Chapter 1: Introduction: Research Context and Attention of the Qualitative Researcher

In this second volume of Qualitative Organizational Research, Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, we bring together seven empirical papers that provide extraordinary insight into the workings of organizations through qualitative methods. Like the papers in the first volume of this series, these seven papers provide some counterintuitive findings (e.g., organizational death is not just an ending, but a beginning of organizational life; written correspondence can communicate emotions more effectively than face-to-face interactions). Yet, this group of papers also struck us strongly as highlighting another feature of qualitative methods: the power of context. In particular, the papers showed us how looking at a previously explored issue through a new contextual lens could focus researchers’ attention on completely different issues and variables, and as a result, provide novel insights about the phenomena of interest.