III

 Using the CSU Online Library and other disciplinary resources, research how qualitative research is used in your field. Using this information, write an essay that describes how qualitative research tools can be used to aid in decision making within your field. Be sure your essay addresses the following questions/topics: 

1. Describe specific qualitative methods and tools that could be used within your discipline to gather data. Include your rationale. 

2. Evaluate their effectiveness with respect to certain areas within your discipline. 

3. Include company or organizational examples within your essay, as relevant. 

4. In your opinion, what is the future of qualitative research both within your discipline and in general? 

Your APA-formatted response must be a minimum of three pages (not including the title page and the reference page) and must include an introduction, a thesis statement (concise summary of the main point of the paper), and a clear discussion of the questions/topics above. Your response must include a minimum of two credible references.  

**SEEATTACHED FOR CSU REFERENCE**

©2016 Business Ethics Quarterly 26:4 (October 2016). ISSN 1052-150X
DOI: 10.1017/beq.2016.67

pp. xiii–xxii

From the Editors

Qualitative Methods in Business Ethics,

Corporate Responsibility, and Sustainability

Research

The number and infl uence of qualitative research articles has been growing across
top-tier management journals (Bartunek, Rynes, & Ireland, 2006 ; Bluhm, Harman,
Lee, & Mitchell, 2011 ). Business Ethics Quarterly explicitly welcomes qualitative
submissions (e.g., Peifer, 2015 ), but has published few such articles in recent years
despite the fact that they compromise approximately 18% of the 300+ annual sub-
missions the journal receives. This does not refl ect a bias against qualitative methods
on the part of the editors, or the idea that qualitative methods are less well suited than
quantitative, or purely theoretical, articles to explore questions of business ethics,
corporate responsibility, and sustainability. On the contrary, qualitative methods
are well poised to understand and explain complex and messy ethical phenomena.
For this reason, the editors seek to increase high-quality qualitative scholarship
in Business Ethics Quarterly . To help facilitate this end, additional, experienced
qualitative methods scholars have been appointed to the editorial leadership
team and to the editorial review board to help mentor submitters to develop their
qualitative manuscripts. However, qualitative researchers also face a number of
challenges in getting their research published, including the need to transpar-
ently demonstrate the quality and rigour of qualitative methods deployed. The
purpose of this editorial is to provide guidance to qualitative scholars seeking
to submit their work to Business Ethics Quarterly . While much of this guidance
applies to qualitative research in general, we would fi rst like to outline what
qualitative methods have to offer for business ethics, corporate responsibility,
and sustainability scholarship.

WHY QUALITATIVE METHODS IN BUSINESS ETHICS RESEARCH?

The strength of qualitative research is typically seen as theory elaboration and theory
generation rather than theory testing. This is particularly valuable for examining
novel or emergent questions in business ethics, where no or little extant theory
exists from which to deduce testable research hypotheses. As qualitative research
typically proceeds inductively from data to theory, it can explore domains and ques-
tions where quantitative research would struggle to formulate hypotheses or fi nd
suffi cient data. With the changing role of business in society (Scherer, Palazzo, &
Baumann, 2006 ), the context for studying business ethics is transforming quickly.
Businesses are facing a host of new, epochal challenges, such as the need to uphold
justice and human rights in global value chains spreading across national borders
(Kobrin, 2009 ; Cragg, Arnold, & Muchlinski, 2012 ; Gilbert, Rasche, & Waddock,
2011 ), deal with climate change and susatainability (DesJardins, 2016 ), realize the

Business Ethics Quarterly xiv

potential new business models to address global poverty and income inequality
(Arnold, 2013 ), and ensure the well-being of employees in changing worlds of
work. Business ethicists have a unique capacity to start addressing the problems and
challenges these new phenomena entail even if they do not (yet) have ready-made
theories available that would be required for deductive analysis.

Second, and relatedly, qualitative researchers are uniquely placed to track novel
phenomena in “real time” as they occur. This can focus on the “in vivo” processes of
developing organizational responses to ethical challenges or generating meanings of
new practices in the context in which they emerge. For instance, it is not clear how
businesses will implement new reporting requirements such as integrated reporting
or practice human rights due diligence in a company’s multi-tiered supply chain.
Rather than retrospectively focusing on the outcomes of such reporting, qualitative
observation can track the processes of how actors make sense of these new business
challenges.

Moreover, business ethicists cannot afford to ignore under-researched topics of
great ethical import because reliable data is hard to obtain. Data limitations may
seriously limit the ability of quantitative researchers to examine areas such as human
rights violations in opaque and fragmented supply chains or business practices in
least-developed countries. To illustrate, in the Bangladesh ready-made garment
sector, which has been bedevilled by a series of deadly disasters culminating in the
2013 Rana Plaza collapse killing over 1,200 workers, scholars are still struggling
to determine even the most rudimentary statistics such as the number of factories
(Labowitz & Baumann-Pauly, 2015 ). There is a need for business ethicists to get
their “hands dirty” in the fi eld to better understand why unethical practices prevail
in the contexts and what might prevent them.

Finally, qualitative methods are typically underpinned by an interpretive approach
to social science. This can offer a more contextual understanding of business ethics
from the vantage point of the complex and pluralistic reality of the actors themselves
(Treviño, denNieuwenboer, Kreiner, & Bishop, 2014 ), rather than understanding
business ethics as a domain of abstract and theoretical knowledge existing objec-
tively and independently from empirical knowledge. Thus, by giving a “voice”
to the participants, this method views business ethics through the lens of the partic-
ipants’ perceptions of his or her experiences rather than through the lens of abstract
categories and concepts imposed by the researchers, including the normative assump-
tions that are always already inscribed into them.

As qualitative examination often occurs in the natural setting of the organiza-
tion, this allows understanding of what ethics means within a certain cultural and
organizational context. Through deep immersion in the context and empathy with
participants, qualitative methods can capture emic, or experience-near understand-
ing, that is, situated knowledge (Geertz, 1983 ) of how individuals, teams, and
organizations defi ne and negotiate what is ethical or not in the social situation under
study, and how this may change over time. Such a stance also allows researchers
to change and adapt research design and data gathering in response to changes in
how the research situation unfolds. Researchers can more refl exively focus on “the
unanticipated and unexpected—things that puzzle the researcher” in the fi eld,

Qualitative Methods in Business Ethics Research xv

and use this as an emergent strategy for opening up novel research directions and
eventually theorization (Alvesson & Kä rreman, 2007 : 1266).

WHAT IS HIGH-QUALITY QUALITATIVE SCHOLARSHIP?

Many scholars agree that signifi cant scholarly contributions should be assessed in
terms of theoretical contribution, rigorous methods, good writing, and also whether or
not the contribution offers “interesting” insights (Davis, 1971 ; Alvesson & Kä rreman,
2007 ). While articles can be theoretically or empirically interesting, Business Ethics
Quarterly particularly encourages articles that are also morally interesting. That is,
we welcome (but not exclusively) research that is based on normative motivations
and normative implications. The implicit or explicit assumption of most mainstream
management research, for example, is that fi rm profi t maximization is the end of
business and that business practices must be justifi ed in relation to that end. In
business ethics research, the operative assumption is that economic value is one of
many important values that merit the consideration of scholars and that economic
values must be weighted against other values, such as justice, fairness, respect for
persons, legal compliance, environmental sustainability, and integrity, in markets
and in business. This, however, does not mean we welcome moralizing judgments,
ethical lecturing, or biased research. Instead, and perhaps more so than in other
research, to be able to make normative claims and recommendations convincingly
requires scholars to demonstrate the validity and credibility of their study’s con-
clusions, and convince readers that their results are valid and based on appropriate
and rigorous methods.

A common tension faced by all qualitative researchers alike is that they lack the
same sort of templates and standardized ways of conducting research and analysis
that quantitative researchers enjoy (Pratt, 2009 ). Qualitative methodology is a broad
umbrella term for a diversity of data sources (e.g., interviews, textual and visual
data, ethnography, and more recently, netnography and video observation), ways
to analyse them (e.g., grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative analysis), and
different epistemological/ontological commitments (e.g., realist, feminist, social
constructivist, poststructuralist), which may lead to different standards of evaluating
qualitative manuscripts. For instance, qualitative researchers working in critical or
interpretive traditions reject neopositivist assumptions about validity. They view
data as constructions, created through interaction between the researcher and
the research setting rather than accurate, if imperfect, representations of reality
(Alvesson & Kä rreman, 2007 ).

The editors of Business Ethics Quarterly seek to respect the diversity of approaches
of both authors and reviewers, yet certain challenges re-occur across different
qualitative approaches. Thus, the purpose of this editorial is not to provide a one-
size-fi ts-all “how to” guide for conducting qualitative research, but offer guidance
on how to meet the expectations that a qualitative researcher is likely to encounter:
1) motivating why the study merits scholarly attention, 2) deploying rigorous quali-
tative methods, 3) providing convincing empirical support to theoretical claims,
4) showing suffi cient empirical data in the writing, 5) managing the interface of data

Business Ethics Quarterly xvi

analysis and theory-building, and 6) demonstrating how results may be transferrable
to other situations. In general, the author(s) need to demonstrate the fi t between
research questions, empirical observations, and theoretical claims.

1) The very fi rst challenge of course is to convince readers that the study merits
scholarly attention. Here, it is important to keep the audience in mind when sub-
mitting an article to Business Ethics Quarterly . Reviewers are likely to be editorial
board members or regular readers and/or authors of articles published in Business
Ethics Quarterly . They will like to know how the study relates to business ethics,
or the related domains of corporate responsibility and sustainability, and improves
our knowledge of business ethics, and expect you to connect with theoretical or
ethical debates in the journal to show the relevance of the manuscript to the Business
Ethics Quarterly readership.

Researchers can thereby motivate their research primarily in two different ways:
by taking as their starting point either a theoretical paradigm or an empirical problem
existing in the world. To be sure, either approach should aim at generating knowledge
that ultimately informs important questions in business ethics. Yet, a problem-driven
or paradigm-driven orientation shapes the way the article is framed.

A paradigm-driven article derives research questions internally from within a theo-
retical paradigm, such as institutional theory, and aims at building cumulatively upon
it. Here it is important to identify gaps or “empty spaces” in the existing literature,
but also explain why it is important to fi ll them. Lounsbury and Beckman ( 2014 )
argue that paradigm-driven research is useful to place our fi ndings in a theoretical
frame and explain how our empirical observations relate to and build on each other.

In contrast, problem-driven research starts by identifying an empirical problem
encountered in the world. A problem-driven research design lends itself to normative
motivations such as understanding the reasons for unethical business practices or
motivators for ethical behaviour. Some therefore argue that it is more suitable to
placing management knowledge in the service of understanding real-life problems
and grand challenges such as corporate accountability in complex and fragmented
global supply chains, ethical implications of new employment practices, and business
responses to poverty or climate change (Davis, 2014 ). While it is still important to
develop a theoretical frame that could help understand and explain the phenomenon
or problem, it is the latter that drives the choice of a theoretical frame.

2) A second challenge is to clearly articulate and utilize established research
methods. Because the methods are qualitative does not mean they should not be
rigorous, nor does it mean that any set of interviews or case-like description of a
particular problem or issue will meet expectations for methodological rigor. Far too
often the editors have seen authors simply make-up a methodology, or refer loosely
to a type of method without rigorously deploying the method themselves. One of
the basic questions asked by the editors about qualitative methods submissions at
desk review is “Does the submission rigorously deploy an appropriate research
method?” If the answer is “no,” the article is desk rejected from Business Ethics
Quarterly . Specifi c methods might include participant observation, structured inter-
views, content analysis, or archival methods and historical analysis. Regardless of
the methods deployed, researchers must use best practices in rigorously applying

Qualitative Methods in Business Ethics Research xvii

the methodology. It is perhaps worth noting that a brief, original case study (e.g., a
description of a recent corporate scandal) can be utilized to ground theory development
without rising to the level of qualitative research. Within moral philosophy there is
a long established tradition of using hypothetical examples to ground theory and in
Business Ethics Quarterly examples can be either hypothetical or actual examples of
ethical problems. Such work should be submitted under the “Theory Only” category
rather than the “Qualitative Methods” category in ScholarOne.

A comment the qualitative researcher will typically get from reviewers is to “better
explain your methods.” The task at hand is to transparently demonstrate a logical
chain of evidence from raw data to theory, in other words, show how theorization is
embedded in empirical material. To be sure, this can be a challenge given the messy
reality of fi eld research and the often iterative, nonlinear processes of data analysis
that is also driven by the prior knowledge, interest, values, as well as intuition and
creativity of the researcher. In qualitative studies, there is therefore more than one
possible way of understanding a phenomenon, and the task is to convince reviewers
why the chosen explanation and data-theory is an appropriate one while maintaining
an awareness of possible alternatives.

The emergence of some templates, such as Eisenhardt’s ( 1989 ) method of com-
parative case study grounded in the positivist tradition, or the Gioia methodology
grounded in the realist tradition (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013 ) can provide
guidance through greater standardization and codifi cation. At the same time,
the strength of qualitative data is often seen as generating more innovative, less
formulaic research. Thus, an alternative avenue to using a standardized recipe is
to explicitly acknowledge creative inspiration in qualitative research, by describing
theory development as a process of “disciplined imagination” (Weick, 1989 ). This
would productively use dialectic tensions that may eventually enable a “conceptual
leap” from data to theory (Klag & Langley, 2013 ). One mistake sometimes made is
that qualitative researchers claim to follow a standard template or commonly cited
approach without actually using its procedures correctly. For instance, researchers
routinely claim to use “grounded theory” (Corbin & Strauss, 2008 ) while doing so
only ceremoniously or seeking to explain through “thick description” (Geertz, 1973 )
while not actually offering “thick description.”

In any case, rather than following descriptive, standard protocols in describing
every step in detail and at length, it is more important to focus on the most critical,
unusual or theory-driven steps through which the core theoretical insights were
derived. And rather than writing up the analytical protocol as if qualitative enquiry
was a linear, mechanical, and straight-forward process, it may actually increase
credibility to transparently acknowledge how initial analytical choices were ill-suited
and were adjusted in the analytical process (Peifer, 2015 ) or how multiple iterations
led to revising earlier interpretations.

3) A third and critical challenge that the qualitative researcher faces is to convince
his or her readers that he or she has systematically collected suffi cient high-quality
data to explain the phenomenon and answer the research question. “Is there enough
empirical support to ground theoretical claims?” is one of the fi rst questions editors
and reviewers will ask themselves when assessing whether a submission has the

Business Ethics Quarterly xviii

potential to be published. In fact, displaying high-quality data can make the critical
difference between desk-rejecting or sending the submission out for review
even if other aspects such as analysis or theorization requires further polishing.
To convince reviewers about the quality and credibility of data sources, it is
essential to provide, as a fi rst step, a comprehensive and transparent overview
over the amount, timing and extent of data collection methods, which can also
be summarized in data tables.

There is no single, objective answer as to how many interviews or hours of
observation are suffi cient. Few in-depth interviews with key respondents may
provide focused insights into a particular niche area of research. But broad claims
about, for instance, fi eld-level changes may necessitate stronger evidence from
more respondents representing multiple perspectives. While researchers may have
the cooperation of an organization which allows for suffi cient data to be gathered
in a short period of time, impactful fi elds research can often require years of data
gathering prior to analysis (Vaccaro & Palazzo, 2015 ). What is important is that
authors explain why their methodological choices of case selection, level of analysis,
or data collection are appropriate and suffi ciently rigorous to answer their specifi c
research question. A common complaint by reviewers is that authors overclaim,
that is, they make theoretical claims that their data are unable to support. Even if
the available data is rich, it may not provide the necessary evidence that theoretical
arguments are valid. Consider the mismatch between levels of analysis: Field-level
data is unsuitable for explaining an organizational-or individual-level phenomenon
and vice versa. In the review processes authors may be encouraged to re-consider
whether their theoretical claims are too broad and whether narrowing them down
may yield more focused and credible arguments.

Rigour may also involve specifying the researcher’s own position in the fi eld
as a way of demonstrating refl exivity and self-examination. As business ethics
research may be motivated by normative considerations it is important to delineate
the researcher’s relationship with the fi eld (cf. Golden-Biddle & Locke, 1993 ). How
did ways of entering the fi eld, forming relationships with informants, and navigating
the fi eld work shape the research process, not as an undesirable bias but inevitable
part of the interpretative process (Alvesson & Skoeldberg, 2009 )?

Finally, rigour may also involve critically questioning one’s own results. For
instance, through triangulation the qualitative researcher can assess the same
phenomenon from the angle of different data sources, such as both documents and
interviews, to determine whether they point to convergent or divergent fi ndings.
Convergence can increase credibility in the initial interpretation while confrontation
with diverging fi ndings can challenge researchers to consider alternative, and maybe
more interesting interpretations.

4) A fourth challenge the qualitative researcher may often hear from his or her
reviewers is that the author “tells” too much and does not “show” enough data,
which refers to the way the data is used in writing up the research account. While
the empirical detail may seem rather obvious to an author who might have spent
months in the fi eld collecting the data, the same cannot be said of readers. Thus,
reviewers typically want to “see” some raw data in order to be confi dent in the

Qualitative Methods in Business Ethics Research xix

empirical validity of the authors’ claims. In addition, research fi ndings that are
presented in terms of conceptual categories, analytical terms, processes and mech-
anisms may seem overly abstract and “dry.” This misses out on the opportunity
to convey and leverage the great richness of qualitative data, which is its greatest
appeal! An intriguing, well-crafted empirical narrative can go a long way in bringing
to life the studied phenomenon and thereby immediately making the article more
interesting. Vivid descriptions, short vignettes, illustrative quotes, or surprising
elements can hook and engage the reader.

Moreover, an overly dispassionate depiction of data in the text as if they were
objective, brute facts presented as “truth” may seem at odds with a qualitative
research agenda that typically recognizes that knowledge claims are constructed
rather than revealed. In ethnographic work for instance, alternative criteria such as
authenticity of “having been there” and conveying fi rst-hand experience, plausibility
of the account, and a critical perspective that challenges prevailing assumptions and
theories, are considered important to producing impactful scholarship (Golden-
Biddle & Locke, 1993 ). However, it is by no means an easy task to convey empir-
ical richness while at the same time staying narrowly focused on the main insights
needed to support the theorization. One can get carried away with presenting a
fascinating empirical story, and forgetting the need to provide a theoretical account
that provides the basis for the theoretical contribution.

This points to the opposite problem, namely when qualitative manuscripts are
overly descriptive. Describing at length accurately observed detail, without offering
a compelling interpretation that lends theoretical weight to the account, typically
fails to meet the expectation of offering a theoretical explanation. This points to the
fi fth challenge—where is the place for theory in qualitative research?

5) The previous point highlights the challenges that occur on the interface of
data analysis and theory-building: A good article has to provide a good balance
between rich descriptions and data analysis and theorization. In their narrative,
successful qualitative articles normally have two places that focus on theory and
theory-building. In a fi rst place, researchers have to embed their conceptual story
in the existing literature regardless of whether they follow a paradigm-driven or
problem-driven approach (see point 1 above). Answering a simple question can
facilitate this outcome: What do we already know about a particular phenomenon
and what do we not yet understand suffi ciently? Here, theory has the important role
to foreshadow the empirical analysis and thus embed the article, its data and its
research question(s) in an existing theoretical debate to which it is meant to make
a contribution. The existing debates should be tailored in a way that informs the
article’s narrative structure.

More challenging for the author(s), when it comes to theory building, is the second
place where a qualitative article utilizes theory: The theorization of data and the
theoretical contribution that results from analysis of the data. Here, the research account
authors present might be too descriptive and not suffi ciently theorized. When ana-
lysing their qualitative data, scholars search for patterns which they typically code,
aggregate, and theorize. Very often, qualitative manuscripts do not make this third
and important step. They look for patterns, organize them (e.g. temporally or in

Business Ethics Quarterly xx

types) and stop there. This, however, is not yet a theoretical contribution, but just a
description or organization of data with key words. Qualitative researchers need
to go further and use their fi ndings as a basis for explanation and theorization. Thus,
they need to offer not just a description but a “theorized storyline”. While there are
many ways of doing so, but no ultimate “recipe”, Golden-Biddle and Locke ( 2007 )
suggest that authors can structure their writing through different “telling-showing”
sequences in which researchers intersperse showing their data with telling their theo-
retical signifi cance, thereby navigating the tension between “telling” (= theorization)
and “showing” (= description).

By theorizing fi ndings, scholars look beyond their particular case. Sometimes,
for instance, qualitative articles end where quantitative articles start: by formu-
lating some propositions. Scholars have to take the perspective of their peers who
are engaged in the theoretical debate, presented as foreshadowing the research
project of the manuscript. Formulating propositions is one, but not the only valid
form of theorizing fi ndings. A theorization might for instance look for a process
or propose categories that can be used by other scholars to analyse different cases
or phenomena. Theorizations go one level deeper than descriptions can do and
they reconnect the manuscript’s narrative to the foreshadowing theory: What is
it that we better understand because of this analysis in the context of a particular
theoretical debate?

6) The ability to offer insights beyond their particular case is related to the fi nal
challenge: qualitative researchers may be reproached that their fi ndings based
on single or small n-studies and are not generalizable to a larger population,
or in other words, lack external validity. In response, qualitative researchers
may argue that they do not hold a statistical view of generalizability based on
frequencies as in the positivist tradition. However, to avoid the pitfall of “case-
bound” theorization where results “only” explain processes that occur in the
situation under study, it is thus important to derive more general implications
from the research.

Qualitative researchers have advocated alternative ways of demonstrating the
transferability (rather than generalizability) of qualitative research, including
analytical generalization (Yin, 2010 ), mechanism-based theorizing (Hedstroem &
Swedberg, 1998 ) or heuristic generalization (Tsoukas, 2009 ). These provide different
avenues of how qualitative scholars can show how their results can be applicable
to and thereby inform processes in similar situations. It is also here that business
ethicists can point to the normative implications that their work entails.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, we reiterate our encouragement of qualitative submissions to Busi-
ness Ethics Quarterly . As the quality and rigour of qualitative methods is a frequent
reason why manuscripts do not get published in the journal, the purpose of this
editorial is to focus on some of the challenges that qualitative authors encounter
most frequently and guide them in their use and writing up of qualitative methods.
To be sure, this does not provide an exhaustive discussion of the use of qualitative

Qualitative Methods in Business Ethics Research xxi

methods in business ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability research,
but we hope it will provide a useful starting point for authors and facilitate a
successful outcome.

Juliane Reinecke

Denis G. Arnold

Guido Palazzo

Associate Editor

Editor in Chief

Associate Editor

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