COURSE DESCRIPTION: Qualitative Research Methods in Management, Marketing and Operations Management. The course provides students an overview & experience in qualitative research methods. The focus of this course includes: ethnography, postmodern studies, content analysis, deconstruction, rhetorical analysis, semiotics, and discourse analysis. The range of topics will be broad, including case study, content analysis, participant and non-participant observation, phenomenological interviews, intertextuality & an introduction to focus groups

MESSAGE FROM THE INSTRUCTOR: Hi, I'm David M. Boje, and this is my Qualitative Methods (QM) course. Here you will find postmodern, critical theory, hermeneutical, deconstructive, poststructuralist, etc., applications to Qualitative practice, Qualitative approaches and philosophical resources. Please feel free to e-mailme with any thoughts, comments, suggestions, links, questions, etc. This is a homebase for qualitative researchers to provide the opportunity for people to post resources and ideas, and also for people to reply to posts. If you have a file you want others to read, please send it. To submit a paper, just attach it (in any PC format) to an e-mail to dboje@nmsu.edu.

OFFICE HOURS: After class is best. I like to prepare before each class. Otherwise, please leave a message on phone mail; I usually answer right away. In addition to meeting, please send me and other class members electronic messages on our Email chat line (yet to be set up)! I'm at dboje@nmsu.edu.

QM is an old and well established methodology in Anthropology (ethnographic methods), Sociology (ethnomethodology), Folklore (narrative, myth, and ritual), Linguistic (sociolinguistics), & in English (rhetoric, hermeneutics, deconstruction). The philosophical roots bridge phenomenology, critical theory, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. For a quick overview, check out the website at "QM Resource"  at http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/nrmaster.html

QM is a detailed description of situations, events, people, and behaviors. It includes what people say about their experiences, attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts through recordings, documents, transcripts, records, and narrative histories. Qualitative data sources include observation and participant observation (fieldwork), interviews, texts, and the researcher's diary of impressions and reactions. QM is open-ended and does not impose, outsider, expert, academic, predetermined, categories (called Etic categories) such as the response choices that comprise typical questionnaires or tests. QM begins with specific observations and builds towards general observations and explorations of the people's grounded, categories-in-use (called Emic categories). Etic-emic is a basic distinction in Anthropology. Emic studies are more nomadic: The nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principle, points for him are always relays along a trajectory. -- G.Deluze & F. Guattari A Thousand Plateaus (p. 380).

RELEVANCY TO MANAGEMENT

Deconstruction (Derrida) is being widely practiced in management. For example, assumptions and theories about technical rationality, emancipatory principles in information systems, IS-User relationships. Management under modernity is becoming what Foucault (1979) calls the "normalizing gaze" or institutional surveillance. Management, in some cases, is used to electronically monitor and gaze bank tellers, customer service representatives, market cashiers, and even professors. Electronic surveillance includes counting keystrokes of workers, monitoring calls between customers and employees, and video surveillance of unsuspecting employees. Management can be studied as a set of discursive practices that construct realities in ways that are beneficial or harmful to organizational members. Management can also be viewed as a disciplinary power emerging from a set of discursive practices. Management viewed as a discourse, relies upon talk, documents, performances that convey semantic meanings of what constitutes quality, efficiency, and information.

RELEVANCY TO MARKETING

Professors Dholakia, Firat, Sherry, Jr., and Venkatesh do critical theory (Habermas), poststructuralist (Foucault, Derrida) and postmodern (Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, Jameson) work in marketing (see attached QM Marketing Reading List). They look at postmodern consumer culture in shopping environments, clothing and fashion, and information capitalism. They look at consumer cultures in terms of Baudrillard's concepts of hyper-real, Lyotard and Foucault's "decentered" and Jameson's "fragmented culture." Hyperreality, to take one concept, defines the emergence of the symbolic and the spectacle and marketing's role in the creation of something which is "more real" than "real:" the "hyper-real."

Disney is a commonly referenced example. Modernist concepts of consumer culture, on the other hand, assume a rational process based upon economic exchange values rather than one based upon signs, spectacle, and representations. Modernism concepts of consumer and producer were socially constructed during the Enlightenment era of history. In this seminar we will question the assumptions of modernist consumption: how gender and ethnicity are constituted in advertising, fictitious constructions of modernity, functionalist theories of global marketing, dualistic theories of consumers and markets, etc. What is marketing after modernity? If the structural-functional concepts of marketing are being deconstructed in postmodern business, then there is a retheorizing of marketing happening now. Topics of relevance to marketing include: the role of symbolism in consumption, fragmented consumer, Hyper-reality and spectacle, advertising as a form of symbolic communication, consumer cultures, constructing and deconstructing the consumer, and global culturalism.

DOCTORAL STUDENT RESPONSIBILITIES
 

1. Each student is to write an article of "publication quality" based on one of the qualitative methodologies examined in this course. The paper, along with the data analyzed, is to be turned in during the last week of the course & be presented during final exam week.
1. Demonstrate mastery of one or more QM methods & QM philosophies of science.
2. Demonstrate mastery of the philosophical & fundamental assumptions of QM, including critical theory, poststructuralism, & postmodernism in class discussion, in written assignments, & in the publication project.
3. Define & integrate what qualitative inquiry is, its philosophy of science assumptions underlying its use.
2. To gain hands-on experiences of qualitative research methods you will complete weekly practice exercises in participant observation, discourse analysis, focus groups & other experiential exercises.
3. Each student is responsible for assigned readings & course assignments. You will be asked to lead the discussion in several sessions. Discussion & debate are crucial for the successful integration of scholarly materials.

• [HQR] Denzin, Norman K. & Yvonna S. Lincoln (Eds). (1994) Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN 0-8039-4679-1. Paperback, if available.
• [GC] Herndl, Carl G. & Stuart C. Brown. (1996). Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Madison Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-14994-3 Paper.
• [PO] Spradley, David. (1980). Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Weston. Paper. Ask for most recent edition.
• [WC] Clifford & Marcus (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Publisher unknown. Paper.
• [ES] Robert P., Gephart, Jr. (1988). Ethnostatistics: Qualitative Foundations for Quantitative Research. Qualitative Research Methods Series 12.Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN 0-8039-3026-7 Paper.
• [FG] Focus Group book: Krueger (1997). Analyzing and Reporting Focus Group Results. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

If you are unfamiliar with qualitative research obtaining several of these books is strongly recommended.

• Bantz, C. (1993). Understanding Organizations. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
• Berger, P.L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality. New York, NY: Anchor Press.
• Denzin, N.K. (1989). Interpretive Interactionism. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
• Ely, Margot et al. 1991. Doing Qualitative Research: Circles Within Circles. The Falmer Press, Bristol, PA.
• Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
• Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. 67-22565. Hardcover.
• Glaser, B.G. & Strauss, A. L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. NY: Aldine de Gruyter. ISBN 0-202-30260-1 paper.
• Glesne, C. & Peshkin, A. 1992. Becoming Qualitative Researchers. White Plains, N.Y. Longman.
• Lofland, John 1971. Analyzing Social Settings: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Paper. Ask for most recent edition.
• Mishler, E.G. (1986). Research Interviewing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Patton, M.Q. (1990). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. (2^nd Ed.). Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
• Riessman, C.K. (1993). Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
• Strauss, A. & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of Qualitative Research. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
• Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the Field. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-84962-7
• Wilcott, H.F. (1994). Transforming Qualitative Data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Vol 36, No. 6, (December, 1993), Issue of Academy of Management Journal. Call 908-445-0862.