Book Description

about management research, has developed and made a more prominent appearance in the relevant literature. Both the Academy of Management Review and Management Education and Development have devoted complete special issues to these topics in their impact on theory-building and research: see section 6.5. While the latter journal continues, its editorial team have decamped to set up a new periodical, Management Learning, which emphasizes current thinking about management research. This -the 'New Paradigm', postmodern analysis, call it what you will-is an epistemology whose relevance I argued in my first edition and continue to emphasize in Chapter 6 of the present. The appreciation of qualitative approaches to the understanding of organizational life has increased during the last four years, approaches seen as complementary to quantitative analysis by many, a substitute by some. The appearance of the second edition of Miles and Huberman (1994) indicates the growing importance attached to qualitative analysis by many management researchers, and I have mentioned some of the techniques they advocate at relevant points in Part Three of this book, without attempting, or indeed being able, to replicate their magnificent work. Discourse analysis, biography and hermeneutic analysis are among the recent approaches to which pointers are provided in Part Three. Similarly, the value of arguing a case, rather than testing a thesis, has been emphasized for some forms of Diploma and MBA work: see section 6.4.