Theoretical Progress in Management Studies and the Role of Qualitative Research

• Author: Dries Faems,Bill Harley
• Date: 01 May 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12239
• Published date: 01 May 2017

Theoretical Progress in Management Studies and the

Role of Qualitative Research

Bill Harley and Dries Faems

The University of Melbourne; University of Gronigen

The Journal of Management Studies has a long history of publishing qualitative research. In

recent years, a number of other journals have sought actively to attract more qualitative

papers and it would appear that the proportion of qualitative papers in leading journals

has increased (Bluhm et al., 2011). Nonetheless, it is widely recognised in the field that

quantitative research remains the norm, and in some sub-disciplines would appear to be

becoming even more dominant, with positivist methodology and conceptions of rigour

more-or-less taken for granted as the preferred approach (Harley, 2015).

A dilemma facing qualitative researchers is how to publish their work in leading

journals, which demand very high levels of methodological rigour, without losing what

is distinctively valuable about qualitative methods. In his contribution to this

Point-Counterpoint, Joep Cornelissen suggests that an increasingly popular approach

has been for qualitative researc hers to produce papers which seek t o mimic the style of

quantitative papers. He argues that this commonly takes the form of analysis in which

the rich and detailed data from qualitative studies is reduced to a series of ‘fa ctors’.

Cornelissen’s concern is not with the method per se, but with its implications for

theory building. He argues that method and theory are inextricably linked and that by

adopting this kind of approach, qualitative scholars are led toward linear cause-effect

theorising of the kind usually associated with quantitative work. For Cornelissen, the

danger of this trend in methods is that it undermines the ability of qualitative work to

provide the kind of rich, detailed explanatory theorising which is its hallmark.

In his Counterpoint piece, Patrick Wright also accepts that qualitative scholars face

difficulties in publishing their work in leading management journals. Adopting a view of

theory and method consistent with positivism, he argues that theoretical progress takes

place as theories are developed, refined and empirically tested. A necessary part of this

is measurement. If concepts cannot be measured, then their reliability and validity can-

not be tested, and theory cannot be built on a rigorous empirical basis. From Wright’s

Address for reprints: Bill Harley, Department of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Business and Eco-

nomics, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia (bharley@unimelb.edu.au).

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C2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and Society for the Advancement of Management Studies

Journal of Management Studies 54:3 May 2017

doi: 10.1111/joms.12239