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The study seeks to address the research question: “How can Gadamerian and Ricoeurian hermeneutics be operationalized in an interpretive accounting research project”? The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to review the key hermeneutic concepts of philosophers Gadamer and Ricoeur; and second, to share insights from the researcher’s experience of applying Gadamerian and Ricoeurian hermeneutics to an interpretive accounting research project.

The paper draws on the extant literature and the researcher’s own experience using hermeneutics theory in an interpretive accounting research project involving in-depth interviews with organisational managers.

The process of interpretation is described using the core concept of the hermeneutic circle where the reader and the text engage in dialogue. The readers’ pre-understandings play a key role in this dialogue and assist in drawing meaning from the text. However, it is necessary for the reader to adopt a critically reflexive approach remaining alert for both unproductive pre-understandings and hidden power structures and ideologies in the text being interpreted. Each reading of a text involves the completion of one cycle of the hermeneutic circle in which the reader transitions from pre-configuration to configuration and ultimately re-configuration concluding with the reader acquiring new horizons of understanding. The researcher’s experience of applying hermeneutic theory to an interpretive accounting research project are reflected on and nine lessons are offered.

These insights will prove valuable to interpretive researchers within the social sciences, including accounting and management studies, as well as those working in the natural sciences.

Our aim in this chapter is twofold: first, to review briefly the history of the hermeneutic traditions; second, to examine its influence in organization studies. We begin with a review of hermeneutic philosophy including ancient Greek origins and Biblical hermeneutics. We then delve more deeply into the work of 20th-century hermeneutic philosophy, particularly Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, to demonstrate how hermeneutics became a field that is concerned not only with texts but also with verbal and nonverbal forms of action and the preunderstanding that makes any interpretation possible. Finally, we explore how hermeneutic philosophers claim that interpretation is the mode by which we live and carry on with one another. In the third section, we suggest that the field of organizational studies has discovered the relevance of hermeneutic theory, a rarely explicitly acknowledged debt. In particular, we outline the influence of hermeneutic theory on several figural areas, including culture, sensemaking, identity, situated learning, and organizational dialogue.

In a postmodern context this paper proposes that analogical scholarship in which one conceptual schema is used to view another in order to generate new perspectives, be used to view play. Hermeneutic philosophy specifically is used in a process modelling hermeneutic inquiry. Included are a review of play, hermeneutic philosophy, and the outcomes of the juxtaposition of hermeneutic concepts against play. Resultant perspectives on key issues in play, such as the meaning of play, play in meaning making, the binaries of play, play and practice, and play in the reconceptualizing movement in early childhood education, follow.

It has recently become more acknowledged that there is a quality of “messiness” to the qualitative research process. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the fieldpath approach—a hermeneutically inspired framework—to account for the non-linearity, uncertainty and ambiguity of the research process.

This conceptual paper reviews how the scope of hermeneutics has been partly misunderstood. The paper discusses how the scope of hermeneutics has lately been expanded by works such as Günter Figal’s (2010) Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy.

The fieldpath approach proposes that a heightened relation to materiality enables the messiness of the process to be preserved, while at the same time offering a way to find one’s footing in the midst of ontologically incomplete phenomena that are still—in a processual fashion—forming and becoming.

This is a conceptual paper. In addition to the research mentioned here, more studies would be needed to legitimise, test and refine the approach.

Objectivity provides an additional criterion for researchers to lean on when facing the non-linearity and unexpected turns inherent in the qualitative research process.

The stress on materiality involves an ethical dimension. Post-human ethics are concerned with the future environmental consequences and sustainability of the material world. The way that matter matters in our methodologies is of primary importance.

First, the paper emphasises that hermeneutics, contrary to the common perception, does offer criteria for evaluating between interpretations. Second, it introduces the notion of hermeneutic objectivity, which stresses the importance of materiality for interpretations. Third, it introduces the fieldpath approach, which, based on the previous criterion of hermeneutic objectivity, allows for the messiness of the research process, while also preserving a tight grip on the hermeneutic imperative of “understanding in a new way”.

Though paradoxes constitute a basic ontological condition of organizational processes, the modernist approach has always been to find ways to resolve them. In this chapter, an alternative approach called hermeneutic appreciation is proposed. By accepting and affirming paradoxes through the process of hermeneutic appreciation, the generative potential inherent in them can be recognized and unfolded. This chapter presents a case study of an organization that demonstrated such a sophisticated understanding of hermeneutic appreciation. By not dismissing the paradoxes but by affirming and reframing them, members of this organization were able to reverse a visible organizational decline and instead infuse it with new energy and vitality leading to an eventual organizational renewal. Lessons learned from this appreciative inquiry project suggest that a hermeneutic appreciation of paradoxes may act as a change intervention and is likely to enable innovation and organizational transformation.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a complete guide to a qualitative method for capturing critical moments of managerial practice that combines interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and existential hermeneutic phenomenology (EHP).

This article is based on the findings of extensive research and describes in detail the specific steps that must be taken for complete replication of research. The research uses methods of IPA and critically develops the EHP framework with an emphasis on the analysis of interpersonal relationships.

Depending on the testing of the research method in practice, the article evaluates the IPA-EHP method as suitable for the research on critical moments of managerial lived experience, considering the causes of the crisis.

This article is based on demand from academics who would like to use this method to analyse managerial practice. Especially now, at a time associated with a number of challenging events, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, qualitative research is gaining in importance, even in management science. The original interpretative framework based on the phenomenology of Fink and Patočka is appropriate in this respect.

Consumer discourse is a narrative of generically (in)formed, goal‐directed activity. If research interprets such practice, it is often deemed to draw upon phenomenology. Returning to the philosophers (Gadamer, Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty and Ricoeur) who shaped phenomenology, the purpose of this paper is to argue that consumer studies should further cultivate their important insight – that action (particularly perceiving) is structured temporally as always already realising our pre‐given meaning. Entities are prima facie experienced as “ready‐to‐hand” “equipment” enabling “potentiality‐for‐being”. Hermeneutic phenomenology is thus a philosophical resource offering appropriate spatio‐temporal images for people responding to media marketing's branded life‐styles.

Drawing upon authoritative academic resources, the paper proceeds from philosophical definition to resulting analytical methods in marketing research, using a brief Malaysian case study as an example. Philosophically, phenomenology's core perception is of persons as located in a life‐world of socially shared concepts whose employment/ emplotment is said to “fore‐structure” (Heidegger) their understanding, shaping their “projections” (Gadamer) or expectation of events. Phenomenology posits one engages in a “hermeneutic circle of understanding” – aiming at resolving contradiction between such “fore‐sight” and our subsequent perceptions of events. Consumers thematise “pre‐understood” experience in articulating their storied accounts.

Drawing on phenomenology's account of perceiving, the paper suggests qualitative marketing research unpacks consumers' generic expectation of branding narrative as equipment enabling potentiality‐for‐being, regarding narrative as addressing assumed audience expectation.

The paper provides a conceptual route through phenomenology's application to marketing communication research practice.

In this chapter, we set out to demonstrate how organizational theory and analysis can benefit from the work of the distinguished philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. In the first part of the chapter we show how MacIntyre's conception of how rival traditions may move towards reconciliation has the potential to resolve the relativist conclusions that bedevil organization theory. In the second part, we show how MacIntyre's ‘goods–virtues–practices–institutions’ general theory provides a framework for reconciling the fields of organization theory and organizational ethics. In the third part, we provide a worked example of these two strands to demonstrate the implications of MacIntyre's philosophy for organizational analysis. We conclude with a research agenda for a distinctively MacIntyrean organization theory.

The purpose of this paper is to see to what extent Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy could be used to unveil how corporate discourse about financial crimes (in codes of ethics) is closely linked to the process of understanding.

Corporate ethical discourse of 20 business corporations will be analyzed, as it is conveyed within their codes of ethics. The companies came from five countries (USA, Canada, France, Switzerland and Brazil). In the explanatory study, the following industries were represented (two companies by industry): aircrafts/trains, military, airlines, recreational vehicles, soft drinks, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, beauty products, telecommunications and banks.

Historically-based prejudices in three basic narrative strategies (silence, chosen items and detailed discussion) about financial crimes are related to the mindset, to the basic outlook on corporate self-interest or to an absolutizing attitude.

The historically-based prejudices that have been identified in this explanatory study should be analyzed in longitudinal studies.

The historically-based prejudices that have been identified in this explanatory study should be analyzed in longitudinal studies. Historically-based prejudices could be strengthened by the way corporate codes of ethics deal with financial crimes. They could, thus, have a deep impact on the organizational culture in the long-run.

The paper analyzes the way corporate codes of ethics use given narrative strategies to address financial crimes issues. It also unveils historically-based prejudices that follow from the choice of one or the other narrative strategy.