Qualitative research methodology: a neo-empiricist perspective

A commitment to empiricism is evident in much of the published research, in the business and management field, which extols the virtues of ‘qualitative research’ approaches. Yet just what their implicit assumptions to empiricism suggest in terms of the epistemological positioning of the research often remains problematic. It is our position that management researchers need to be more aware of the philosophical commitments they make through their methodological choices if they are to understand what they are investigating. In this paper we argue for the importance of neo-empiricism as a distinct interpretivist mode of engagement with qualitative methods and its position as a response to the criticisms of positivism with respect to developing meaningful understandings of social phenomena is discussed. With the focus of neo-empiricism on developing theory that is grounded in observations of empirical reality, we offer two examples, from Forensic Accounting and International Joint Venture Management, to highlight the general inductive data (thematic) analysis processes associated with such data oriented empirical perspectives. The main focus of the paper is to ‘forefront’ the role of the neo-empiricist perspective as an important interpretive approach in business and management research and to provide a basic understanding of the theoretical commitments of such perspectives