It’s time to join the conversation: Visions of the Future for Qualitative Transparency and Openness in Management and Organisation Studies

Abstract

The social sciences continue to move towards more open and transparent research practices. However, these changes have been driven by researchers outside of management and organisational studies and are primarily designed with quantitative methods in mind. While open research is grounded in principles that are core to qualitative scholarship- such as validity, rigour transparency, and trustworthiness, many current open research practices demonstrate little sensitivity to qualitative epistemologies. In this paper, we conduct a mixed-methods survey with qualitative management and organizational researchers (n = 163) to examine their understanding of openness and transparency, alongside their hopes and fears surrounding the use of open research practices. We find that qualitative researchers are concerned with the ethical obligations to their participants and see ‘open science’ to be a positivistic opposition to their interpretivist epistemologies. However, they see some benefits for openness and transparency, especially in a potential for greater societal impact. Finally, we bring together our empirical findings on the views of this community to discuss the potential futures for open research in management, encouraging qualitative scholars to join and shape the conversation.