Opportunity for Creative and Innovative Qualitative Manuscripts

As qualitative research gains increasing presence and prominence in management journals, qualitative researchers often lament that editors and reviewers ask the papers to fit the methods or approaches into a narrow scope of possibilities. The scope is often constrained with an eye to demonstrate rigor, oftentimes at the cost of the idiosyncrasies required to capture an unknown or understudied phenomenon. This is most evident in the reliance on so-called ‘methodological templates’, where authors, editors and reviewers of qualitative work assume that demonstrating rigor will result in better qualitative papers (e.g., by following the tenets of the Gioia method for coding data, or the Langley method of temporal bracketing, or the Eisenhardt method of cross-case sampling, or positivist standards of replicability, validity and reliability) (Harley & Cornelissen, 2022; Pratt, Sonenshein, & Feldman, 2022, Pratt, Kaplan and Whittington 2020).

While some qualitative researchers appreciate the clarity that these approaches offer, others seek to express their ideas more creatively through innovative methods, unique theoretical or empirical insights, or different ways of presenting the paper. Some articles based on qualitative research have challenged these boilerplate methods, but few such examples are published in major management journals. Part of the reason given for this is that qualitative authors are reluctant to stray too far outside of norms, given a high-stakes review process that can result in the rejection of papers based on research that has taken years to conduct (Corley, Bansal, & Yu, 2021).

Through this Special Call, we seek to open up opportunities for qualitative researchers to engage in a unique review process that provides pathways for greater creativity and innovativeness, while still offering high quality work. This review process will permit more dialogue between authors and the Editor than is the case in a typical review process, so that authors can correspond with the Editor with less fear of rejection. The list of Guest Editors is provided at the end of this document. This review process should result in more scholarship that opens new lines of inquiry and discovery, whether it be phenomenologically, methodologically, or theoretically. The papers will still undergo a double-blind review process and be at risk of rejection if the evolving paper is not likely to meet the quality norms of Journal of Management (JOM) within a reasonable amount of time.

This Special Call for Qualitative Research Proposals will work similarly to JOM’s Call for Review Proposals. The Guest Editors for the Special Call will consider all proposals and select those that (a) have strong data to build insights from, (b) focus on a phenomenon intriguing to an Editor, and (c) expose opportunities for new and important directions of theory development.
Proposals that are not selected by an Editor can still be developed into a full original research paper and submitted via the regular JOM review process.

Please note that this is a Special ‘Call’, not a Special ‘Issue’. Proposals selected to be developed into full papers for this Special Call and ultimately accepted will be published online and in print as accepted (on a rolling basis), with a note indicating that the paper was a part of this Special Call. 

Further Details

• The proposal should be submitted through manuscript central:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jom
o Select “special qualitative research proposal” as the submission type when
submitting).
o Further information is available at Submission Guidelines: Journal of
Management.
• Proposals must adhere to the JOM Style Guide.

• Submit a proposal of up to 20 pages, double spaced text, that includes:
o Detailed description of the phenomenon of interest, research question(s), and empirical context;
o Detailed methods, which should include the data collected to date, the analysis completed to date, and the reasons for the decisions taken;
o Initial theoretical framing, which should include citations to the body of work
that this research will contribute and some review of that literature to expose
the puzzle – which may be empirical or theoretical;
o What’s exciting, which will seek to convince the editors to champion this work;
o Tables and figures that support the text;

References

Corley, K., Bansal, P., & Yu, H. (2021). An editorial perspective on judging the quality of inductive research when the methodological straightjacket is loosened. Strategic Organization, 19(1), 161-175.

Harley, B., & Cornelissen, J. (2022). Rigor with or without templates? The pursuit of methodological rigor in qualitative research. Organizational Research Methods, 25(2), 239-261.

Pratt, M. G., Sonenshein, S., & Feldman, M. S. (2022). Moving beyond templates: A bricolage approach to conducting trustworthy qualitative research. Organizational Research Methods, 25(2), 211-238.

Pratt, Michael G., Kaplan, S., & Whittington, R. (2020), The tumult over transparency: Decoupling transparency from replication in establishing trustworthy qualitative research, Administrative Science Quarterly, 65(1): 1-19

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