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The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of doing research that uses qualitative approaches. Anchored in a process ontology, this paper starts from the idea that doing research implies a performance in which the researcher is fully immersed, and explores the implications of the processual nature of doing research.

The paper takes use of vignettes; short stories of research in action, told by different researchers that are analyzed to reveal the richness of the situation in question. These vignettes illustrate how performing qualitative research is an emotional, embodied and deeply personal experience.

The authors show that when grounding qualitative research in a process ontology, research is the fruit of the researcher's performance: doing research is performing it, and performing it cannot happen without feeling a wide range of emotions, without appealing to who we are or without questioning what we are doing. Thus, this exploration reveals that doing research is a rich, complex and multi‐level experience that mobilizes the whole person conducting this inquiry – that is, that doing research takes the form of a thick performance.

The value of the paper lies in its roots in a process ontology to understand the doing of qualitative research, which makes it possible to fully acknowledge the importance of subjectivity in all the steps that make up the research endeavor, from the fieldwork to writing – thus offering not only a richer image of what research is about, but an image that is also closer to the experience of doing it.

The use of organizational ethnography has grown significantly during the past decades. While language is an important component of ethnographic research, the challenges associated with language barriers are rarely discussed in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to open up a discussion on language barriers in organizational ethnography.

The author draws on her experience as a PhD student doing an organizational ethnography of an emergency department in a country where she initially did not speak the local language.

The paper examines the author's research process, from access negotiation to presentation of findings, illustrating the language barriers encountered doing an ethnography in parallel to learning the local language in Sweden.

This paper calls for awareness of the influence of the ethnographer's language skills and shows the importance of discussing this in relation to how we teach and learn ethnography, research practice and diversity in academia.

The paper makes three contributions to organizational ethnography. First, it contributes to the insider/outsider debate by nuancing the ethnographer's experience. Second, it answers calls for transparency by presenting a personal ethnographic account. Third, it contributes to developing the methodology by offering tips to deal with language barriers in doing ethnography abroad.

The purpose of this paper is to revisit theoretical positions on gender and the implications for gender in management by building upon current research on doing gender well (or appropriately in congruence with sex category) and re‐doing or undoing gender and argue that gender can be done well and differently through simultaneous, multiple enactments of femininity and masculinity.

This is a theoretical paper.

The authors argue that individuals can perform exaggerated expressions of femininity (or masculinity) while simultaneously performing alternative expressions of femininity or masculinity. The authors question claims that gender can be undone and incorporate sex category into their understanding of doing gender – it cannot be ignored in experiences of doing gender. The authors contend that the binary divide constrains and restricts how men and women do gender but it can be disrupted or unsettled.

This paper focuses upon the implications of doing gender well and differently, for gender and management research and practice, drawing upon examples of leadership, entrepreneurship, female misogyny and Queen Bee.

This paper offers a conceptualization of doing gender that acknowledges the gender binary, while also suggesting possibilities of unsettling it.

This paper reports the results of a three-year-long research on business relationships, relying on qualitative data gathered through multiple-case study research of four focal companies operating in Australia. The industry settings are as follows: steel construction, vegetable oils trading, aluminum and steel can manufacture, and imaging solutions. The research analyzes two main aspects of relationships: structure and process. This paper deals with structure describing it by the most desired features of intercompany relationships for each focal company. The primary research data have been coded drawing on extant research into business relationships. The main outcome of this part of the research is a five construct model composed by trust, commitment, bonds, distance, and information sharing that accounts for all informants’ utterances about relationship structure.

This study focuses on Vietnamese international students who returned from their overseas doctoral education to home universities in Vietnam (henceforth Vietnamese overseas-trained returnees). The purpose is to explore the experience of these returnees “doing research” (i.e. being research active) when resuming a lecturing role at a Vietnamese regional university. In the context of research now receiving heightened attention in both the wider global higher education (HE) discourse and the Vietnamese HE sector, this study is timely and provides valuable insights.

In total, 76 Vietnamese overseas-trained returnees from varied disciplinary backgrounds completed a questionnaire on their research motivation and their perceived constraints doing research. Eighteen subsequently took part in semi-structured interviews. The study draws on the notion of human agency from the sociocultural perspective to understand the coping strategies of the Vietnamese overseas-educated returnees in response to the challenges they encountered.

The results show that the returnees' motivations to conduct research varied, fuelled by passion, but constrained by multiple factors. Time constraints, heavy teaching loads, familial roles and lack of specialized equipment are key inhibiting factors in re-engaging in research for these returnees. Addressing them necessitated a great deal of readaptation, renegotiation and agentive resilience on the part of the returnees in employing different coping strategies to pursue research.

The paper argues for a subtle understanding of the returnees' experience of re-engaging in research that is both complex and contextual. Implications are drawn for research development in the regional Vietnamese HE context and perhaps in other similar settings.

There is little empirical knowledge about how Vietnamese returned graduates – university lecturers – continue doing research after their return. Also underexplored in global discourse is research on foreign-educated returnees doing research, while they are an important source of human resources. The present study, therefore, fills these research gaps.

Purpose – This chapter ruminates on a range of different ways that the author experiences being what the author calls a “lurker” in mainstream criminologies as a queer criminologist.

Methodology/approach – Drawing on the work of Jack Halberstam, Michel Foucault, Heather Love, Sarah Ahmed, and other queer theorists, the author explores their positionality as a lurker in mainstream criminologies, and policing particular, to better understand how “[d]isciplines qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 10), and how leaders of these disciplines make calculated decisions about who qualifies as legitimate scholars of policing knowing.

Findings – The discussion steps through some significant moments of discomfort that have emerged in lurking around with/in these disciplines, and in doing the work of queer research with queer people about queer policing.

Originality/value – The author finishes by sharing strategies and learnings that have emerged out of these research and disciplinary contexts. The author suggests that it is most valuable to continue to lurk so their position of discomfort and potential failure persists as a more productive positionality than conforming with the mainstream.

In this study we examine how doing research on gender impacts identity, sense of self, and relation to community; and how fieldwork is mediated by gender structures.

We draw on feminist epistemology, qualitative methodologies, and critical pedagogies to analyze the fieldwork experiences of 15 women students and nine men fieldwork partners in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

By conducting fieldwork which challenged gender norms, students and partners gained greater awareness of themselves and confidence. Their actions challenged the appropriate place of women (and minority ethnicities) as perceived by research participants in these communities. The experience rendered the community a site of hope and learning for them, working to empower them as well as building relationships grounded in lived experiences with their communities.

Women’s voices are more prominent in this analysis than men’s.

This chapter points to the potentially empowering aspects of doing gender-related fieldwork in the developing context, as well as how gender and other power structures mediate fieldwork experiences in Muslim communities in South Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the general failure of management accounting research to be useful for practitioners.

The paper discusses the causes and consequences of the problem, and possible remedies.

The causes of the problem, and hence also the remedies, are related to choice of topics, research design, and writing and dissemination of findings; researchers are forced into choices that lead to less useful research by the research evaluation standards used by the major accounting journals and university professor evaluation practices.

While this general problem of lack of research usefulness has been discussed at some length in other areas of management, the issue has not received much attention in the management accounting community, other than with a few calls for more field research. However, getting out into the field more to do research addresses only one part of this important failure.

Addresses the standardization of the measurements and the labels for concepts commonly used in the study of work organizations. As a reference handbook and research tool, seeks to improve measurement in the study of work organizations and to facilitate the teaching of introductory courses in this subject. Focuses solely on work organizations, that is, social systems in which members work for money. Defines measurement and distinguishes four levels: nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. Selects specific measures on the basis of quality, diversity, simplicity and availability and evaluates each measure for its validity and reliability. Employs a set of 38 concepts ‐ ranging from “absenteeism” to “turnover” as the handbook’s frame of reference. Concludes by reviewing organizational measurement over the past 30 years and recommending future measurement reseach.

The Guest Editors’ intent with this special issue is to tell tales of the field and beyond, but all with the serious end of rendering visible the largely invisible. This paper aims to introduce the articles forming the special issue, as well as reviewing extant work that foregrounds the hidden stories and uncertainties of doing qualitative research.

The authors advance their arguments through a literature review approach, reflecting on the “state of the field” with regard to doing research and offering new directions on reflexivity as an ethical consideration for conducting qualitative research.

Far from consigning the mess entailed in doing qualitative research to the margins, there is much to be learned from, and considerable value in, a more thoughtful engagement with the dilemmas we face in the field and beyond, one that shows the worth of what we are highlighting to both enrich research practice itself and contribute to improving the quality of what we produce.

This paper turns the spotlight onto the messiness and storywork aspects of conducting research, which are all too often hidden from view, to promote the kinds of dialogues necessary for scholars to share their fieldwork stories as research, rather than means to a publication end.