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To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

Cross-boundary cooperation with shared goals and values involving the poor has been argued as an indispensable means for inclusive business (IB) success. Cooperation may become dynamic, especially when exploratory and creative attempts with effective cooperative learning among partners can be realized. Even so, not many companies have reported successful in building the cooperation. One case, providing clean, affordable drinking water to the poor in Tanzanian rural villages, suggests that a delegated and grassroots-based approach in cooperation with a highly trustworthy local partner can successfully promote cooperative learning and transfer know-how in both operations and management. This approach also stimulates local and self-initiated activities for expanding water facilities and generating local businesses in an area where employment is scarce. Deviation from mainstream-institution-based operations and management is one example of institutional interconnections that enable the rural poor to self-manage projects and stimulate self-initiated business activities, consequently contributing to rural development and sustainable development goals.

This chapter describes the work-life balance project, which was the first to investigate the potential of clean language as an academic research interview methodology (Lawley, Meyer, Meese, Sullivan, & Tosey, 2010). It resulted in the publication of an article in the British Journal of Management (Tosey, Lawley, & Meese, 2014) that has since been cited in several academic papers, including Langley and Meziani's (2020) review of interview methodologies in the field of organisational change. This chapter describes the project's methodology and findings and highlights six lessons learnt that have helped to inform the further development of clean language interviewing.

Networking, gatekeeper access, understanding of “localized talks,” and jargon are revealed to be influential factors on the quality and richness of case study research (CSR) data. Rapport between the researcher and the interviewee not only affect the depth of the data collected but also the credibility and completeness of the final research output. This chapter discusses these features of CSR by employing two different CSR studies. The chapter provides practical insights to promote the interviewee's confidence in revealing sensitive data, through a three-step procedure.

There is currently no case study for how clean language interviewing (CLI) might be useful for journalists. This chapter addresses that gap by discussing the value of CLI in journalistic interviews within the scope of a profile story interview. A profile story is akin to a mini biography, usually of a public figure or an interesting personality. This chapter was written drawing on my experience as an award-winning journalist in Malaysia for 20 years.

The chapter first examines the experience of CLI for both the interviewee and the interviewer. It then considers how the experience is similar to or different from other ‘standard’ media interviews both have been involved in. The chapter concludes that CLI is a method of interviewing that exceeds the criteria for what constitutes a good journalistic interview, within the context of a profile interview.

Underpinning clean language interviewing is a set of skills that allow the interviewer great facility in tracking what has been presented. These skills include minimising personal inference and making an informed choice of what question to ask. They are grounded in the logic of the interviewee's data and the purpose of the interview.

This chapter makes visible four hidden skills I identified through reflection on a doctoral study I conducted using clean language interviewing. These are, how I: ‘parcel out’ sentences in order to build visual-spatial schema; apply content-free codes during the interview; decide what is salient in the interviewee's words and gestures; and use adjacency to navigate my way around the data. Since these skills are applied moment-by-moment during the interview, I refer to them as ‘coding in-the-moment’. I conclude with a comparison between grounded theory methodology and clean language interviewing.

The long interview is an intensive questioning of informants selected for their special knowledge, experiences and insights (or ignorance) of the topic under study. The objectives of the long interview include learning the thinking, feeling, and doing processes of the informants, including an understanding of the informants' worldviews of the topic under study in their own language. The chapter compares the strengths and weaknesses of the long interview to other primary data collection methods. The chapter describes a research application of the long interview in integrated marketing. The study was designed to (a) learn about the rich complexities in the lives of household gardeners buying and using seeds plants after responding to direct marketing appeals and (b) resolve two conflicting “theories-in-use” of how and why different customer types purchase products. These competing theories were proposed by different executives in the firm sponsoring the study. The development and critical testing of competing theories-in-use are described. This chapter reports a study to learn the behavior of five customer types. The results include thick descriptions of the processes of buying and using seeds and plants purchased through direct marketing offers and store visits.

The study here examines how business actors adapt to changes in networks by analyzing their perceptions or their network pictures. The study is exploratory or iterative in the sense that revisions occur to the research question, method, theory, and context as an integral part of the research process.

Changes within networks receive less research attention, although considerable research exists on explaining business network structures in different research traditions. This study analyzes changes in networks in terms of the industrial network approach. This approach sees networks as connected relationships between actors, where interdependent companies interact based on their sensemaking of their relevant network environment. The study develops a concept of network change as well as an operationalization for comparing perceptions of change, where the study introduces a template model of dottograms to systematically analyze differences in perceptions. The study then applies the model to analyze findings from a case study of Norwegian/Japanese seafood distribution, and the chapter provides a rich description of a complex system facing considerable pressure to change. In-depth personal interviews and cognitive mapping techniques are the main research tools applied, in addition to tracer studies and personal observation.

The dottogram method represents a valuable contribution to case study research as it enables systematic within-case and across-case analyses. A further theoretical contribution of the study is the suggestion that network change is about actors seeking to change their network position to gain access to resources. Thereby, the study also implies a close relationship between the concepts network position and the network change that has not been discussed within the network approach in great detail.

Another major contribution of the study is the analysis of the role that network pictures play in actors' efforts to change their network position. The study develops seven propositions in an attempt to describe the role of network pictures in network change. So far, the relevant literature discusses network pictures mainly as a theoretical concept. Finally, the chapter concludes with important implications for management practice.

Purpose – This paper reflects on how does the mode, in which we ask questions, affect the responses? It explores the differences between the responses to the same questions obtained through two different modes – depth interviews and self-administered questionnaires (SAQs).

Approach – This paper is based on a series of serendipitous but enlightening insights that were obtained while conducting research that sought to examine the drivers of corporate environmentalism in firms based in Eastern and Western economies. The methodology adopted in the research project involved conducting depth interviews with senior-most managers in business organizations in India (Eastern) and New Zealand (Western). The insights that form the basis for this paper were gained when some managers treated the list of questions in the interview guide as a structured open-ended questionnaire and sent back detailed written responses.

Findings – This paper reports that the written responses obtained through SAQs in this project were different both in form and content; they were staid, reserved, clichéd and aimed at being politically correct. In contrast the responses to the same question asked in the interviews were open and candid admissions. Interview responses stood up to the triangulation tests, while the written responses did not. These differences were particularly evident in the eastern context.

Research implications – While both SAQs and interviews are prone to social desirability bias, this paper suggests that there is a greater opportunity to reduce social desirability bias in interviews. This is especially true if a trained interviewer can convince the participants of the credibility, importance and legitimacy of the study.

Originality/value – This paper contributes in two important ways:1.It addresses the issue of how responses to the same question differ across SAQs and depth interviews in strategy and management research.2.It also examines whether this effect differs across Eastern and Western organizational contexts.