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The purpose of this paper is to address the imbalance between inductive and deductive research in management and organizational studies and to suggest changes in the journal review and publishing process that would help correct the imbalance by encouraging more inductive research.

The authors briefly review the ongoing debate about the “developmental” vs “as-is/light-touch” journal review modes, trace the roots of the prevailing developmental review to the hypothetico-deductive research approach, and contrast publishing deductive and inductive research from the perspectives of authors, editors, and reviewers.

Application of the same developmental evaluation and review mode to both deductive and inductive research, despite their fundamental differences, discourages inductive research. The authors argue that a light-touch review is more appropriate for inductive research, given its different logic.

Specific criteria for the light-touch evaluation and review of and some concrete suggestions for facilitating inductive research.

Advancing knowledge requires a better balance of inductive and deductive research, which can be facilitated by light-touch evaluation and review of inductive research.

Building on the debate on journal publishing, the authors differentiate the evaluation and review of inductive and deductive research based on their philosophical underpinnings and draw implications of pursuing inductive research for authors, editors, and reviewers.

Based on a framework developed by Kovács and Spens, this paper seeks to assess the use of the three different research approaches in logistics research; discuss the use of different research methods within the three research approaches; find and discuss applications of the abductive research approach to logistics problems.

Content analysis is used in order to categorize the different research approaches. While content analysis commonly uses smaller units such as paragraphs, sentences, words or characters, this study used entire articles as the unit of analysis. The scope of the review encompassed five years (1998‐2002) of articles in IJLM, IJPDLM and JBL. A total of 378 articles was reviewed and categorized.

The findings of the study corroborate earlier studies regarding the main research approach used in logistics. Published logistics research is hypothetico‐deductive, with a strong emphasis on using survey methods. Nevertheless, inductive as well as abductive research is gaining importance. However, most logistics articles do not explicitly discuss the research process, nor the approach used. Therefore, a call for more explicit statements of the research approach is suggested.

The review of the articles is limited to three main journals in the field. A more comprehensive view of research approaches could be obtained by broadening the review to include also other types of research.

The paper provides a framework and guidelines to researchers for explicitly discussing the research approach used in logistics articles.

The paper provides an overview of the research approaches used in logistics research.

Independent travelers are those vacationers who have booked only a minimum of their transportation and accommodation arrangements prior to departure on the vacation. Independent travel is an important and growing sector of worldwide tourism. Choice of vacation itinerary for the independent vacation represents a complex series of decisions regarding purchase of multiple leisure and tourism services. This chapter builds and tests a model of independent traveler decision-making for choice of vacation itinerary. The research undertaken employs a two-phase, inductive–deductive case study design. In the deductive phase, the researcher interviewed 20 travel parties vacationing in New Zealand for the first time. The researcher interviewed respondents at both the beginning and the end of their New Zealand vacations. The study compares pre-vacation research and plans, and actual vacation behaviors, on a case-by-case basis. The study examines case study narratives and quantitative measures of crucial variables. The study tests two competing models of independent traveler decision-making, using a pattern-matching procedure. This embedded research design results in high multi-source, multi-method validity for the supported model. The model of the Independent Vacation as Evolving Itinerary suggests that much of the vacation itinerary experienced in independent travel is indeed unplanned, and that a desire to experience the unplanned is a key hedonic motive for independent travel. Rather than following a fixed itinerary, the itinerary of an independent vacation evolves as the vacation proceeds. The independent traveler takes advantage of serendipitous opportunities to experience a number of locations, attractions and activities that they had neither actively researched nor planned.

To construct a framework for exploring and discussing the use of different research approaches – deductive, inductive and abductive – in logistics.

A review of research articles in three major logistics journals (International Journal of Logistics Management, International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management and Journal of Business Logistics) from 1998 to 2002.

Recognizes the dominance of deductive research in logistics, and the need for more inductive and, in particular, abductive research for theory development. Discusses the use of the abductive research approach in logistics.

Keywords searches led to a small sample size; more thorough content analysis is needed to apply the findings from the constructed framework.

Useful source of information on the three different research approaches, their possibilities and implications for research.

The abductive research approach has not yet been discussed in logistics.

The objective of this paper is to describe a counter‐intuitive view of the deductive research process.

The paper should be seen as addressing a debatable subject where there is no “right” or “wrong”, but one which hopefully will stimulate and/or provoke a certain degree of afterthought and reflection. An applied approach to the research process is presented and discussed.

The paper contends that the counter‐intuitive approach illustrated may uncover pitfalls and flaws in research endeavours at an early stage of an intended research process.

It is important that the four elements of idea, support, implications, and contribution are thought through properly in detail before too much investment in time and resources, as well as intellectual effort, has been made, in order to avoid frustration and discontent among involved stakeholders.

The paper contends that it is essential to dedicate and pay attention to the intended research process as a whole before actually going through with it.

It is hoped that the presented counter‐intuitive view of the deductive research process will assist scholars (e.g. junior faculty and doctoral students) in their efforts to perform research endeavours.

Sentiment analysis is a text analysis method that is developed for systematically detecting, identifying, or extracting the emotional intent of words to infer if the text expresses a positive or negative tone. Although this novel method has opened an exciting new avenue for organizational research – mainly due to the abundantly available text data in organizations and the well-developed sentiment analysis techniques, it has also posed a serious challenge to many organizational researchers. This chapter aims to introduce the sentiment analysis method in the text mining area to the organizational research community. In this chapter, the authors first briefly discuss the central role of sentiment in organizational research and then introduce the traditional and modern approaches to sentiment analysis. The authors further delineate research paradigms for text analysis research, advocating the iterative research paradigm (cf., inductive and deductive research paradigms) that is more suitable for text mining research, and also introduce the analytical procedures for sentiment analysis with three stages – discovery, measurement, and inference. More importantly, the authors highlight both the dictionary-based and machine learning (ML) approaches in the measurement stage, with special coverage on deep learning and word embedding techniques as the latest breakthroughs in sentiment and text analyses. Lastly, the authors provide two illustrative examples to demonstrate the applications of sentiment analysis in organizational research. It is the authors’ hope that this chapter – by providing these practical guidelines – will help facilitate more applications of this novel method in organizational research in the future.

In this chapter, the authors critique dominant technocratic conceptions of rigor in management research and elaborate an alternative account of rigor that is rooted in methodology and involves a concern with the quality of scientific reasoning rather than a narrower focus on methods or measurement issues per se. Based on the proposed redefinition, the authors conceptualize how rigor, as an essential quality of reasoning, may be defined and the authors in turn qualify alternative methodological criteria for how they might assess the rigor of any particular piece of research. In short, with this chapter the authors’ overall aim is to shift the basis of rigor to an altogether more legitimate and commensurable notion that squarely puts the focus on reasoning and scientific inference for quantitative and qualitative research alike. The authors highlight some of the benefits that such an alternative and unified view of rigor may potentially provide toward fostering the quality and progress of management research.