The large crowds that came to the Power of Richness PDWs in Atlanta and the year before in Hawaii have convinced us there is significant demand in the Academy for learning how to do qualitative research well. We want to build on the success of our two previous qualitative methods PDWs and create an even more ambitious PDW this year. The goal of these new proposed activities is to help establish communities of practice and mentoring relationships among the broad set of qualitative methods experts and researchers around particular methodologies and technical issues.
To draw in the broad community of qualitative researchers, we have found that panel presentations, with renowned qualitative researchers, works exceedingly well. We plan to continue these panel presentations with leading qualitative scholars, who will offer their insights about how to craft qualitative research papers.
We have also found, however, that this type of broad stroke forum is limited in its ability to create real communities of practice and mentoring relationships. For this reason we decided to expand the PDW to fit well with this year?s conference theme ?Doing Well by Doing Good?. In the second part of the PDW, we will offer several hands-on sessions to help both researchers just learning aspects of qualitative research and those struggling to get their written manuscripts published. These are two areas in which members of the Academy have expressed strong interest in getting more help.
The panel part of the workshop will be much like the one we had the past two years, and which BPS has so generously taken the lead in sponsoring. John Van Mannan, Steve Barley and Andy Hargadon have already agreed to participate and will discuss how to turn qualitative research questions into publishable papers. We are still in the process of recruiting a fourth leading scholar to present on the panel.
The second part of the workshop will have parallel sessions designed for people beginning or developing qualitative research and those trying to publish qualitative research.
On one side of the room, we will have tutorials for people still developing a qualitative research project. These tutorials will involve leading qualitative researchers who can explain well the methods they use. Some topics for these tutorials include the key elements of important methodologies (e.g., ethnographies, case studies, comparative historical analyses) and technical issues typically facing qualitative researchers (protocol development, interviewing techniques, automatic text analysis, coding techniques, etc.). Klaus Weber (Kellogg) has agreed to give a tutorial on automatic text analysis.
On the other side of the room, we will hold small groups sessions for people who need specific feedback on a paper they are developing. Diana Day and Peter Murmann will lead such feedback sessions. We also plan to invite associate editors from such journals as AMJ, ASQ, Organization Science, and JIBS, and leading qualitative researchers to help with this. Deborah Douherty, Organization Science?s qualitative research editor, has already agreed to participate here. Exactly how many tutorials we will run and how many paper feedback sessions will be offered depends on the demand for them. We have 140 email addresses of people who attended the PDW in 2006. When we know that the PDW is accepted, we will contact them to see what sessions these people would most want to see on the program. We will also send a more general invitation to the session over the AOM division mailing list.
Diana Day and J. Peter Murmann will facilitate the entire PDW.