Re-imagining the Research Process

Conventional and Alternative Metaphors

Mats Alvesson, Jorgen Sandberg

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781529732146, 9781529732153
• eBook ISBN: 9781529760439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a unique solution to the shortage of more imaginative and engaging research by re-imagining the core elements of the research process. 

In contrast to existing methods, which mainly focus on standard ingredients in the research process, the metaphorical approach taken here offers a more varied and comprehensive platform for producing novel, influential and relevant research. The set of guiding principles suggested in the book provides researchers with the resources to break away from existing conventions and templates for conducting and writing research.

Re-imagining the Research Process: Conventional and Alternative Metaphors is suitable for upper-undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers interested in challenging traditional views of the research process.

Mats Alvesson holds a chair in the Business Administration department at Lund University in Sweden and is also a part-time professor at University of Queensland Business School, Australia and at Cass Business School, UK.

Jorgen Sandberg is Professor at UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Australia, and Distinguished Research Environment Professor in Organization Studies at the Warwick Business School, UK. 

1 Conventions and templates: A straitjacket for innovative research

Has social science research lost its mojo?

Universities are globally a growth business. In many countries almost half of the young population take some kind of university degree – sometimes in topics that few people would have seen as particularly academically oriented some decades ago, such as nursing, tourism or beverage management. With the expansion of the higher education sector and the strong belief in the knowledge society, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in social science research, not least in qualitative research – our key interest in this book. There are not only ‘good’ motives for this expansion in research: it is also very much about status and legitimacy. In a crowded higher education market, it is important to have a favourable position compared to competitors, and here it is vital to show that institutions, at least for those aspiring to be seen as high up on the status (and ranking) ladder, are research intensive. This leads to massification research. In the past, being a university and doing teaching were a sufficient source of status, now an intensive positioning game has taken over. For many institutions and people, it is more a matter of not appearing or feeling inferior.

Nevertheless, given the expansion in research on a variety of topics, one would assume a plurality of large and lively social science research fields, comprising an enormous variety of perspectives, methodologies and research styles. One would perhaps assume that this would offer fellow researchers, professionals, political and organizational decision makers and the educated public a wealth of interesting and novel studies of great value. Even though a quantitative expansion may not lead to a corresponding increase in significant research contributions, one could expect it would lead to at least some more really valuable, and impactful, knowledge contributions. This does not, however, seem to be the case. Although there are many views on this, and across different disciplines there is probably variation, we see many signs of great disappointment with the state of the art of social science research.

Many agree that despite all the good work being produced, contemporary social science is frequently accused of being dull, narrow, incremental and irrelevant (e.g. Abbott, 2004; Alvesson, Gabriel & Paulsen, 2017; Tourish, 2019; Weinstein, 2000). Not infrequently, it seems the relevance is restricted to the researchers themselves boosting their CVs. Richardson (2000), for example, confesses that even when encountering texts on topics that she is very interested in, it is often difficult to keep on reading and she leaves many academic texts half-read. Her colleagues concur, and we share that experience too. Boredom is a common and often dominant experience when reading many contemporary research texts. The experience of boredom or even frustration is partly due to writing conventions, which give many research texts an impersonal, seemingly neutral flavour, with passivity and rule-following as salient characteristics. Journal articles are, for example, often standardized in terms of structure and the content does not necessarily differ much from other writings in the same domain. Many articles also use an abstract and high-sounding language, such as ‘discourse’, ‘sociomateriality’ or ‘intersectionality’ (often to camouflage a trivial content), making it unnecessarily hard to read and comprehend (Pinker, 2015; Sword, 2017; Tourish, 2019).

The experience of boredom, or at least very low enthusiasm, about much published research is also, and perhaps first and foremost, a matter of most texts having not that much to say in terms of novel ideas or rich empirical material. When one has read a few dozen articles or other publications within an area, it is often difficult to find something clearly memorable – a surprising insight or something else – that is worth passing on to other well-educated people who are broadly familiar with the field. In fact, many studies rather come across as trivial and without much value. Large numbers of publications seem to have been accepted because they tick the right boxes rather than offer an original contribution or empirical findings that are clearly non-trivial or non-predicted. This is not only an idiosyncratic opinion from the perhaps somewhat cynical authors of this book, who each have spent over three decades in our core field(s) and have tried to read relatively broadly across the social sciences. The first author of this book gave a plenary speech during a large conference and spontaneously paraphrased Churchill, saying to the 400 people or so in the audience: ‘Never before in human history have so many had so little to say to so few.’ This rather depressing and insulting message was met by a large spontaneous applause – the apparently broadly shared perception that despite there being massive efforts to produce research in social science, rather little of interest comes out of all of this.

Several editors and scholars have increasingly expressed concerns and frustrations about the lack of more novel, influential and relevant ideas published in journals in many areas within social science, including our own, organization studies. Gap-spotting, formulaic, pedantic, parochial and boring are frequent pejorative characterizations of current social research (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013a; Gabriel, 2010; Grey, 2010; Starbuck, 2006). In many fields, isomorphism and parochialism rule, in the sense that research tends to be more similar-looking in form and more and more people eager to publish concentrate on their subspecialized subfields. These developments have resulted in highly constricted ways of conducting and writing research. Many follow templates and offer more of the same as others and as their previous work. This is most salient in quantitative studies, but also for many (most?) qualitative research studies, particularly those published in highly ranked journals. In the words of a previous editor of a top-tier journal: ‘Like black cats in coal cellars, published studies are increasingly indistinguishable from previous ones, and the contexts in which these theories are tested or developed tend to fade into irrelevance’ (George, 2014: 1). At the same, we need to acknowledge the huge variation in social science research on display in many leading methodology textbooks, such as in Denzin and Lincoln’s The Sage handbook of qualitative research (1994, 5th edn 2018). However, much of the more varied work, and dissimilar to black cats in coal cellars, tends to be in somewhat esoteric areas and not published in leading journals or is viewed as offering a limited contribution, and therefore seen as peripheral, with limited readership and impact.

The main reasons behind the rather disappointing state of the art of much research produced within social science today can be debated. But the massification of research, an ongoing push for specialization, and the ‘neoliberalization’ of our universities (at least in the Western world) with its often strict and narrow performance management metrics, probably play significant roles (e.g. Fleming, 2020). We also need to consider the increased problem of saying something new as so much has been said before. It is simply difficult to add something valuable to areas in which there are already many thousands of publications. Perhaps the golden age of social science is over and what remains are footnote-adding studies, where research becomes mainly symbolic – demonstrating that the higher education institution is good and credible, as it produces research published in good journals, feeding the university ranking machines. Or, alternatively, perhaps research to a large extent has become an escape mechanism from teaching and/or a vehicle for promotion and the gaining of status and respect, and as a way of maintaining intellectual abilities and getting some inspiration for teaching – or justifying not doing so much of it. At least sometimes research and publications seem to be more driven by employability and promotability concerns than a strong wish to develop intellectually and socially valuable knowledge. With increased pressure – from others but also from the individual academic’s wish to be in line with, or ahead of, others and show capacity and worthiness – research easily becomes guided by narrow instrumental concerns (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013b).

Although the situation is a bit gloomy, we should add that we sometimes see interesting contributions that clearly make a difference and there are no reasons to give up doing research. On the contrary, we see the increasing complaints about contemporary research as motivating renewed efforts and rethinking the way we conduct and communicate our research. Without denying the need for university reforms. In this book we concentrate on what we, as academics, can do when we do social science, particularly qualitative research. Surely, we should be able to do much better than we currently do.

Many suggestions for encouraging researchers to develop more interesting and influential research have been made, such as problematizing implicit assumptions for generating research questions (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2013a); applying counterfactual thinking (Cornelissen & Durand, 2014); focusing on problem-oriented rather than theory-driven research (Corley & Gioia, 2011); using heuristics (Abbott, 2004); tricks of the trade (Becker, 1998); loosening up the formulaic writing style (Alvesson & Gabriel, 2013) or engaging in experimental writing (Richardson, 2000); changing the evaluation criteria for journal publications (George, 2014); reconsidering the institutional and professional norms governing research (Alvesson, Gabriel & Paulsen, 2017; Willmott, 2011); and opening up, and acknowledging, multiple meanings of theory (Abend, 2008; Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021). Although this book partly builds on, but mainly supplements these suggestions, we concentrate on another possible way forward.

Problematizing dominant conventions and templates for qualitative research

In this book we propose and elaborate a metaphorical framework that enables researchers to problematize and broaden the ways they think about the main elements of the research process. Our idea is that we need to be more open and mind-stretching in how we consider the elements of the research process: everything from research questions, literature reviews, interacting with data (empirical material), to how we write and formulate our contributions. We think there is a strong case for counteracting the closing of the academic mind following from standardized requirements for how to do and report research.

Specifically, we make the case that the dominant conventions and templates for conducting and reporting research are often constraining for researchers’ imagination, creativity and innovative abilities for developing more interesting and impactful knowledge. As Weick (1989: 516) noted, researchers ‘often write trivial theories because their process of theory construction is hemmed in by methodological strictures … [which] weaken theorizing because they de-emphasize the contribution that imagination, representation, and selection make to the process, and they diminish the importance of alternative theorizing activities’. The constraining strictures Weick alludes to are the dominant conventions and templates that shape the way we conduct and communicate our research. As we will show, these conventions and templates create habits of thoughts about ways of doing research which we want to challenge in this book.

Some (e.g. Bluhm et al., 2011) claim that, in contrast to quantitative research, there are really no established templates, or ‘boilerplate’, as Pratt (2008: 856) expressed it, for how to conduct and report qualitative research. However, reading leading methodology textbooks within social science and the conformist nature of most journals suggests otherwise. Reviewing dominant textbooks on qualitative research across several disciplines, such as management and organization studies (Symon & Cassell, 2012), psychology (Willig, 2011), sociology (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2011), education (Hatch, 2002), as well as more cross-disciplinary approaches (Flick, 2018; Miles & Huberman 1994), it becomes clear that there are indeed well-established conventions and templates for how to conduct and report qualitative research. These textbooks portray almost in unison the process of qualitative research as being made up of a linear set of elements, such as ‘theoretical framework’, ‘method’, ‘research design’, ‘data collection’ and ‘data analysis’, suggesting the existence of well-established conventions and templates for how to conduct and report studies.

The existence of well-established conventions and templates for qualitative research is further evidenced by the fact that several researchers have raised their concerns about an increased use of more or less fixed templates and constraints for conducting and reporting studies in leading journals (e.g. Harley & Cornelissen, 2020; Tourish, 2020). Reay et al. (2019: 202), for example, note that ‘most management and organization theory journals today endorse a format for empirical papers that is reminiscent of the physical sciences’. Similarly, in an editorial piece, Pratt et al. (2020: 12) argue that ‘there has recently been an outcry that journals are becoming too enamored with the use of such templates in qualitative research’. The templates of qualitative research are increasingly fashioned in the image of quantitative research in many journals (Abend et al., 2013; Cornelissen, 2017), which is likely to increase, rather than reduce, the already ‘dull and uninspiring scholarship – the opposite of what we expect of qualitative research’ (Reay et al., 2019: 202). Köhler et al. (2019: 3) worry about ‘some form of convergence on a template for qualitative research. This means that there now seems to be an expectation of what qualitative research methods should look like, what they should entail, and how they should be written up. This greatly limits the power of qualitative research methods for discovery, exploration, and refinement.’

Conventions and templates are, of course, important and necessary in many ways. They provide shared understandings among researchers about what research is and clear guidelines for conducting, reporting and evaluating research (Barney, 2020; Becker, 1982). Effective writing and communication, for example, requires an understanding of academic conventions and an appreciation of how editors, reviewers and readers in general respond to what we write. But it is also these very same conventions that often make research texts boring, as well as the research produced unimaginative and uninteresting.

A central problem is that these conventions and templates almost per definition form a shared and often taken-for-granted understanding of how to conduct and report research. They subsequently influence our thinking and decisions about how to carry out our research and developing knowledge in all aspects of the research process. In fact, they are even likely to encourage researchers to stop thinking and instead rely on templates to demonstrate rigour and impartiality (Harley & Cornelissen, 2020). They represent a form of functional stupidity – the following of a narrow rationality that makes sense based on taken-for-granted assumptions and within its own logic but appears irrational from a broader perspective (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016). While researchers are not entirely constrained by these conventions and templates, they are likely to have a significant disciplinary and normalizing effect as editors, reviewers and readers (i.e. we, the authors and readers of this book) often tend to evaluate each other’s research in the light of those conventions and templates. For example, if editors and reviewers do not see that you follow the established convention, they may think that you have not understood what good research looks like or are just sloppy. These conventions and templates thereby act like normalized and established standards for conducting, reporting and evaluating research. The researcher internalizes these standards and defines her- or himself as a good academic through living up to the normalized expectations, i.e. becomes subjectified through this form of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1980).

Metaphors and imagination in research

Our aim in this book is to encourage researchers to become more thoughtful and imaginative in their research and to develop some healthy, ironical distance to the normalized way of working, including one’s own work (Rorty, 1989). We contend that many of the established and taken-for-granted assumptions and views about research form the basis for the dominant conventional and template-driven studies and results. Often, assumptions and templates represent received wisdom and are simply reproduced without much thought. In order to enable researchers to break out from the captivity of taken-for-granted assumptions, they need to be identified, articulated and challenged by a set of alternative views. A slogan here can be ‘I only know what I think when I have been confronted by another kind of thinking’. As Khaire and Hall (2016: 846) note in regard to innovations more generally, significant innovations often occur because innovators challenge and violate established conventions and templates in a specific area, and, through that, open up new thinking and ways of doing things in that area.

In order to enable researchers to generate more interesting and imaginative research, we aim to disrupt and break with the dominant conventions and templates by metaphorizing the elements of the entire process of research. Such metaphorization means that we emphasize the underlying images that are either explicit or implicit in various ways of approaching the research process and its different elements, such as formulating research questions, methods and contributions. The discovery of grounded theory is a good example, where the metaphors of ‘discovery’ and ‘grounded’ are often and easily taken for granted. But it is not given that research aiming for new knowledge is a matter of discovery – in the same way as people discover the source of the Nile or that a researcher has cheated. Nor is it self-evident that even ambitious and ‘down to earth’ studies mean that these are ‘grounded’ – perhaps the empirical ground is more like a swamp than solid rock. Our approach implies that established metaphors are targeted for critical scrutiny, reflection and possible more or less radical rethinking.

Metaphors are a key part of language use, including in scientific settings. Well-written academic texts typically make plenty of use of metaphors, being employed in skilful, and sometimes in almost poetic ways. A text by Suddaby (2006: 634) illustrates this in addressing misconceptions of grounded theory:

A common misconception is that grounded theory requires a researcher to enter the field without any knowledge of prior research. There are several variants of this myth, each based on the false premise that the researcher is a blank sheet devoid of experience or knowledge. … [In forgoing examining existent literature] the researcher honestly hopes to gain fresh insights by keeping out of the ruts earlier travelers have worn.

Suddaby uses metaphors effectively and seductively to get his message across. (At least we think so.) It goes beyond pure ornament and adds some sharpness to the message. Other authors more often fail in doing so in an appealing and reader-friendly manner – or prefer to write in a more strict and seemingly rigorous way. A wealth of metaphors can be spotted in Suddaby’s texts, such as in the references to a researcher entering the ‘field’ (as if s/he was a farmer), the ‘blank sheet’ (the mind as a sheet), ‘fresh’ insights (again a farming metaphor, combined with the metaphor of peeping, i.e. seeing from the outside in).

However, we, the authors of this book, don’t think that this detailed view of Suddaby’s text is as interesting as considering his broader viewpoint, about research as insight-generation. Although we do take seriously the use of metaphors in order to write appealing publications, we are less interested in the details and technicalities of language issues and rhetorical tactics per se. We do not see as our major task to support beefing up texts with more colorful language, even though we hope to a degree also to encourage and give ideas for more inspiring social science texts. Our main interest lies instead in developing broader ideas of how to think more creatively and critically about the elements of the research process more generally, as well as in specific projects and writings.

As said in the Introduction, our key point in this book is to encourage metaphor awareness and an interest in actively metaphorizing various parts of the research process. We do so by suggesting a variety of metaphors – some conventional, some alternative (less common or marginal) and some almost unheard of – for the entire spectrum of key elements of the research process. The ambition is to encourage the reader to think differently and more actively about several issues that are normally taken for granted or normalized in research. Even if the researcher decides to continue in a conventional mode, and we are convinced that there are often good reasons for doing so on many occasions, it may still be based on better grounding through having thought about alternatives.

We are mainly interested in cognitions and images rather than in details of discourse or language use. Our intention is therefore not to conduct research on metaphors per se, but to elaborate a metaphorical framework that can function as a heuristic device for unsettling taken-for-granted ways of conducting research. This opens up finding alternative ways of doing more imaginative and interesting research. Although there are no guarantees and all deviations from a well-trotted path may be risky and lead to disaster, we still assume and hope that occasional departures from conventions are likely to make at least parts of social research more readable and impactful. At present we face the problem of a reverse theatre: there are more people eager to be on the stage than in the audience. In academia, we have many authors, few readers. There are many reasons behind this, but conventionalism and predictability of much research is a major contributing factor to a limited audience. Knowing metaphors better is, thus, a means, not the end, of this book. We are therefore not very strict in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Table List
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Introduction: Making research more imaginative and interesting
• I Setting the Scene and Metaphorical Reflexivity
• 1 Conventions and templates: A straitjacket for innovative research
• 2 Metaphors
• 3 Reflexivity
• 4 Reflexivity and metaphors in combination
• II Re-imagining the research process
• 5 Metaphorizing the grounding elements of the RP
• 6 Metaphorizing the framing elements of the RP
• 7 Metaphorizing the processing elements of the RP
• 8 Metaphorizing the delivering elements of the RP
• III A kaleidoscope of RP metaphors
• 9 Proposing a kaleidoscope of RP metaphors
• 10 Illustrating the kaleidoscope of RP metaphors
• 11 Generating more interesting research through metaphorical reflexivity
• References
• Index