. Published by JohnWiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Gars-
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