Anne D. Smith

Using Photographs to Research Organizations: Evidence, Considerations, and Application in a Field Study

Despite calls for more visual methodologies in organizational research, the use of photographs remains sparse. Organizational research could benefit from the inclusion of photographs to track contemporary change processes in an organization and change processes over time, as well as to incorporate diverse voices within organizations, to name a few advantages. To further understanding, the authors identify researcher choices related to the use of photographs in organizational research, clarify the advantages and disadvantages of these choices, and discuss ethical and other special considerations of the use of photographs. They highlight several organizational areas of research, primarily related to the management discipline, that could benefit from the inclusion of photographs. Finally, the authors describe how they used photographs in a study of one organization and specifically how their intended research design with photographs changed over the course of the study as well as how photographs helped to develop new theoretical insights. Photographic research methods represent a viable—but underleveraged—method that should be more fully incorporated in the methodological tool kit of organizational scholars.

Everyday Sensegiving: A Closer Look at Successful Plant Managers

The authors conducted in-depth interviews and on-site visits with successful plant managers to understand similarities in their management approaches. Across 11 different plants, representing nine different industries, the authors found each plant manager actively engaged in shaping how employees viewed the organization and its values through what the authors call “everyday sensegiving.” From themes inductively identified from the interviews and on-site visits, four central values—“Here, we value people, we value openness, we value being positive, and we value being part of a larger community” were identified. In this article, the authors link everyday sensegiving of these middle managers and extend the findings of the study to consider linkages to organizational performance and change efforts.

From Process Data to Publication A Personal Sensemaking

How do field researchers make sense of voluminous process data, much of it qualitative data? When this author began to analyze her dissertation data in 1992, she did not have a clear answer to this question. However, with several articles from this research safely in publication, she took the opportunity to make sense of her 7-year data analysis experience. Her sensemaking of process data analysis is broken down into three phases and compared to the data analysis schema of Langley (1999). The role of outside influences, which aided movement through the phases, is highlighted at the end of the article. Finally, a model of this overall process—from process data to publication—is articulated. The article does not provide a definitive answer to the above question, but it is hoped that it will provide clues for researchers searching to answer that question themselves.

The gendering of organizational research methods: Evidence of gender patterns in qualitative research

Purpose — The purpose of this paper is to explore the role that gender plays in choice of research methods. Design/methodology/approach — The publication patterns of men and women in four prominent management journals over two decades were analyzed in three North American journals—Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science—and one European journal—Journal of Management Studies. The authors coded the research methodology—qualitative or non-qualitative—and author gender for each article from 1986 through 2008, other than Organization Science which began in 1990. The authors also coded the stage of career for the journals whose author bios provided this level of detail and conducted chi-square tests of the gender authorship between qualitative and non-qualitative journals. Findings — It was observed that women are over-represented and men are under-represented in published qualitative studies as compared to non-qualitative authors. This trend remained steady across the study period. As well for each journal. this relationship was significant. Quantitative findings about trends in authorship of qualitative research were connected to three theoretical perspectives that help explain these findings—information processing theory, separate vs. connected ways of knowing, and social identity theory. Originality/value — Management scholars work in a profession that rarely speaks of itself in terms of gender. One may control for gender or explore gender implications in studies of organizational behavior. but gender is not spoken of as a factor that influences the tools used to study organizations. In this study. the authors use quantitative methods to address trends in gender and type of methodology in published papers across two decades and four academic journals.

Autobiographies in Organizational Research Using Leaders’ Life Stories in a Triangulated Research Design

Obtaining deep-level insights into the thoughts, actions, and emotions of organizational leaders can pose significant challenges to organizational scholars. Fortunately, a promising but largely untapped resource to provide such insights exists—autobiographies. We begin by providing an overview of autobiographies as a data source, including their benefits and limitations. We then discuss where autobiographies could contribute to theory development in organizational research, highlighting the areas of strategic leadership and entrepreneurship, identity, and sensemaking. To provide direction on how to incorporate these texts into a research design, we provide several research ideas and guidelines about how autobiographies could be used in a triangulated research design. We illustrate their use in a recent study conducted among craft entrepreneurs to confirm existing findings and document a series of planned studies using autobiographies to explore new findings. Together, the study, although focusing on autobiographies, offers a broader framework to advance the use of narrative forms in organizational scholarship.

Using Photographs to Integrate Liberal Arts Learning in Business Education

The inclusion of photographic approaches in the business classroom can incorporate missing elements of liberal education into business education, which were highlighted in a recent Carnegie study of undergraduate business education. Building on photographic methods in social science research, we identify three categories of photographic approaches that can enhance undergraduate liberal arts modes of thinking: (a) archival or researcher-created images translated into in-class activities, (b) photo-elicitation course projects in which students envision future careers and step into the shoes of another, and (c) photovoice courses built around semester-long projects to generate student self-reflection. These in-class, grassroots efforts allow professors to provide undergraduate business students the opportunities to learn through multiple framing and reflective exploration of meaning.

Worth a Thousand Words: Photographs As a Novel Methodological Tool in Strategic Management

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to review and categorize how photographs have been used in management research and to provide strategic management researchers with suggestions about how to use photographs to enhance their qualitative research methodologies. Methodology/approach – We develop a typology of photographic uses in management research by reviewing several scholarly journals. Findings – We identify two dimensions that differentiate how photographs have been used in management journals. First, photographs can be used to illustrate scenes from a field setting or they can be interpreted as data. Second, the role of field participants can be one of active collaboration or no involvement in the photographic aspect of the qualitative research project. For instance, field subjects can collaborate in research by aiding in the photo-documentation process and/or aiding in the photo-elicitation process. Choosing which of our four identified photographic approaches represents a critical decision for qualitative researchers interested in incorporating photographs in their research. Practical implications – We suggest ideas for strategic management researchers related to use of photographs in their research. Also, we describe how specific strategic management research projects can be approached with photography, which we argue can lead to enhanced theoretical contributions. Originality/value of paper – To date, little has been written in the strategic management field about the use of photography. This chapter provides a succinct review of photographic methods in management research. Moreover, this chapter provides suggestions for how strategy researchers, study participants, and interested readers of management research could benefit from incorporating photographs into research accounts.

Introduction “What Grounded Theory Is…”

With the impending 50th anniversary of the first publication of Glaser and Strauss’s The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967), the time feels right to ‘‘talk about what we do in our research and how we do it’’ (Locke, this issue). This conversation began with submission of a well-attended 2013 Academy of Management panel organized by Isabelle Walsh and Judith Holton including Barney Glaser, Lotte Bailyn, Walter Fernandez, and Natalia Levina. Two reviewers (unknown to the panelists) helped to transform the panel transcript into a more tightly scripted contribution to Organizational Research Methods, after which we invited three expert commentaries (Kevin Corley, Deborah Dougherty, and Karen Locke). The panelists then provided a rejoinder and final comments. In the end, I believe that this conversation clarifies points of agreement as well as surfaces differing assumptions and contemporary considerations related to grounded theory (GT). These articles can be read by novices to grounded theory as well as seasoned GT users. I recommend reading the ‘‘conversation’’ as a package—starting with the initial panel, followed by the expert commentaries and panelist rejoinders and final comments. There were several areas of agreement across this conversation. First, that grounded theory can accommodate a variety of data is a clear point of agreement. The panel emerged from discussion of Walsh’s question on a listserv, ‘‘Whoever said that grounded theory is only a qualitative method?’’ All panelists and commentators agree grounded theory can include any type of data—numbers, words, and, I would add, images. As Dougherty succinctly states, ‘‘Data are data. Period.’’ Fernandez reiterates this view, ‘‘All is data . . . [but you need] a research problem, with the data offering a good fit to this problem.’’ The application of the word qualitative to analysis is misleading, according to Bailyn, who argues for identifying data more precisely as verbal or numeric and clarifying whether modes of analysis are confirmatory and explanatory. So, while there is agreement that numeric data can be included in GT, the way in which we refer to research as qualitative or quantitative has created confusion. Levina extends this agreement on quantitative data in GT by asking: What are we going to do about Big Data? Because Big Data ‘‘cannot be reasonably analyzed with qualitative methods alone,’’ Levina (this issue) calls for inclusion of ‘‘inductive data scientists into the grounded theory research community and [to] start using some of the advance analytical techniques available today.’’ As well, Dougherty (this issue) identifies a need to ‘‘develop approaches for ‘data mining’ of big data.’’ Many involved in this conversation discuss the need to visualize data, see longitudinal patterns, and identify what is interesting in the patterns. Levina points out that tools from ‘‘computer science and Organizational Research Methods 2015, Vol. 18(4) 578-580 a The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1094428115604539 orm.sagepub.com

How we research & how we teach: Connecting research traditions to photographic uses in the classroom

We explore how research approaches can inform inclusion of photographic approaches in the management classroom. We describe three approaches to using photographic research processes: 1) a positivis...

Book Review: Interactive Qualitative Analysis: A Systems Method for Qualitative Research

Interactive Qualitative Analysis by Northcutt and McCoy presents a new qualitative research approach. Before I received this book to review, I was not aware of interactive qualitative analysis (IQA). In fact, to prepare for this review, I conducted a search on the Business Source Premier (EBSCO) database for articles using this research approach, but I did not find this methodological approach cited. However, this may be due to the relative newness of this approach (developed by one of the authors in 1993) and its primary use in the field of education. With at least 26 types of qualitative research (Blank, 2004; Tesch, 1990), there should be room for a qualitative approach that offers an important role for participants during data collection and data analysis processes. The IQA research methodology is not for every qualitative project, nor does it claim to be. This methodology is built on ideas from systems theory, but this approach also includes aspects of dialectical logic, grounded theory, concept mapping, action research, total quality management, the social construction of reality, and postmodern views of society. The purpose of IQA is to develop a picture of a phenomenon through the lens of a group. The authors describe IQA as a process in which the “researcher’s engagement is highest at the beginning (design), decreases during data collection, is at a relative minimum during analysis (which is largely protocol or rule driven), and increases during the interpretative stage” (p. 292). Key features that I found novel were the use of focus groups for data collection and direct participant involvement in creating the resulting process model. The book’s title—Interactive Qualitative Analysis—may be misleading because this text provides much more than a discussion of data analysis, which might be implied by its title. Rather, the authors address a variety of topics, such as the philosophical underpinnings of this research approach, selection of groups for the research project, and a detailed description of the IQA data collection and analysis processes. Throughout the book, one IQA study, conducted by author McCoy, is provided as an example of the material covered in a chapter. This book is organized into five sections and includes a CD tutorial. The book should be read sequentially; each chapter builds on material from the previous one. Each section is discussed below, with a brief commentary after each section. The first section—chapters 1 through 4—provides the theoretical grounding and assumptions on which this research methodology is built. In chapter 1, the authors identify where IQA fits in terms of several values that have defined, differentiated, and divided qualitative researchers. The authors clearly anchor IQA in the social construction of phenomena and advocate the use of those closest to the phenomenon of interest to be directly involved in data collection and analysis. One aspect that is emphasized throughout this first section is rigor: that the use of IQA data collection and analysis protocols reduces erosion of original data by researcher “tracks” and enhances the