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The purpose of this paper is to propose and illustrate blind qualitative hypothesis testing, which is a qualitative research technique that further generalizes the well‐known notion of “blindness” in research to include a qualitative researcher. The technique introduces a method to test a priori hypotheses using qualitative, emergent observation and analysis without the biasing influence of prior knowledge of the hypotheses being tested.

In essence, the proposed technique is as follows. After forming a set of a priori predictive hypotheses, a theoretical researcher (who may or may not be a qualitative researcher) engages the cooperation of a qualitative researcher to perform an empirical study. The qualitative empirical researcher is given adequate guidance to perform a study but is kept blind to the hypotheses. After the qualitative empirical researcher makes observations and forms his or her conclusions, the qualitative empirical researcher and the theoretical researcher jointly determine the extent to which the conclusions support or disconfirm the hypotheses. The qualitative empirical researcher then identifies emergent themes and inductive conclusions that contribute beyond the a priori hypotheses. A study testing consumer response to advertising is described as an illustration of the proposed technique.

The proposed technique diminishes the influence of the ontological assumptions of researchers on hypothesis tests. By reducing a priori expectations, the proposed technique frees practical and academic market researchers to more fully immerse in the context of interest and better recognize subtle phenomena and imbricated, complex intrapersonal and/or social interactions. Furthermore, the proposed technique provides a new way for qualitative methods to go beyond the “supportive” and “exploratory” role to which they have often been limited.

An ability to test hypotheses gives qualitative researchers another way to contribute to the literatures currently dominated by constricted and pallid questionnaire‐based methods within the positivist tradition. Such literatures will benefit from the methodological pluralism encouraged by the technique introduced here because some benefits of qualitative research (including an ability to identify unanticipated, emergent findings) offer much needed compensation for inherent flaws in questionnaire‐based methods.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate trends in the use of research methodologies and publications in manufacturing strategy (MS) literature across geographical regions and suggests possible future research opportunities.

This literature review is based on a sample of 512 subject-relevant journal articles and uses content analysis as the primary method for data analysis. The paper investigates developments in the use of research methodologies – in terms of research design, data collection methods, country of data collection, sample size, respondent type, statistical techniques used and time horizon of studies; and publication trends in terms of authorship type, authorship collaboration, most prolific authors, top journals, most prolific universities, and citation analysis.

Research in MS has substantially changed from conceptual quantitative to empirical quantitative designs. NA and Europe show a declining research interest. However, other regions of the world are consistently showing higher interest. Significant opportunities and synergies exist for collaborative research among regions.

Though the literature review is limited in its selection of articles and journals it sketches a picture that may surrogate the whole research community in MS.

Trends in publications and use of research methodologies provide directions for designing research projects relevant to various geographical regions. This will help develop a holistic understanding of MS that is meaningful for managers of today’s organizations.

This paper provides broader and deeper review of the MS literature. Complex patterns in data are revealed using cross-tabulations and advanced cross-tabulations that have not been performed in previous content-analysis–based literature reviews in MS. These patterns will help position future research studies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze research methodologies and publication trends across geographical regions in the field of supply chain innovation (SCI) and provide a discussion of future research in the SCI.

Using a content analysis approach, this paper investigates 26 years of SCI research based on a sample of 473 journal articles published in 77 peer-reviewed international journals.

There has been an increasing focus on empirical quantitative research design as compared to empirical qualitative, conceptual quantitative and conceptual qualitative designs in the field of SCI. Continued research interest in SCI from all parts of the world including North America, Europe and Asia illustrates the importance of SCI in the broader field of management.

The inclusion of a large number of journals provides greater confidence in the identified trends. However, as the top-tier journals publish only the most rigorous studies, considering all journals as equally weighted will give rise to a mixed pool of studies. Identifying trends from this mixed pool may provide more comprehensiveness at the cost of inclusion of non-core journals of the field.

The current study builds a holistic view of the methodological progress made so far in the field of SCI.

The purpose of this study is to examine the prevalence of mixed methods research across several business and management fields and to gauge the level of acceptance of mixed methods within these fields.

The methodology employed for this study involved synthesizing the findings from six large‐scale methodological scans of business and management discipline journals in seven fields: marketing, international business, strategic management, organizational behaviour, operations management, entrepreneurship and human resource management.

The study finds that quantitative studies dominate all seven fields (76 per cent of empirical articles) followed by mixed methods (14 per cent of empirical articles) and qualitative studies (10 per cent of empirical articles). In applying the framework for acceptance levels, it would seem there exists minimal acceptance of mixed methods across these fields.

The study has limitations related to the coverage of different disciplines and differences in sample sets. More extensive research is planned for the future and will involve an expanded mixed method prevalence rate study across additional business and management fields.

The growing use of mixed methods has practical implications for research training and capacity building within business schools. The study points to the need to develop research capacity through the introduction of postgraduate courses in mixed methods and advanced research skills training for existing researchers.

Mixed methods is a relatively new and emerging methodological movement. This paper attempts to gauge the use and level of acceptance of mixed methods across a diverse range of business and management discipline areas.

Tremendous change has taken place in organisational structures, networks and strategy over the past 25 years. Yet, a strategic management framework developed 25 years ago has increased in popularity among researchers in the past decade. This paper aims to review how Simons’ Levers of Control (LOC) framework has been used in empirical research studies over the past 25 years.

The findings are based on electronic database searches of papers adopting Simons’ framework published in accounting and management journals.

A total of 45 empirical studies adopting the LOC framework are presented chronologically by research method. The review highlights the far greater use of the framework in qualitative compared to quantitative studies. Qualitative studies have extended the application of the framework to broader organisational issues such as sustainability, environmental accounting and inter-organisational controls. The quantitative studies have mainly sought to add to our understanding of the antecedents and outcomes of the use of interactive control systems.

This paper furthers our understanding of Simons’ framework by synthesising and analysing the literature over 25 years. It provides insight into the varying interpretations of the concepts underlying the framework in empirical studies including differences in operationalisation of the concepts in quantitative studies. In addition, it highlights the application of the framework beyond the original domain in which it was developed. Fruitful areas for future research are pointed to in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a systematic and rigorous process of data collection and fieldwork in qualitative research using four empirical studies of customer interactions in new product development (NPD) as examples. The intention is to dispel a misconception that the qualitative research lacks objectivity and methodological robustness.

To collect data for all the four studies a preliminary process of conducting fieldwork was first developed from the extant literature. This preliminary framework was applied in the first study and subsequently revised twice in the second and third study by incorporating necessary changes and additions. Finally, the framework was tested and further refined in the fourth study.

The findings from these four empirical qualitative studies have demonstrated that a theory generating idiographic research such as field interviews could be carried out systematically. These findings also provide a basis for proposing a structured framework for data collection.

The paper is based only on business‐to‐business NPD. Therefore, to increase the applicability of the results more studies are needed in other business and marketing fields.

The results offer an in‐depth look at specific research activities that can be carried out for efficient idea generation work and the overall NPD efforts.

The framework reported in this paper allows for an iterative data collection process from multiple respondents and from multiple sources. This method of data collection is a key issue because product managers tend to interact with the customers and other partners repeatedly and throughout the NPD process. Thus the product managers would find this framework useful for research involving NPD and customer interactions.

The paper is an extension to a previous empirical study that models the process of innovation diffusion in Australian architectural and engineering design (AED) firms. This paper aims to utilise explanatory case studies to assist in the verification of this empirical model that depicts pathways that explain the role of enabling “climate for innovation” constructs in determining the level of innovation diffusion outcomes (IDO), and subsequent business performance (BPM) in Australian AED firms.

This paper presents the latter of a two‐stage sequential mixed method research design: quantitative empirical study; and qualitative explanatory case studies. Specifically, this stage extracts findings from five explanatory case studies using a qualitative pattern matching analysis technique. Interview‐based data collected from the case studies are analysed to formulate the relationship patterns between constructs, which are then compared with those predicted by the empirical model. This approach affords a determination on the extent to which the case‐based findings (i.e. work‐setting phenomena) explains (i.e. validated) the empirical model.

The results of the case studies on five Australian AED firms indicate that the model can be adequately explained by the actual phenomena. This is evident in four of the cases providing a good to perfect match, and one showing a partial match to the predicted patterns of relationships between the model constructs. Thus, the paper presents verified empirical pathways for AED firms, which suggest that, by increasing the level of leadership for innovation, the level of team climate and organisational culture for innovation can be improved. The improved culture for innovation will then heighten the level of IDO, which can in turn, result in an enhanced BPM.

This paper expands and improves upon the current understanding of how the diffusion of innovation can be accelerated within the AED firm context. By focusing on the socio‐psychological processes, the paper depicts the pathways to improve IDO and BPM through fostering a robust climate for innovation. These pathways have been constructed empirically and are verified in this paper under real‐work settings. Based on the validated model and the specific insights derived from the explanatory case studies, the paper also highlights a number of strategic implications for AED firms seeking to enhance their BPM through improving innovation diffusion practices.

The purpose of this study is to understand the research on numeracy coach in the Canadian context.

This study was a systematic review of studies about numeracy coaching in Canada, which described the trend of knowledge production on this topic. The study made use of qualitative meta-analysis. According to Timulak (2009, p. 591), qualitative meta-analysis is “an attempt to conduct a rigorous secondary qualitative analysis of primary qualitative findings. Its purpose is to provide a more comprehensive description of a phenomenon and an assessment of the influence of the investigation on findings.” By using meta-analysis, this article analyzed the general pattern of knowledge production, the nature of the publications, the focal topics, the research methods and the citation impact of numeracy coaching studies in Canada. The literature analyzed in this review included all the available sources we were able to find with regard to Canadian numeracy coaches. The sources included peer-reviewed journal articles, online magazines, program reports and information from non-profit organizations, as well as doctoral theses.

Research about numeracy coaches in Canadian contexts remains in an initial stage, and there is, as yet, no accepted definition of a Canadian numeracy coach. Scholars in this area have been fond of empirical studies and qualitative research methods. This research has shown that numeracy coaches, who can be regarded as directors, evaluators and consultants in schools, also experience difficulties such as a lack of background knowledge in math. Scholars have advised several ways to improve the quality of coaching activities, including teacher collaboration and coaching models. The citation impact of the current Canadian literature about numeracy coaches has been quite uneven; only a few articles have been cited by other researchers. This article concludes by summarizing the results of this meta-analysis, its limitations and suggestions for future research.

This is one of important studies to explore numeracy coach research in Canadian context. Theoretical and practical significance is explored.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how intervention research weighed in nonintervention research in the field of human resource development (HRD) by examining the number, citation frequency and use of experimental studies in HRD academic journals.

A total of 2,700 articles published between 1990 and 2014 from Advances in Developing Human Resources (ADHR), European Journal of Training and Development (EJTD), Human Resource Development International (HRDI) and Human Resource Development Quarterly (HRDQ) were reviewed and analyzed to identify 91 experimental studies in the field.

The total citation frequency of the 91 articles was 1,100 (14 from ADHR, 222 from EJTD, 56 from HRDI and 808 from HRDQ). The authors reviewed the 1,100 subsequent studies that cited 91 experimental research studies and coded them to identify the research methods that each article adopted and to determine whether the studies used the citation to make causal statements. As a result, the authors found 459 causal statements from 1,100 citations. In particular, they identified the citation frequency of the causal statements used in nonintervention research to examine how often nonintervention studies used causal statements from intervention studies.

The results of the citation frequency could be different according to the search engines and timeframes. Books, technical reports, non-English studies, non-academic articles and inaccessible articles were not considered in this study. Theoretically, this study aimed to illuminate the magnitude of HRD experimental research conducted over 25 years and to what extent it influenced non-experimental studies. In addition, this study emphasized the importance of using the causal statements from experimental research to improve empirical validation in other studies.

When HRD practitioners need to identify alternative interventions to replace previous ones or to justify the use of specific interventions, they could consider causal statements from empirical studies as valid evidence. Further, HRD practitioners might collaborate with researchers to receive more direct and relevant information from experimental research.

Significantly, this study provides an integrative review of experimental research conducted in the field of HRD in terms of the number, citation frequency and proportion of using experimental research. An additional contribution is that it summarizes the research methods used in HRD studies over 25 years.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the best processes that are currently used in managing talent in Australian higher education (HE) and to examine the policies in terms of talent management processes (TMPs) that are derived from objective one. Pragmatic benefits for academic institutions focused on enhancing talent.

This study selects the mixed method as its research design. In the qualitative study, there were three methods: brainstorming, focus group and individual interviews, followed by the quantitative questionnaire study. The sample consisted of 6 participants for brainstorming, 11 in focus group, 6 individual interviews and 286 participants for the quantitative questionnaire, all conducted in nine Australian universities.

Three key themes: talent retention, talent development and talent attraction were explored by the qualitative study. The quantitative study tests the level of an importance regarding the three TMPs explored.

This empirical research is one of the first few studies that extended the previous investigation of TMPs in various industries to the HE sector. This research provides more debates for adding more new ideas in the Australian education strategic plans for HE.

This study offers a value-add to talent management literature through designing a quantitative measurement of TMPs for the educational sector. Consequently, there is a deficiency of pragmatic evidence in terms of TMPs in the aforementioned sector. Furthermore, this study provides a clear and comprehensive outline of the extant scholarly research of TMPs from the period 2006–2018.