Field Research Practice in Management and Organization Studies: Reclaiming its Tradition of Discovery

Abstract

This review reasserts field research's discovery epistemology. While it occupies a minority position in the study of organization and management, discovery-oriented research practice has a long tradition of giving insight into new, unappreciated and misappreciated processes that are important to how work is accomplished. I argue that while methods discourse has long emphasized that particularizing data and an emergent research design are productive for discovery, little to no attention has been paid to the conjectural processes necessary to imaginatively interpret these observations. I underscore them. What is the future for discovery work in business schools today? Issues arise when an increasing interest in discovery-oriented research is expressed in an institutional context that is bounded off from field research's home disciplines and is dominated by a validation epistemology. In light of this current context, I offer some initial thoughts on the work to be done to maintain fieldwork's discovery tradition in management and organization studies.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ann Cunliffe, Adina Dabu, and Martha Feldman for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

I lived it. Besides multiple courses in statistics, my undergraduate degree in psychology at University College London included a required two-year course in experimental design in which theoretically derived experiments were performed one week and written up the next over every week of the entire two-year period. It still echoes. Intensive observation did persist, albeit in ethological studies of animal behavior, which I pursued.

Anthropology has, though, had a continuing presence in industry (for example, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center) where the corporate form of anthropological practice has acquired a near brand status (Suchman, 2007).

Both the insistence of ethnographers and separate research supports this claim. Tope, Chamberlain, Crowley, and Hodson's (2005) analysis of the information yield of 204 book-length qualitative workplace accounts indicates that, relative to interviews and non-participant observation, participant observation provides greater information and more descriptive detail. And, Rynes, McNatt, and Bretz (1999) found that research impact measured by a study's citation rate was positively correlated with how much time researchers spent on site.

The term is here used to refer broadly to theoretical tools (including theories, models, and concepts).

Blumer (1954) distinguished sensitizing from definitive concepts. While the latter prescribe what to see, sensitizing concepts provide general directions along which to look.

See also Prasad (2005) and Yannow and Schwartz-Shea (2006) for a range of traditions falling under the interpretive umbrella.

Requisite is qualified because within its cybernetic framing it suggests a bounded range of variety that I do not intend.

See also Barley and Kunda, 2001; Bate, 1997; Prasad, 2005; Silverman 2007; and Watson, 2011 for discussions of the dominance of interviewing.