Chapter 1: Introduction: Weird Ideas from Qualitative Research

Over the past five years the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research has welcomed research projects by the very best qualitative, organizational researchers in the world. This conference has helped authors develop and hone theoretical ideas in an environment friendly to qualitative methods, and more important, has begun to build a community of qualitative researchers that work on organizational and management issues. The authors winning the “Best Presentation Awards” at the Davis Conference over the past five years have contributed papers to this volume. In this introduction I discuss some of the prominent insights evident in this set of papers. As it turns out, these papers suggest a number of counter-intuitive and counter-normative ideas. I discuss these “weird ideas” and how the authors’ qualitative methods contributed to their uncovering. I also discuss how these weird ideas highlight some of the virtues of qualitative methods, including providing theory that is rich, process-oriented, and contextually-informed. I conclude by suggesting that a primary virtue of qualitative research, and the Davis Conference is the possibility of extending organizational theories through a collective and ongoing dialogue among a community of qualitative scholars.