Management International Review

Guest Editors' Introduction to the Focused Issue: Qualitative Research Methods in International Business

Narrative Interviewing and Narrative Analysis in a Study of a Cross-Border Merger

Narratives are important tools in constructing an organization, and individual and collective narratives about key actors and critical events compete in defining the organization and making sense of the challenges faced in organizational change processes. This article introduces narrative interviewing and narrative analysis as qualitative methods relevant to international business research, with illustrations from a case study of a cross-border merger. Narrative interviews offer access to the...

Crossing Language Boundaries: Qualitative Interviewing in International Business

In this paper, the researchers explore the use of foreign languages in qualitative interviewing, an issue previously treated as a mere technical consideration and largely neglected in the monolingual, English-dominated environment of international business research. Drawing on literature from linguistic anthropology and qualitative interviewing methodology, they provide a holistic view of foreign language use based on the experiences of 34 scholars from different countries. Their findings sho...

Postcolonialism and the Politics of Qualitative Research in International Business

This paper offers a re-configuration of international business research by subjecting it to a postcolonial critique. This critique sees international business research as exhibiting continuities with the colonial project in the way it appropriates the Other. Qualitative research in international business often reproduces a neopositivist separation of theory and method, which can marginalize discussion of the important ontological, epistemological and political issues inherent in any research ...