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In this chapter, the authors explore the state of our field in terms of ways to present qualitative findings. The authors analyze all articles based on qualitative research methods published in the Academy of Management Journal from 2010 to 2017 and supplement this by informally surveying colleagues about their “favorite” qualitative authors. As a result, the authors identify five ways of presenting qualitative findings in research articles. The authors suggest that each approach has advantages as well as limitations, and that the type of data and theorizing is an important consideration in determining the most appropriate approach for the presentation of findings. The authors hope that by identifying these approaches, they enrich the way authors, reviewers, and editors approach the presentation of qualitative findings.

This essay addresses the topic of research lifeworlds and personal lifeworlds and what we gain and lose as researchers, and as people, from their overlaps and collisions. The essay analyses six narrative accounts of the authors lived experience of a unique collision between research and personal lifeworlds when the researcher-mother presented with her sick daughter to the hospital emergency department that served as the field site for her own research. This analysis revealed the following themes through which a researcher’s personhood animates the research process: feeling exposed but empowered; gaining conceptual clarity while opening up ethical ambiguity; and becoming liminal because of identity shifts and coping through self-reflexivity. The essay contributes to our collective understanding and shared learning of the ways a researcher’s personhood shapes, and is shaped by, the research process and (re)production of knowledge.

The Scottish civil justice system is undergoing its most substantive transformation in over 150 years. This reformation will create new judicial bodies, alter the jurisdictional reach of courts, and drastically unsettle what has been, up to now, a highly stable institutional field. These changes have caused pronounced threats to the status of different groups of actors in the field. Our work examines the impact of these threats, and the varying responses among groups of professional actors. In so doing, we detail how intra-professional status differences and uncertainty hindered attempts to maintain threatened institutions.

This chapter addresses the concern that much theory building in organization and management (OM) research suffers from de-contextualization. The authors argue that de-contextualization comes in two main forms: reductionism and grand theory. Whereas reductionism tends to downplay context in favor of individual behavior, grand theory looks at context only in highly abstract ahistorical terms. Such de-contextualization is problematic for at least two reasons. First, the boundary conditions of theories remain unexplored in ways that threaten scientific validity. Second, de-contextualization limits the potential of OM theory to fully understand the role of organizations in society and thereby address societal grand challenges. These claims are exemplified through critical reviews of four fields in OM research – gender, employee voice, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and institutional logics – and counterpoints that may help to overcome de-contextualized research are presented.

This chapter asks: ‘How often do we as social scientists question the validity of our theories and our findings? How often do we reflexively examine the distortions in the lenses we use to analyse organizations? ‘It proceeds to answer these questions by defining reflexivity and presenting six perspectives on reflexive analysis that build on and extend previous analytical treatments of reflexivity, especially that by Alvesson, Hardy, and Harley (2008). Illustrations of the six are drawn from my own experiences as well as those of other scholars. The intention is to stimulate greater interest in reflexivity and provoke other scholars to look more reflexively at their own work.

This chapter outlines a discursive epistemology of knowledge production through an analysis of the role of time and context in the social construction of organizational insights, outcomes and theories. While the role of time and context has been widely acknowledged in organizational discourse analysis, it has remained unclear what is specific to knowledge generation. Drawing upon a case study of an attempted company acquisition, the authors illustrate how knowledge is discursively produced and consumed during a process of strategizing. The analysis of this study shows how knowledge producing processes (e.g., strategizing, theorizing, conceptualizing and hypothesizing) extend both the time horizon of discourses that relate to the future, and the context horizon for discourse(s) that relate to the broader context. This reconstructs the tapestry of interwoven discourses that make up a local discourse and enable new managerial knowledge to be produced.

This chapter extends research on peer review by utilizing and assessing an emerging methodology: automated textual analysis. In a corpus of 38 papers successfully revised for publication in Administrative Science Quarterly, the authors found that measures based on exact wording (measured by plagiarism detection) and sentence similarity (measured by Word Mover’s Distance) performed well in capturing differences between original submissions and published papers. They identified the same overall pattern of revision that authors reported (intensive revision of Theory and Discussion sections, limited modification of Methods), and were strongly correlated with the turnover in references and hypotheses that occurred in the course of peer review. Automated textual analysis can usefully contribute to the study of manuscript change in peer review and other social scientific contexts, particularly as available textual corpora grow in size.