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Our theoretical understanding of subjective well-being in the workplace is incomplete without a dynamic understanding of antecedents and outcomes of subjective well-being. While between-person differences provide useful information about employee outcomes, these differences do not provide information about the relationships between subjective well-being and employee outcomes that evolve over time and across situations. In this paper, we discuss specific statistical methods within the nomothetic and idiographic perspectives that can support dynamic research on subjective well-being in the workplace and outline unanswered contemporary questions regarding structure, processes, and dynamics of subjective well-being that may be addressed with these methods reviewed; some of which were proposed in early research but progressed slowly due to a lack of adequate methods. This discussion highlights how idiographic methods from outside organizational psychology can be applied to the study of worker subjective well-being to strengthen this dynamic approach in a way that addresses limitations associated with reliance on between-person models.

This chapter discusses the main research interests and outputs in the various branches of geography that have influenced the study of tourism from a geographical perspective. It argues that the idiographic tradition has been transversal throughout, leading to the growing interest for tourism within the geography academic community in the last 10 years. There is a focus on the birth of specific research groups, mainly related to a constellation of new university curricula on tourism and—with few exceptions of territorial tradition—to an intermittent availability of public research funds. The chapter concludes with a more general picture of the place of tourism within the geography discipline in Italy and of evolving trends in terms of research results, dissemination, and evaluation.

Army and Joint Transformation initiatives in U.S. national defense (Shinseki, 2000) underscore the need to plan and meet mission requirements for individual soldier and small unit deployment in “close fight” scenarios (e.g. close combat, direct fire, complex terrain). This has focused interest and attention on the need for improved individual human performance research data, models, and high-fidelity simulations that can accurately represent human behavior in individual and small unit settings. New strategies are now needed to bridge the gap between performance outcome assessment and prediction (see also Pew & Mavor, 1998). The purpose of this chapter is to address epistemological and methodological issues that are fundamentally relevant to this goal.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a reflexive process that makes a distinction between reflection and reflexivity, two processes the authors define according to the mentalization construct. Next, it explores how the narrative mediation path (NMP), a novel multimodal counselling method addressed to underachieving college students, promotes reflection and reflexivity by enhancing student ability to mentalize their university experiences.

The authors conducted an idiographic case study on one of the ten groups of underachieving students who participated in the counselling sessions.

NMP narrative modes (metaphoric, iconographic, writing, and bodily) promoted reflection, and group-level inter-subjective steps were essential for the development of reflexivity. Furthermore, it was found that in each narrative mode, the students developed reflective and reflexive processes through the attainment of mentalization dimensions.

The adoption of the NMP has some implications for universities. Many underachieving students in higher education often have reflexive difficulties when examining their university experiences, so could be considered average mentalizers who tend to show bias in their university experience signification when under stress. Promoting mentalization development can enable students to use their resources strategically at university and improve their academic performance.

The NMP is innovative because of its multimodality: it employs different modes and media, makes use of both individual and group narrative levels, and is integrated in a single method, which enhances the development of reflexive meaning construction.

Geertz is well known for his methodology. Many Symbolic Interactionists refer to his notion of “thick description.” They may not know his work on Indonesia in general, but they often know his famous essay on the Balinese cockfight: “Deep Play” (Geertz, 1972, 1973). That essay is often held up as an exemplary “model” of ethnographic fieldwork. But we need to examine what he calls “thick description” more carefully. After the first few pages of the essay there is actually very little “idiographic description” per se. Much of the paper concerns general description and analysis. We do not get a blow-by-blow account of a cockfight as viewed by Geertz. Instead we get an analysis that is based on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism (Parekh, 1998). There is a good deal missing from the broader analysis as well. Much of that can be found in other work (Geertz, 1959, 1966, 1980, 1995). Students who only read “Deep Play” often form a superficial impression of the method of “thick description” and a distorted sense of Balinese culture (Howe, 2001; Vickers, 1996 [1981]; Warren, 1993). This essay supplements Geertz’s essay with a discussion of a religious ceremony of far more importance than the largely secular cockfight. I touch on a central feature of Balinese society not emphasized by Geertz: the temple anniversary festival. It is called an odalan (Belo, 1966 [1953a]; Eiseman, 1990; Geertz, 2004). But the problem is not just restricted to the “Deep Play” essay. Geertz’s other work is often also not based primarily on ethnographic thick description. It concerns historical and sociological generalizations. Those are often based on archives and general fieldwork. Geertz also benefits from reading of Dutch research not available in English. The celebrations which take place at a temple are “deeper” than more immediate, largely secular games like a cockfight. Geertz’s oeuvre is well worth reading, but his notion of “thick description” needs to be seen in a broader, comparative historical sociological context. That involves Interpretive research paradigms that Geertz, as a symbolic anthropologist, distanced himself from, including Symbolic Interactionism and Weberian verstehende Soziologie.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and articulate concepts and approaches to qualitative generalisation that will offer qualitative accounting researchers avenues for enhancing and justifying the general applicability of their research findings and conclusions.

The study and arguments draw from multidisciplinary approaches to this issue. The analysis and theorising is based on published qualitative research literatures from the fields of education, health sciences, sociology, information systems, management and marketing, as well as accounting.

The paper develops two overarching generalisation concepts for application by qualitative accounting researchers. These are built upon a number of qualitative generalisation concepts that have emerged in the multidisciplinary literatures. It also articulates strategies for enhancing the generalisability of qualitative accounting research findings.

The paper provides qualitative accounting researchers with understandings, arguments and justifications for the generalisability of their research and the related potential for wider accounting and societal contributions. It also articulates the key factors that impact on the quality of research generalisation that qualitative researchers can offer.

This paper presents the most comprehensively sourced and developed approach to the concepts, strategies and unique deliverables of qualitative generalising hitherto available in the accounting research literature.

To demonstrate how awareness of Neo-Marxist critical theory and Neo-Weberian comparative–historical sociology would have been beneficial to U.S. policy planners and decision-makers, especially Presidents.

This study employs qualitative analysis of available sources rather than quantitative data analysis.

Based on its practical application to a specific historical instance, the heuristic value of Max Weber’s ideal-type model of traditional authority (Herrschaft [domination]) is confirmed, as it is apparent that Henry Kissinger’s interpretation of the meaning of Realpolitik harmed U.S. foreign policy.

There is an imminent need to be critical of claims to expertise by advisors of major decision-makers. The practical relevance of possessing an adequate grasp of a given situation as the context in which actors must make choices is evident, as applies with regard to the current crises facing the world, which must be approached and addressed as scrupulously as possible.

Prevailing critiques of Kissinger and American foreign policy have tended to accept the premise that Kissinger was well-informed and giving good advice based on extensive and appropriate scholarship. That was not the case in Vietnam, in Indonesia, or in other regions. There are no available studies that examine Kissinger’s Eurocentric and limited perspective in light of critical theory and comparative–historical sociology.

Policy-capturing is an experimental technique potentially capable of providing powerful insights into the cognitive bases of work-related decision processes by revealing actors’ “implicit” models of the problem at hand, thereby opening up the “black box” of managerial and organizational cognition. This chapter considers the strengths and weaknesses of policy-capturing vis-à-vis alternative approaches that seek to capture, in varying ways, the inner workings of people’s minds as they make decisions. It then outlines the critical issues that need to be addressed when designing policy-capturing studies and offers practical advice to would-be users concerning some of the common pitfalls of the technique and ways of avoiding them.

Quantitative research is based on epistemic beliefs that can be traced back to David Hume. Hume and others who followed in his wake suggested that we can never directly observe cause and effect. Rather we perceive what is called “constant conjunction” or the regularities of relationships among events. Through observing these regularities, we can develop generalizable laws that, once established, describe predictable patterns that can be replicated with reliability. This form of reasoning involves studying groups of individuals and is often called nomothetic and is contrasted with idiographic research that focuses on the uniqueness of the individual. It is clear that large-scale experiments with random assignment to treatment are based on nomothetic models, as are quasi-experimental studies where intact groups of people (e.g., students in a particular classroom) are assigned to treatments.