COURSE DESCRIPTION: Qualitative Research Methods in Management, Marketing & 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-mail  me 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.

You are training to have the best job on the planet. It is my job to help you attain that job by equiping you with the most advanced qualitative analyses. This is a highly practical course on how to analyze qualitative (textual)  materials in ways that result in publications for you. Several of the projects from this class have been published and become dissertation analyses. In 2000, two of my QM students are presenting All-Academy Showcase Symposiums at the Academy of Management Meetings in Toronto.

Qualitative Methods are quite practical. The qualitative analyses you will master are as practical as any you might learn in SPSS or SAS.  You can use each analysis to address problems that are unsuited for quantitative methods.  To learn why and when to apply each analysis, you will be learning several important qualitative philosophies. As Mark Twain said, "There is nothing more practical than a good theory."

I assume that QM may be new to you. You are here to learn what is unknown to you, to apply your creative imagination. As with anything unknown fear may come as a barrier to your growth.  Have no fear, in the unknown of QM is a great treasure house.  There are many qualitative rooms with many treasures in this mansion.  Please come into the QM mansion expecting to find positive qualities. Please open the door to each room in the qualitative treasure house with a sense of expectancy, enthusiasum, and excitement.

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.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

• To understand the advantages and limitations of qualitative methods to the analysis of organization and management research questions.
• To learn to design and conduct qualitative research within the framework of textual, intertextual, narrative, network, ethnostatistic and other analyses from this course.
• To have knowledge of the capability of computers to assist in textual data management and qualitative analysis.
• To produce a publishable (quality) product from qualitative data and analysis.
• To be able to assess qualitiative journal articles using criteria from the Academy of Management Journal.

• Preparation for seminar classes by reading assigned material, critically analyzing methods in the readings, come with notes and questions.
• Read something each week that is NOT required in the lists provided.
• Actively participate in the class by contributing commentary on the assigned readings (but also respect others' air time). Willingness to constructively engage the ideas presented by others.

1. A term project of your own design in which you apply one or more of the analyses being conveyed this term. Instructor will evaluate this. This will demonstrate your understanding of the course topics. The best measure is actually completing the project and getting it published after the course has concluded.

1. Participation in class discussion and active contribution to the learning effectiveness of others.  This will be a combination of peer and instructor assessment.  Participation can consist of in-class, web-based, handouts, presentations, etc. All participation should stimulate learning and interest in qualitative methods.
2. Grades on weekly learning assignments such as assessing a qualitative article using Academy of Management Journal criteria, doing qualitative data collection and qualitative text analysis assignments. This will be assessed by the instructor.

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.
4. The class an I will collaborate in a joint project that we work on during the term. I envision weekly sometimes bi-weekly) short analysis assignments that will lead us to generate a corporate product. This will be a collective effort that will lead to publication. You and I will propose several projects and vote on one to enact this term.
5. You are expected to demonstrate your qualitative analysis learning in ways that leads to the positive learning experience of the entire class. If at any time during the seminar you are not a happy camper, please call me at home 532-1693 and speak to me directly.

• Boje, David M. (2000). Narrative Analysis book, to be published by Sage International (photo/web copies will be supplied for 8 chapters as the term progresses.) Note: I will finalize the chapters for this book as we complete this course.
• [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.
• [PO] Spradley, David. (1980). Participant Observation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Weston. Paper. Ask for most recent edition.
• [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.

• Clifford & Marcus (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Publisher unknown. Paper.
• 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.
• [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.
• [FG] Focus Group book: Krueger (1997). Analyzing and Reporting Focus Group Results. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• 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.