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While quantification and performance measurement have proliferated widely in academia and the business world, management and organization scholars increasingly agree on the need for a more in-depth focus on the complex dynamics embedded in the construction, use and effects of quantitative measures (pertaining to the thread of research called ethnostatistics). This paper develops a pluralistic method for conducting ethnostatistical research in organizational settings. Whilst presenting practical techniques for conducting research in live settings, it also discusses how historical approaches which focus on source criticism and contextual reconstruction could overcome the limitations of ethnostatistics.

The methodological approach of this paper encompasses an in-depth discussion of the ethnostatistical method, its underlying assumptions and its methodological limitations. Based on this analysis, the authors propose a pluralistic method (model) for conducting ethnostatistical research in organizational settings based on the integration of 1) research practices employed by one of the authors conducting ethnostatistical research in a large multinational organization and 2) best practices from ethnographic and historical research.

This paper suggests how historical approaches can successfully join ethnostatistical enquiries in an attempt to overcome some limitations in existing conventional methods. The developed framework explores four levels of analysis (ethnography, statistics at work, rhetoric of statistics and history of statistics) and suggests practical approaches for each level that can contribute to strengthening the research output and overcoming limitations when using ethnostatistics.

This paper contributes to the ethnostatistical field by discussing the intersection between history and ethnography and the ways for their complementary use in organizational and management research on quantification processes. As such it offers unique insights and hands-on experience from conducting ethnostatistical enquiries in live organizational settings.

We analyzed the earnings release of the Enron Corporation for the year ended December 31, 2000. By applying the methodology of ethnostatistics we were able to gain insight into the environment of earnings releases, the underlying meanings ascribed within the content and the resulting limitations on those third party users who rely upon the information provided. Moreover, with this understanding, we were better able to contrast the rhetoric employed by management in light of the reality of a deteriorating company. Our contribution provides for a comprehensive application of ethnostatistics in sensemaking of organizational disclosures and further extends the utility of the ethnostatistics methodology beyond academia.

This essay, invited by the editors, provides a retrospective overview of Robert Gephart's career using qualitative research methods to study disasters, and disseminating findings from the research in important management and organizational journals. Dr Gephart's work is associated with many methodological innovations. These include early use of grounded theory; early application of text analysis software to support analysis of extensive documentary data sets including legal proceedings and transcripts; development of ethnostatistics to explore risk assessment; explicating and elaborating abductive processes during the research experience; and using an autoethnographic approach to embed data from his own life in his research (before the term autoethnography was in common use). His contributions to the area of disasters and research methods innovations are wide ranging and provide tools for improving our understanding of risks and crises, and for managing them.

The article broaches the important topic of the relationships between governance operationalizations and productivity at the start-up level. It proposes a new approach to reconnect the contingency factors to the optimization of productivity. This helps us to identify the changing characteristics that influence the determinants of decisions, actions and management of the technological projects of the mainly innovative enterprises.

The study uses techniques that effectively solve unobserved endogeneity and heterogeneity problems in enterprises: an empirical–structural design. With this method, this study enables rich empirical conceptualization and helps with extending theory. However, there is a need to further the research by taking into account the system analysis and the complexity of the research object: one of the options might be to explore a possible follow-up of the research through drawing on ethnostatistics and qualimetrics.

The analysis reveals that the phenomenon of technological project productivity in operational governance context is thus manifested by the coexistence of the applied governance configuration variables, the contingency factors operationalization, the optimizing productivity mechanisms and this with the secular innovation and stagnation and stagnation. Ceteris paribus, the governance operationalizations have an important role in the productivity of technological projects of the innovative enterprises.

This research is the first to mobilize as major determinants of the operationalization of governance, the oversight of the capital, the dividend strategy and the system control, the managerial follow-up, the detection of opportunistic behaviours and the application of governing incentives (among others) as governance configuration variables in order to highlight their interactions with productivity in the innovative firm technological projects. For this reason alone, the paper will be referenced by other authors in the future.

Talk of “macrofoundations” helps foreground the constitutive and contextualizing powers of institutions – dynamics that are inadvertently obscured by the imagery of microfoundations. Highlighting these aspects of institutions in turn opens intriguing lines of inquiry into institutional reproduction and change, lived experience of institutions, and tectonic shifts in institutional configurations. However, there is a twist: taking these themes seriously ultimately challenges any naïve division of micro and macro, and undermines the claim of either to a genuinely foundational role in social analysis. The authors propose an alternative “optometric” imagery – positioning the micro and the macro as arrays of associated lenses, which bring certain things into focus at the cost of others. The authors argue that this imagery should not only encourage analytic reflexivity (“a more optometric institutionalism”) but also draw attention to the use of such lenses in everyday life, as an underexplored but critical phenomenon for institutional theory and research (“an institutionalist optometry”).

Qualitative information‐gathering techniques are focused on to determine whether they can be adapted or adopted to support strategic goal‐setting. Much of the literature suggests that if planning is based on information gathered and presented in a manner which managers can understand they are more likely to act on it, and, for this reason, qualitative rather than quantitative techniques are stressed here. Factors which are not amenable to numerate analysis but which are useful to the strategic planner, such as experience, judgement and intuition, are also isolated and analysed. An attempt is made to facilitate the use of qualitative data‐gathering methods and suggestions are made as to where particular techniques may prove beneficial, together with their limitations. Research, from a small (n = 20), in‐depth survey of small business owners/ managers in Canada, is included which shows that they do not use quantitative planning processes but that judgemental techniques were most widely used; in general, the less sophisticated the planning process the higher it would be ranked among the survey participants. The research from other surveys also shows that scientific mathematically based models often do not fit with small business organisational reality and that methodologies should be developed that integrate research into the decision‐making process.

In this chapter we develop sustainability implications of the Savall, Zardet, Bonett, and colleagues’ approach, known worldwide as socioeconomic approach to management (SEAM). SEAM can be used as a way of doing management and organizational inquiry into the ecological sustainability of practices with planetary boundaries. We conclude that a socially responsible approach to management needs to consider the hidden costs to an enterprise if it is not being sustainable to planetary resource limits.