Faculty
Stefan Meisiek, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School

Course Coordinator
Stefan Meisiek, Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that the student attends the whole course.

The demands on the quality of qualitative data collection and analysis have steeply risen over the past years. In order to publish a qualitative study in a top journal, students of organization and management studies need to know how to collect rich data, how to see interesting developments in the data, how to push beyond first order concepts, how to elegantly theorize from qualitative data, and finally to write it up in a compelling way. The process needs more than command of a few qualitative methods, it require the scholar to develop a qualitative mindset. This course aims at helping students to develop this mindset, and with it to a) choose wisely among methods, perspectives, and analytical moves, and b) to learn how to “see” organizational and management phenomena with an aesthetical sense. Any choice and perspective has to be adequate and generative for their particular study interest.

Qualitative methods have gained a substantial following in the social sciences, and especially Scandinavia has developed a rich tradition in qualitative research. In contrast to quantitative methods, however, this branch of scientific inquiry has no unifying standard, like mathematics. What seems like a detriment in terms of control and generalizability, is in fact the great advantage of qualitative work: the suitability for inquiry into new phenomena, where variables are yet unknown, or unknowable. It is the explicit-making of human-centered perspectives, and the flexibility to create situated understanding, which can inform broader theorizing that makes them valuable.

The lack of a unifying standard has also led to a plethora of fundamentally different qualitative methods. Some look for variables for future quantitative research, some want to further critical theory, and yet others look for patterns of structuration around practice-based action. But whatever epistemological and ontological branch you might find attractive, the basic challenges of problem finding, appreciating richness, finding interesting points of comparisons, and not to loose the oversight in hundred or thousands of pages, photos, soundbites, and drawings remain. Looking at the work with qualitative material through a humanities lens, a field where qualitative work has a broader footing, reveals some of the inner workings and possibilities in qualitative work as it happens in the social sciences today. Especially it highlights the need for less tool thinking and more of seeing qualitatively.

The present course is less an introduction to qualitative methods, than an exercise at developing a qualitative mind, including a repertoire of seeing and way finding.

- Develop a qualitative mindset

- Critically evaluate qualitative studies in top journals

- Mindfully choose qualitative methods

- Collecting and analyzing qualitative data

- theorizing from qualitative data

- introduction to visual methods

- gaining richer perspective on interviewing and interview data

- analogical reasoning in data analysis

- becoming conversant in epistemological and ontological matters

Lecture plan

Time/period	Faculty	Title
Wednesday 26 October
9.00-12.00	Stefan Meisiek	Problem Finding
12.00-13.00		Lunch
13.00-15.00	Stefan Meisiek	Richness
15.00-17.00	Stefan Meisiek	Comparisons and Extensions
Thursday 27 October
9.00-12.00	Stefan Meisiek	Visual research
12.00-13.00		Lunch
13.00-15.00	Stefan Meisiek	Online Information
15.00-17.00	Stefan Meisiek	The Power of Analogy
Friday 28 October
9.00-12.00	Stefan Meisiek	Theory building with Qualitative Data
12.00-13.00		Lunch
13.00-17.00	Stefan Meisiek	Reporting: How do you Know?

 Discussion based, experiential, problem-based learning, and example lectures

Books:

Banks, Marcus 2001 Visual methods in social research. London: Sage Publications

Juster, Norton 1961. The Phantom Tollbooth. London: Random House.

Miles, Matthew and A. Michael Huberman 1994 Qualitative Data Analysis: An extended sourcebook. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.

Pink, Sarah 2006 Doing visual ethnography. London: Sage.

Strauss, Anselm L.; Juliet Corbin 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research

 

Articles:

Barry, D., Meisiek, S., and Hatch, M.J. 2010. The fine art of organizational theory. (unpublished manuscript)

Bartunek, Jean. 2007. Academic-practitioner collaboration need not require joint or relevant research: Toward a relational scholarship of integration. Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 50 Issue 6: 1323-1333

Cornelissen, J. P. 2005 Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory. Academy of Management Review, 30 (4): 751–764.

Davis, M. S. 1971. That’s interesting! Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1: 309-345.

Hatch, M. J., & Yanow, D. 2008. Methodology by metaphor: Ways of seeing in painting and research. Organization Studies, 29 (1): 23-44.

Jick, T.D. 1979. Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Methods: Triangulation in Action. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 24 (4), 602-611.

Palmer, I. and Dunford, R. 1996. Conflicting uses of metaphors: Reconceptualizing their use in the field of organizational change. Academy of Management Review 21: 291-717.

Strati, A. 1992. Aesthetic understanding of organizational life. Academy of Management Review, 17 (3): 568-581.

Tsoukas, Haridimos 1991. The missing link: A transformational view of metaphors in organizational science. Academy of Management Review 16: 566-585.

Weick, K.E. 2007. The generative properties of richness. Academy of Management

Journal, 50 (1): 14–19.

 

Study Examples:

Anteby, Michel 2008 Identity Incentives as an Engaging Form of Control: Revisiting Leniencies in an Aeronautic Plant. Organization Science 19: 202-220.

Baker, T., & Nelson, R. E.. 2005. Creating something from nothing: Resource construction through entrepreneurial bricolage. Administrative Science Quarterly, 50: 329–366.

Barry, Daved and Rerup, Claus 2006. Going mobile: Aesthetic design considerations from Calder and the constructivists. Organization Science 17: 262-276.

Cunha, Joao, and Orlikowski, Wanda. 2008 Performing catharsis: The use of online

discussion forums in organizational change. Information and Organization 18: 132–156.

Dutton, J. E., & Dukerich, J. M. 1991. Keeping an eye on the mirror: Image and identity in organizational adaptation. Academy of Management Journal , 34 (3): 517-554.

Kan, Melanie and Ken W. Parry 2004 ‘Identifying paradox: A grounded theory of leadership in overcoming resistance to change’. The Leadership Quarterly 15(4): 467-491.

Orlikowski, Wanda J. and Yates, JoAnne. 1994. Genre Repertoire: The Structuring of Communicative Practices in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4: 541-574

Weick, K. E. 1993. The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38: 628–652.

Weick, K. E. 1989. Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Academy of

Management Review, 14 (4): 516-531.

 Please send your application to Katja Høeg Tingleff ( kht.research@cbs.dk) no later than 23 September 2011