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The purpose of this paper is to investigate and illustrate the potential relationships between doctoral students’ life histories and educational experiences and their methodological understanding and assumptions.

The qualitative research design consisted of life-history interviews with nine doctoral researchers in the UK in disciplines relating to the social sciences.

The study indicated that the students’ methodological assumptions may be understood as a socially constructed product of their life histories and academic experiences. Experiences of postgraduate research training were presented as having the potential to unlock the methodological consciousness required to re-frame these experiences, improve understanding and resolve methodological conflict.

This paper provides an insight into the complex nature of the development of methodological understanding and a provocation for considering methodological becoming through the lens of socialisation. This may have utility for both doctoral students and educators.

The aim of this paper is to provide insights on Albert J. Mills' and Jean Helms Mills' lifelong methodological journey in the airline culture. The interview offers a retrospective and reflective insight of their research into organizational culture and the airline industry, reasons for this research, their methodological journey, challenges they faced and ways forward.

This article is based on an interview with Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills, which was virtually conducted for a professional development workshop (PDW) at the 2020 Academy of Management Meeting.

Albert J. Mills and Jean Helms Mills provide insights and reflections on their lifelong methodological journey, focusing organizational culture, discriminatory practices, and the impact of this on what constitutes men and women's work.

This paper draws from Albert J. Mills' and Jean Helms Mills' lifelong experience in studying gender, intersectionality and historiography in airline cultures. Scholars will be encouraged by their insights on how to start a long-term study, potential challenges, impacts of current trends and how to deal with them.

This paper provides a methodological map for guiding the choice and application of research paradigms and design frames that can be of value to a wide range of researchers in the fields of education, social sciences and interdisciplinary studies who are interested in teaching and learning in context. Following an interpretivist/constructivist paradigm, I used a mixed methods research approach to study the spatial experiences of Emirati female students in a gender--‐ segregated educational context. The main component was qualitative, using ethnography, while the quantitative part included a survey. In such a research approach, my reflexivity and unique positionality as both insider and outsider played a significant role. The paper is divided into three sections: the beginning, which justifies the choice and philosophies of the methodological route; the journey, which illustrates the data collection techniques; and the destination, containing reflexive lessons from the field.

The paper investigates the pivotal role of storytelling as a pedagogical tool in tertiary education, specifically in the context of the practice-based doctoral framework in design disciplines. In such a doctoral model, storytelling assumes different meanings and nuances that open to a study in relation to the self-reflective process at the core of the learning paradigm.

The research methodology integrates a qualitative and participatory approach with visual and design-based methods through which the authors interact with primary sources (the body of work of PhD candidates) and relevant research literature.

Drawing on the expanding field of creative practice research, the research work evidences the emergence of storytelling as a research method and learning tool applied at different levels of the candidates' Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) journey and provides methodological insights into the practice-based doctoral training paradigm.

The paper demonstrates the role of storytelling as a learning tool and evidences the multiple levels that storytelling assumes over the course of a practice-based doctoral journey, integrating processual, operational and contextual dimensions.

Drawing on part of a French doctorate research journey, the purpose of this paper is to illustrate how an initial research design gets to be questioned and deconstructed when confronted to fieldwork.

The paper reflects on the second year of the doctoral project when the theoretical research object that had been built during the first year was confronted to fieldwork, driving the author to reshape the initial research question.

The paper explains how doing ethnographic work helped the author to deconstruct the author’s own theoretical and epistemological assumptions. The author started to investigate on the uses of pupils’ “mental suffering” in French upper secondary schools and administration in order to understand the labelling process. The author explains how fieldwork, writing and peer-reviewing made the author realise that the author was not focussing on the appropriate categories. Throughout the reflection, the paper highlights the epistemological shift that this journey reveals.

This paper aims to contribute to methodological debates scrutinising the black box of the research process. It aims to be helpful to those experiencing for the first time the chaos of reformulating the research object.

The purpose of this paper is to reflectively narrate the methodological journey of the authors in penetrating the positivitic hegemony of accounting and management control research in their native countries, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This paper offers an auto-ethnography to demonstrate the lack of diversity in accounting, accountability and management control research.

Global developments in accounting and accountability reforms entail not only about how developing countries being governed through these reforms but also about how accounting research itself can be pursued alternatively. In the past several decades, a camp of British accounting researchers initiated a programme of research in this direction. Inspired by post-positivistic traditions, they aimed to explore how these reforms are predicated upon cultural-political milieus in developing countries. However, the academia in most accounting and management researchers from local universities in these countries are blindly bombarded with positivistic traditions.

The authors unpack how this hegemony formed and how attempts were made towards some emancipatory potentials.

The purpose of this paper is to recover the identity of Chinese intellectual discourse, arguing for the necessity of a Chinese methodology in educational research to be constructed on the basis of the Chinese philosophical traditions and the Chinese social norms for the aim of solving Chinese educational issues within the Chinese cultural context.

The paper is a theoretical paper, arguing for the ontological, epistemological and methodological basis for a Chinese methodology in educational research.

The major ontological issue of Chinese social and educational research, also the ultimate goal of the Chinese governance, is social harmony through harmonious personal relationships. The key to social harmony has been seen in the Chinese philosophical tradition as residing in people’s personal morality and obligation, which constitutes the epistemology of Chinese research. And the golden mean of moderation by synthesizing and balancing the dualist extremes of views and actions should be adopted as the methodological paradigm to researching social and educational issues in China.

The elaboration of these three entities holds promises in the construction of the Chinese methodological system on Chinese social terms and merits.

The author has long sensed that the extensive methodological borrowing from the West by Chinese scholars in educational research might be problematic, given the vast structural differences in the two social worlds that the author and other scholars have observed. A paper in English to argue for the necessity of constructing a uniquely Chinese methodology for educational research in China is an absolute necessity.

The purpose of this paper is to set the groundwork for a new methodological movement. The author claims that methodological strategies must take as their object the laws with found sexual identity, or rather should be “fucking with” law by creatively confronting, occupying and agitating limiting ethical frameworks that control access to the field. The movement is ethnographic, since it finds research ethics and “straight” academic space to be where these rules are the most harmful in limiting access to the field, for female researchers, in particular.

The approach (but also to some extent the target) is on Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian’s philosophy, whose theoretical leaps have sought to shift and cause slippage in laws of sexual identity. However, when these laws are tested by researchers proposing to access the field, specifically ethnographically and autoethnographically, it is clear they have not “slipped” at all. This is clear through the questions raised by ethics committees. Fucking law, therefore, becomes a methodological movement intimately connecting ethical agendas and sex as an encounter in the field.

The author claims that the methodological movement of “fucking” law captures, or at least attempts to capture, the slipperiness of the body, the encounter, the research project and sex itself. The movement, “fucking law”, is essential in agitating and occupying the limiting institutional research agendas and their ethical frameworks.

The implications of “fucking law” will be necessarily unpredictable, but the main practical and connected social implication is questioning as to why more women are not practically questioning arguably one of the biggest questions: the ethics of sexuality. Fucking law argues for the questioning of these laws with bodies, and experimenting with philosophies which underpin and create institutional ethical rules.

This is the first work of its kind by a female autoethnographer challenging the ethics of sexuality, arising from a participatory field project. It also evaluates and confronts the ethics of the field as a whole: from the researcher herself, to her academic environment and sexual life, to the field itself and the writing up of the project.

This paper aims to tackle in turn the merits and limits of Nicholas Georgescu‐Roegen's entropic model, as well as its implications for the methodological discourse in economics. This appraisal of the Georgescu‐Roegen's work emphasizes the emergence of the entropic nature of the economic processes as a paradigm à la Kuhn of explanation in social economics.

This work provides a critical assessment of the entropic model's main conceptual pillars, namely the role of mathematical formalism and the natural imagery of irreversibility. This discussion takes them in turn and develops a critique from a methodological point of view.

The focus of this work is that the proposed epistemological reconstruction of economics is vulnerable to attacks from two methodological objections. The first deals with the change of metaphor from the “pendulum” of mechanics to the “hourglass” of thermodynamics. The second refers to the changes this replacement of metaphors brings about as to the relevance of the formalism of the discipline.

This material has gathered arguments to show that the intellectual concurrence of the arguments onto the field of physics makes the methodological value of the new paradigm of entropy not transcend into a new logic of reasoning in economics. The limits of this approach stems from the same rationale for which it has got its revolutionary stature: what it proposes consists of a scientific discourse based on a mixture of evolutionary biology, economics and thermodynamics, which may open up new original and insightful perspectives, but which has never been justified on terms of economic nature alone.

Although the process of fieldwork is often characterised by disorder, the requirement to adhere to a tightly defined methodology and produce timely research outputs often leads the authors to present the findings as though the research has been the product of a linear process. The purpose of this paper is to unmask this paradox, by documenting the disorder and development of a research project 15 years (so far) in duration.

The approach used in this paper is one of auto-ethnographic reflection, drawing on aspects of Boje’s living story approach, incorporating not only the “linear” narrative of the research process, but also fragments of ante-narrative, themes running above and below the dominant. Within the study, the authors are reflecting on, a range of qualitative methods, including interview, focus groups, memory-work, and living story (ante-narrative) methods, which are employed within a critical management research methodology.

The authors’ experiences show that although “messiness” may be an inherent part of qualitative research, it is this very disorder, and the consequent opportunities for time and space, that allows the research, and the researcher, “time to breathe”. This reflexivity allows for methodological development and refinement, and ultimately rigorous and participative research, which also honours the participants. The authors argue that although this approach may not align with the current need for prolific (and rapid) publication, in allowing the disorder to “be” in the research, and allowing the time to reassess theoretical and methodological lenses, the resultant stories may be more authentic – both the stories gathered from participants and the stories of research.

The paper highlights the intertwining of stories of participants and stories from research, which is a significant addition to understandings of the “messiness” of qualitative research. This paper adds to the growing call for the inclusion of “chaos” and authenticity in qualitative research, acknowledging and valuing the humanity of the researcher, and giving voice to the paradox between the time to methodologically develop, and the requirement for timely research.