Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Entrepreneurship

Citation

Holt, R. (2007), "Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Entrepreneurship", International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Vol. 13 No. 4, pp. 252-253. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552550710760021

Whilst words do not change, concepts do. This is particularly the case in the field of entrepreneurship research, which has emerged as one in which different disciplines, world views and methods accompany, compliment and even vie with one another. Qualitative methods represent one such element of the field; a distinct element because entrepreneurship that is investigated and represented is, in the words of Bygrave in the first essay of this collection, a process of becoming not being. Rather than pluck things from life and fix them in isolation, qualitative methods tend to follow things as they are lived. It is no accident that the editors are European where getting at the nuance of lived human experience, in all its messiness, remains an abiding concern for many scholars whose existential intellectual lineage (whether sourced in the angst of Kirkegaard or the reason of Kant) frames meaning and value as being inherently bound within particular, personal and social narratives. The fact that a significant number of contributors are from the US, however, upsets the easily made generalization that the equivalent American tradition is one in which meaning arises from the generalized re‐ordering of life through the presentation of propositionally ordered variables.

The collection is structured as a journey along a vertical line, taking the reader through four sections: from a departure point of ontology, through larger sections on research strategies and data collection and analysis, before arriving at the destination of research assessment and publication. The implicit prescription of this line, however, is often not followed; researchers also take the journey the other way round. Where do you want to publish? What kind of research has status? What kind of researcher do you want to be? Of course answering these questions might lead researchers away from qualitative research design. In a late‐modern condition of unmitigated human choice, picking an appropriate ontology appears as just one more research decision. So the editors and authors are to be commended for showing us readers substantive ways in which qualitative work attains and sustains status and how associated worldviews are not simply a matter of selection. This is achieved at the expense of exhaustive coverage of different methods and methodologies. The editorial decision has been to provide insight into good studies. In this regard, their rhetorical effort is exemplary.

Too much in the way of qualitative research in the field is simply reportage, doing little to enamour the approach to others. However, as the studies in this collection show, good qualitative research must go beyond simply describing events to provide theoretical explanation; to which elaboration might also add: providing phenomenal accounts of what entrepreneurial experiences are like (as in Berglund's contribution); as well as critical evaluations of the phenomena (as in Ahl's reflective chapter on Foucault). Yet with theorization comes the requirement of disinterest; abstracting from experience in order to create and substantiate “if … then … ” structures (like rules or models) that pertain across instances and cases. This is not a natural science theory yielding prediction and control – there are very few social scientists who think intentional human activities inherently predictable phenomena – but, nevertheless, theory that levels the rough ground of experience by proposing: traits; trends; patterns; outcomes; and the like. This requires rigour, but as more than one contributor makes plain, often this rigour is gained at the expense of relevance. Indeed the reconciliation of relevance and rigour is the leitmotif for nearly every chapter of the collection. This is an endeavour that is welcome, not because any author is especially successful in providing resolution, but for the spirit and integrity with which the endeavour is conveyed by the authors as constituting good research in itself. There is no hiding behind the ramparts of dry scholarship here. The credibility of the theory being spoken of is not the stuff of constructed proofs, but alignments of critical insight and utility. This is where qualitative work can make a difference to the field, and where this book makes its mark.