Abstract
In this interview, Dr. Ann Langley draws on her extensive pedagogical and research experience to share insights on how she helps her students learn the fundamentals of qualitative research. In the closing commentary, I elaborate on two take-aways from this discussion. The first highlights the importance of experiential learning for nurturing the development of key skills related to qualitative data collection and analysis. The second centers on the ways in which Dr. Langley identifies and fuels the synergies between her teaching, research, and methods contributions. These reflections provide inspiration and concrete examples of how, as Dr. Langley describes, both pedagogical considerations and “practical experience where I have encountered challenges” can morph into important theoretical and methods pieces, with the potential to push a field forward.
Qualitative research is like a voyage of discovery. I think this is important. What makes it so attractive as well is that it draws on the natural processes by which all of us learn about life all the time. We go out and observe things and listen to people, pick things up, absorb them, and learn. (. . .) What qualitative research does is it systematizes that ordinary learning. It’s the way we all learn. Just doing what comes naturally, but then systematizing it.
Describing the process of conducting qualitative research, Dr. Ann Langley offers the metaphor of a voyage—more specifically, “a voyage of discovery.” Indeed, qualitative research involves a journey to unpack complex phenomena and unearth insights about them. As with all research endeavors, journeys can be exciting, inspired, and perplexing, as well as fraught with unexpected twists and obstacles. Having the skills and tools to properly chart one’s path, maintain a steady course, and navigate roadblocks—while at the same time being open to and embracing new paths forward—becomes essential. In particular as, drawing on Dr. Langley’s quote, it is imperative that the journey and information collected be properly systemized. How can we best help our students develop these skills? One source of inspiration is to turn to the experts in our field, to learn from their insights and the techniques they use in the classroom.
Indeed, the literature shows that learning qualitative research and writing techniques can sometimes be challenging for students (e.g., Cassell, 2018; Wang, 2013) and evoke many emotions (Vince, 2020). In an engaging autoethnographical account, Humphreys (2006) draws similarities between the difficulties and anxieties he faced when learning to play the saxophone and students’ experiences when learning qualitative research methods for the first time. We develop our skills as we engage with research—for example, McLachlan and Garcia (2015) use autoethnography to analyze their experience selecting and adapting a research philosophy to their methodology in the context of collecting and analyzing interview data for a project during their doctoral studies. The benefits extend beyond research itself—Cassell (2018) notes that experience with qualitative methods provides students with an opportunity to develop and hone skills that are highly salient for managerial roles, such as active listening.
Given this, many instructors endeavor to develop innovative approaches for introducing qualitative research, as well as different perspectives related to it, in the classroom (e.g., Harlos et al., 2003). For example, several scholars have designed or adapted various types of activities and materials for their students to help them learn about key notions, such as qualitative data coding and analysis (e.g., Mallette & Saldãna, 2019; Raddon et al., 2009; Scharp & Sanders, 2019). Drawing on transformative learning theory, Geller et al. (2023) also outline the learning activities and practices incorporated into a two-term online doctoral qualitative methods course. Yet, as Cassell et al. (2009, p. 514) observe, less research has explored “the skills and knowledge required to produce high-quality qualitative research, and the processes that facilitate the development of those skills in managers and management researchers.” To address this gap, Cassell et al. (2009) conducted semi-structured interviews with 45 participants with significant experience and “an interest in enhancing the quality of qualitative management research” (p. 518) to identify key capabilities and practices.
To add to this important management education conversation, I interviewed Dr. Ann Langley. Ann Langley obtained her BA in mathematics from the University of Oxford and her MA in operational research from the University of Lancaster in England, before moving to Canada where she pursued a doctorate at HEC Montréal (https://annlangley.ca/profile/ [Langley, 2021b]). A prolific researcher, Dr. Langley has authored more than 100 journal articles, 50 book chapters, and co-edited 14 books (https://annlangley.ca/realisations/publications [Langley, 2021c]). As per a Google Scholar search on June 4, 2024, her work has been cited 36,160 times. In addition to her research articles, Dr. Langley has published a number of theory and qualitative methods-focused pieces, exploring such topics as analyzing process data (Langley, 1999), different styles by which authors present process theories in the literature (Cloutier & Langley, 2020), and styles of interviewing (Langley & Meziani, 2020).
For her contributions to the field, Dr. Langley has been awarded seven honorary doctorates (from the Norwegian School of Economics in 2011, Aalto University School of Business in 2016, the University of St. Gallen in 2020, Ghent University in 2022, Roskilde University in 2022, the University of Gothenburg in 2022, and Lancaster University in 2023), elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences) in 2010, named a Fellow of three professional academies (the Academy of Management in 2017, the Academy of Social Sciences in 2020, and the British Academy in 2022), and received the 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Contributions to Management Award from the Academy of Management, among other recognitions (https://annlangley.ca/distinctions [Langley, 2021a]).
Professor Emerita, Dr. Langley retired in 2020 after 20 years as a faculty member in the Department of Management at HEC Montréal ([2022] https://www.hec.ca/en/news/2022/ann-langley-honoured-twice.html), where she taught a variety of courses related to strategy and research methods, including doctoral seminars on Qualitative Research Methods in Management, as well as Reading, Doing, and Publishing Research in Strategy. Though retired from teaching, Dr. Langley is very active in the research community, presently serving as Deputy Editor of the Academy of Management Journal. She is also Distinguished Research Environment Professor at the University of Warwick.
The following pages present excerpts of an interview conducted with Ann Langley in the summer of 2022 (with some questions and reflections edited by both the author and Dr. Langley for flow). The first part of our conversation centers on how she helped her students to develop key competencies to conduct rigorous qualitative research, including an overview of typical activities that she used in her courses, as well as reflections on some of the most common challenges students face. The second part expands on this discussion to explore the many connections between her teaching, research, and writing on qualitative methods. To close, Dr. Langley reflects on her relationship with qualitative research, as well as what it means to learn qualitative methods more generally.
Interview
Interviewer (INT): Could you describe some activities that you typically used in your qualitative classes to help your students learn about that approach?
Ann Langley (AL): My class has always been very hands on. I strongly believe in learning by doing. That’s the way I learn and so that’s how I feel that students learn. So, I didn’t do a lot of what you see in some classes, which is asking students to discuss many theoretical texts about epistemology and so on. We did a little of that of course, but most of the time, it was hands on.
Rather, my doctoral seminar in qualitative research was oriented around a mini-qualitative research project related to the student’s thesis topic. The whole class, the way I organized it, was that you start with the research question in the first session and at the end, people are exchanging their final reports on their empirical research project. Almost every session had a discussion between members of the class about some aspect of the research that they were currently working on.
INT: So, peer learning?
AL: Yes, peer learning. Let me give you an example of the interview session. In my class there was one full session on interviews, and they would do three things in that session. And they’re all kind of hands on. Perhaps the more theoretical piece is [that] I [would] give them an interview transcript, which had two mini-interviews in it, which were full of mistakes, or rather moments of awkwardness where the interviewer could have framed their question in a more productive manner. And the exercise involved discussing how the interviewer might improve their approaches to orienting an interview to generate richer insight. That’s one exercise.
A second exercise is that, before the class, students prepared an interview guide for their own research. During the class time, they discussed each other’s interview guides and made recommendations about how to improve the guide, after having done the first exercise. You know, what seem to be good questions, not so good questions—and then they would critique each other’s interview guides.
And then, in the third part, they interviewed each other around the same question. And the question that I used, and I was inspired to do this by someone else—so this is not my exercise—[is to] interview someone about [a person] who has influenced their lives for 5 min each, in small groups. Then they received feedback from other members of the group that are hearing the interview about how the interview went. Which questions were useful? Where they should have asked for an example? Where they were asking yes or no questions—which tend to give monosyllabic responses . . . how they could have improved the interview. And so this was a very intense session, where we did these three things in the same class. It’s always been a wonderful class, I had a lot of fun with it.
INT: What are some of the key challenges that students tend to have taking a qualitative seminar?
AL: In the interviewing class, what I find they have most difficulty with is learning to speak about concrete things in interviews, rather than asking people to theorize. Bringing everything down to specifics is very difficult, and if you have an interview where you don’t get down to specifics, it may be no use at all. You know, you’re just hearing the person regurgitating maybe a textbook they’ve read. (. . .) If you’re asking them about leadership, you don’t want them to be telling you about the latest book they’ve read on leadership, which they have kind of incorporated into their own understanding of the phenomenon. You want them to tell you about their own experiences and sometimes it’s very, very important to bring that down to examples. And students have a lot of difficulty doing that. I think they learn by seeing other people do it, so you know that it’s helpful to have that, and then they learn by looking at their transcript and saying, “Oh dear, I don’t have anything that’s interesting.”
The other thing that I think students have a lot of difficulty with is the analysis process. I think that they can learn how to code data, but where they run into difficulties is getting beyond just the descriptive codes. So there becomes a kind of a mechanical aspect to coding data, where you’ve put labels, and you know how to report on the different labels and codes that you have developed, but then reaching beyond that to make sense of it—that I think is very difficult. Actually, I still struggle with it myself (laughs).
I think one of the most difficult [challenges] in qualitative research is this kind of creative leap that you need to take once you’ve got the data, and you’re moving to a higher level of abstraction and you’re trying to understand: “Okay, now what does this mean?” I think at this point you reach the place where it’s no longer a mechanical exercise.
INT: How do you help students make that conceptual leap, if it’s their first time using qualitative methods, or that they’re nervous to go too far beyond the data that they have or the codes. How do you help them do that?
AL: This may sound silly, but I think that one of the ways you help them do that is you force them to make a 10-minute presentation on what they have seen in their data. After they have coded—not before—but once they have done all this coding and you can see that they’re kind of lost. . . Making a 10-minute presentation kind of forces a sort of abstraction, a kind of rising above your data. So, what is it that you have seen? And a few diagrams and actually being forced to do that, it’s like an elevator talk about what you’ve done. Students at that point hear themselves speak and see what it is that is coming from the data.
That’s not the end of the process. Then they have to go back and [say]: “Okay, how am I going to . . . these are the ideas that I came up with when I had to present the thing in 10 minutes, which of those are defensible in the data?” Then they have to go back and link those ideas back to the coding that [they] have done, so this kind of digging in deep, and the separating, and then going back in deep and separating, is a kind of process that I think you have to go through to start to theorize from your data. That’s my thinking. There are all kinds of other things, like drawing tables, that can be helpful in this process as well. So, you can code and then you can try to compare cases, compare time periods, all kinds of comparisons can help you get a little bit further along. But there comes this point where I think there’s a creative leap that needs to happen and to get that to happen, there’s a certain amount of detachment that has to take place, but then you need to go back to the data and get re-attached.
INT: Are there other main challenges that you’ve identified over the years?
AL: Well, the hands-on approach that I used creates a bit of a challenge, because it does mean that you are managing a class where every student is working on something different. The typical kind of a class is where everyone’s working on the same thing, and it may be much easier to have conversations. I’ve often used a lot of small group work. And if the class is too big, you spend your time running between groups and you don’t get to see what’s going on in every group. So, sometimes there’s a kind of a little missing piece where you don’t get to be following everybody quite to the same degree. But I still believe so much in this approach, I’m sure this is the way to learn, to get people to do their own work.
I mean, also determining which groups . . . so, the way I always did it, is in every class the groups will not be the same. I would shuffle people around to different groups. And sometimes it’s because of the topic, so for example when we’re talking about conceptual frameworks, I would put people who have a similar-looking conceptual framework together. They have prepared before the class their conceptual frameworks, they’ve sent them to me, and then I’ve put them in a group where they have something that looks a little bit similar, so that they can have some kind of discussion which might resonate with others in the group. And in other sessions, I would put them with people who are dealing with similar topics in their research. But I would change it around. And, yeah (laughs), managing the groups could sometimes be a little bit complex.
INT: You mention in one of your articles [Langley & Meziani, 2020] that often people will think of interviews when they think of qualitative research. You used a lot of data collection methods, in your course or with the students you supervise, how do you help them consider other avenues for their data collection methods?
AL: In the classroom, we had a session on interviews, we had a session on observation, and we had a session on archival data. So, they were introduced to all the different methods. I have to say that it did tend to happen that in the class, in the empirical studies they did, they didn’t necessarily have enough time to do more than a few interviews, so it did tend to be interview-based. (. . .) Perhaps the most difficult thing to teach is observation.
INT: What about with the students you supervised? How do you help them develop the confidence and interest in using those multiple data sources that you mentioned?
AL: Yes, quite a few of my students have done observations. And I have been very successful in some cases and not-so-successful in other cases, in terms of getting students to do good observations. And I think the really difficult thing with observations is the degree of discipline it requires. So, if you can record meetings and so on, that’s great. But what is very difficult, I think—not just for students but for myself—is when you’re doing observations, you need as much time, if not more, to write them up afterwards as you are actually observing. And it has to be done in an extremely rigorous manner. Students do not always catch that at first, and then they become lazy.
And the quality of what you can get from observations can be absolutely fantastic, even if you haven’t recorded. I have one student who was absolutely fabulous at doing this. She would observe meetings, and you would have a report on the meeting where you could almost see people looking at each other. She would draw a table showing the people present, and you almost had a sense of being there when you were reading her notes. And others, it’s just, you know, two or three lines, and you really felt they weren’t there. So, one of the skills that a good ethnographer needs to be able to capture is writing really good notes. And looking, observing, listening—not just writing what was said, but also the important non-verbal aspects about what is going on—and never stop writing for a single second. Because if you do, it’s gone (laughs). It’s gone.
INT: That’s a fantastic transition actually to my next set of questions which are on the methods pieces that you have written. You’ve written many methods pieces. I was wondering how they inform your teaching and how your teaching, conversely, influences your methods writing?
AL: Yeah, so it’s obvious that there is a flow, back and forth, and there’s a flow also from my own research. A lot of the methods pieces I wrote are inspired from my own research originally. The piece “Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data” [Langley, 1999] was inspired by my own research—I developed it because I was struggling with how to analyze data and this helped me clarify it. And it was also immediately useful for teaching. The paper does get into a lot of qualitative methods classes, and I used it in my own classes.
From the class to the paper, I think the Templates and Turns piece [“Templates and Turns in Qualitative Studies of Strategy and Management”; Langley & Abdallah, 2011] was probably in that direction. I had a class which I gave on epistemology and ontology in qualitative research, and I used to give students two papers to read: one was a kind of a positivistic paper, by Kathleen Eisenhardt and colleagues, and one was an ethnography. And the way the class was set up, and this used to work very well, is that one student would play the role of the author of the paper and present the paper to the class. Then we would have designated discussants, whose objective was to challenge the paper. And, of course, I told them, you can challenge it from the wrong paradigm. Then the author would have to respond (laughs).
[For the purpose of the exercise,] I gave them a co-author, so they were not alone. We had a huge amount of fun with this, and it was a really great way to see what the assumptions were that were driving people in the research that they were doing, and some of the challenges underpinning those assumptions. So, we would do that, and that became really part of the beginnings of what turned into the Templates and Turns paper later (smiles). So, in that sense, that kind of inspired this paper.
INT: In those methods papers, one thing that I find as a reader is that you and your co-authors just have this amazing ability to take paradoxes or points where there are multiple perspectives (. . .) and you break it down in a way that gives pathways to people so well. How do you do that? How do you take something so complex, from a methods perspective, and boil it down, nuance it, in that effective way for readers, for students? Can you walk me through how you do it?
AL: I don’t usually think: “Well now I’m going to write a paper about X from scratch.” It’s usually inspired by some kind of experience, some kind of practical experience where I have encountered challenges. “Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data” was my own challenge of wondering how to analyze my data. That becomes the starting question. And then, I think for the vast majority of those methods papers, once you’ve reached that starting question, I then say: “Well ok, let’s see how other people did it.” I’ll go into the literature and look for exemplars of people who have tackled this question before and the different ways that they have done it. So, that would be the practice.
For example, I have a paper in Organizational Research Methods [“Being where? Navigating the involvement paradox in qualitative research accounts”; Langley & Klag, 2019], which is about what we called the involvement paradox. The involvement paradox is this idea that [with] qualitative research, to be any good at all, you have to get really close to the phenomenon. The whole point of qualitative research is being there to see and learn in depth. And yet, being there can be seen as a problem, in the sense that you may get too involved and therefore one would question your objectivity, and so on. So, there’s this kind of paradox. I ran into this problem when I was working with Malvina [Klag] on another project. We wanted to do a piece of research based on her own experience of being a board member of a school system. So, we were doing this with a third person, Malvina was deeply involved, she was one of the key actors, and [the other person and I] were outsiders. We were trying to develop a research project about a strategic planning effort she was involved in that was not really going well. And this really made us aware of this issue of being close: she was getting wonderful data, but at the same time, she had personal feelings about it. So, we were inspired by this to write the paper about the involvement paradox.
The interesting thing is, we never wrote the paper [on the original research idea]. The data were not sufficiently extensive, at some point we lost our access. (. . .) But we wrote this methods paper about the involvement paradox, because we could see this tension there and we were wondering—how do other people handle this? We started to look at published work where involvement was really central to the research. And we asked ourselves how people were actually writing themselves in, or not, in the text in ways that were credible. That was how that paper developed. And I then used those ideas in seminars with students.
INT: Do you think that you have a methods piece that, to you, is the most useful—either to your career or one that you’re most proud of in the way that it came out, how it helps your students?
AL: Quite clearly, “Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data” is my most influential paper. It was published in Academy of Management Review in a special issue. And the special issue—this has never happened to me in any other publication, it was practically conditionally accepted on the first round.
INT: Oh wow!
AL: No, this doesn’t happen! (Laughs). It was a long time ago, so publishing seemed a little bit easier then. (. . .) So, that is my favorite paper. And I still agree with most of it. Some of it I would change, but I still find that it makes sense. I really like the involvement paradox paper, as well.
The Templates and Turns paper has an interesting aspect to it. What we did in that paper is that we introduced two templates and two, what we called, turns. The templates were two very standard ways of analyzing qualitative data, the Eisenhardt method—we called them—and the Gioia method. And the turns were two more open-ended approaches, so a practice approach and a discursive approach (. . .). [In the paper] we basically said: “Be careful with these templates because they can close you down, they can be problematic.” But they are very powerful and they can be helpful in allowing you to generate insights that combine novelty and credibility, which is the kind of tension we were dealing with in that paper. But we also noted: “There are other approaches beyond templates.” However, what happened was, I discovered at one point, that there was a version of this paper circulating where the “turns” part had been cut out!
It’s a book chapter, and it wasn’t necessarily easy to obtain, and so I think people were passing it from one to the other. And at one point, I found out from a colleague that there was this version circulating without the “turns” part. I found out because someone wrote to me and they said: “I’ve got your paper, it’s very interesting, but it seems to end in a strange way, you know, could you say more.”
But then, following that, there has been some a pushback against the notion of templates, of there being templates. So, in a way I look back on it now, and I think that maybe we contributed a little bit to making these templates into templates by writing this paper.
INT: That’s so interesting! You mentioned your AMR paper earlier, and you said something that I thought that I would follow-up on. . . you mentioned there would be some things you would change now about that paper. Is that something you’d want to elaborate on?
AL: Yeah, one of the things that I did was evaluate various approaches according to their accuracy, parsimony, and generality. And the way I describe the grounded theory approach was that it was not parsimonious. And I’m not sure I agree with that anymore.
I think that approaches have evolved over time and so, when I wrote that paper, Denny Gioia, who developed a very popular version of the grounded theory approach, hadn’t written his famous papers about grounded theory yet. So, I was relying on very early work that he had done. I [now] have a different perspective on that. I also didn’t really address discursive methods in that paper. And I did not focus much on epistemology and ontology, which perhaps might have been given more attention if I had written the paper today.
INT: I think back to when I was a student, sometimes having paradoxes or unclear avenues created a little bit of stress for me, maybe because I was just learning and nervous and all that—I don’t know if that’s the experience that some of your students sometimes have? How did you approach paradoxes or this perspective of multiple pathways in your classes?
AL: It was kind of inherent to the whole class. I used to come in at the first class and say: “Listen, I’m not going to give you the one best way—that’s not my approach. I’m going to try to open your eyes to the range of approaches that are available.”
You know, I have my own biases, I may be slightly more toward the positivist end than other people. I have a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, I can’t help myself. My brain works in categories (laughs). But even in the first class, the first exercise is: “Tell me what attracts you to qualitative research and what worries you about it.” And we put these things up on the [board]. People just come up with things, and you realize immediately (or at the end) that what’s on the “what attracts me” side and what’s on the “what worries me” side are actually the same things. They’re the same things (laughs). For example: subjectivity. So, what is great, what attracts you to qualitative research is that you can actually get inside the research site, you can see it through your own eyes, subjectiveness is a strength. But then, it’s also what worries you. And so, from the beginning, there was always: “There’s this and there’s that,” and this is the range of ways that you can address it.
INT: I love that—in the first class, just putting it on the table and kind of addressing the fact that—this is normal, this is part of the process, and part of what excites you at the same time! Before closing—do you have a metaphor that you could use that would describe your relationship with qualitative methods? And/or a metaphor that you think represents well just the idea of learning qualitative approaches more generally?
AL: So, I did look at your list of questions beforehand and I’m [glad] I did, because that’s not an easy question (laughs)! My approach to qualitative research is that I’m not dogmatic. I’m a pragmatist. Very pragmatic. And another word that would go with that is—and I’ve seen an author who used this recently, and so I’m borrowing what they’re saying—a bricoleur. You know, bricolage. It is putting things together—no dogmatism. It’s what works and having fun doing it as well. It’s enjoying it. Qualitative research is like a voyage of discovery. I think this is important.
What makes it so attractive as well is that it draws on the natural processes by which all of us learn about life all the time. We go out and observe things and listen to people, pick things up, absorb them, and learn. You just have to write it down, that’s the difference. If you’re not doing research, you don’t have to write it down, you learn it anyway and it just stays in your mind. What qualitative research does is it systematizes that ordinary learning. It’s the way we all learn. Just doing what comes naturally, but then systematizing it.
Commentary
In this commentary, I elaborate on two main take-aways from my interview with Dr. Langley. The first highlights the way she uses experiential learning to help students develop the skills required to collect good data, analyze it, and take creative (i.e., conceptual) leaps, that move beyond the data while remaining grounded in it. The second centers on the ways in which Dr. Langley both identifies and fuels the synergies between her teaching, research, and methods contributions.
Experiential Learning: A Key Catalyst for Developing Skills for Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis
So, you can code and then you can try to compare cases, compare time periods, all kinds of comparisons can help you get a little bit further along. But there comes this point where I think there’s a creative leap that needs to happen and to get that to happen, there’s a certain amount of detachment that has to take place, but then you need to go back to the data and get re-attached.
When asked to describe typical exercises that she used in her qualitative methods courses, Dr. Langley opens the conversation by emphasizing the importance she accords to a “hands on,” “learning by doing” approach. This experiential focus (e.g., Kolb, 2015) permeates the entirety of the discussion. For example, she not only overviews several in-class exercises that she used to impart the skills needed to collect rich data, but also describes ways that she helps students to make a “conceptual leap”—a “consciously realized and abstract theoretical idea in an empirical study that may or may not make its way to a theoretical contribution in its final form” (Klag & Langley, 2013, p. 150)—when analyzing their data. The latter, as she explains, is particularly crucial to nurture, given that students may struggle to move “to a higher level of abstraction” when teasing apart their findings:
I think one of the most difficult [challenges] in qualitative research is this kind of creative leap that you need to take once you’ve got the data, and you’re moving to a higher level of abstraction and you’re trying to understand: “Okay, now what does this mean?”
Learning to conduct qualitative data analysis can be challenging for students (e.g., Cassell, 2018) in general. Yet, as Dr. Langley notes, some skills—such as the ability to engage in creative leaps, which may be described as “uncodifiable” (Langley, 1999, p. 691)—can be particularly challenging to learn. Indeed, as Klag and Langley (2013, p. 162) observe, “conceptual leaps may be as varied as the individuals that engage in conceptual leaping and the circumstances in which they leap at particular moments in time.” Thus, while learning about these skills via readings or lectures is undeniably important, the opportunity to engage with the data, attempt “leaps,” get feedback, and apply it in subsequent research activities appears crucial.
This focus also aligns with the extant literature—in Wagner et al.’s (2019) systematic review of journal articles published over a 15-year period (ending in 2013) that both discuss and present empirical data on how to teach qualitative research methods, the two most prominent themes were the use of experiential learning and the incorporation of “practice-based material,” such as exercises and assignments.
As such, by drawing upon her extensive experience using and teaching qualitative methods, Dr. Langley was able to anticipate the roadblocks her students were most likely to face as they completed their course projects and strategically embed experiential activities into her course to help students confront them and manage the emotions they may generate. Educators teaching similar courses will be able to build upon the insights and examples of experiential exercises shared in the interview—whether developed by Dr. Langley or that she has adapted from others—to help students circumnavigate such obstacles in their research endeavors.
Identifying and Fueling Synergies
(. . .) It’s obvious that there is a flow, back and forth, and there’s a flow also from my own research. A lot of the methods pieces I wrote are inspired from my own research originally.
Teaching and research reinforce each other, producing valuable synergies for educators (e.g., Vroom, 2007). Accordingly, in the second half of the interview, Dr. Langley provides compelling examples to illustrate how her teaching, research, and writing on qualitative methods are intertwined. She describes, for example, how a particularly engaging in-class activity served as the starting point for one methods-focused book chapter: We had a huge amount of fun with this, and it was a really great way to see what the assumptions were that were driving people in the research that they were doing, and some of the challenges underpinning those assumptions. So, we would do that, and that became really part of the beginnings of what turned into the Templates and Turns paper later (smiles). So, in that sense, that kind of inspired this paper.
Interestingly, through the discussion, Dr. Langley alludes to a fourth component that fuels these synergies: the impact of, and feedback one receives about, one’s work. For example, a recent article by Lerman et al. (2022) underscores the impact of her “Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data” (1999) paper by examining how its core premises were applied across a sample of 176 articles.
Within the present interview, Dr. Langley discusses how methodological insights are not static, and thus can evolve with the field. Reflecting on her most cited paper (Langley, 1999—cited 9,119 times as per a Google Scholar search conducted on June 4, 2024; see also Lerman et al., 2022 for more background on the origins of that article), she takes the time to elaborate on a few elements that she would change, for example, related to her analysis of grounded theory. Moreover, when discussing the book chapter on “templates and turns,” Dr. Langley takes a step back to consider its influence on the current conversations (including a recent debate!; see Gioia et al., 2022) regarding templates and notes, “So, in a way I look back on it now, and I think that maybe we contributed a little bit to making these templates into templates by writing this paper” (see also Dr. Langley’s reflections on this in Gioia et al., 2022, pp. 237–238). (I thank Dr. Langley for pointing me to, at the time of the interview, both the Gioia et al., 2022 and Lerman et al., 2022 articles.) These examples attest to the ways in which one’s research and the feedback on it from the field interact, as well as the importance she accords to openness and reflexivity as a researcher.
For scholars who aspire to also contribute to methodological conversations in their fields, these reflections provide inspiration and concrete examples of how, as Dr. Langley describes, both pedagogical considerations and “practical experience where I have encountered challenges” can morph into important theoretical and methods pieces, with the potential to push a field forward. Importantly, management educators can also create synergies by drawing upon their personal experiences to identify and contribute to research and conversations in the field (e.g., Eury & Hawk, 2023).
Conclusion
Acquiring and cultivating the skills to conduct and write about qualitative research is a demanding task (e.g., Cassell, 2018; Wang, 2013). In this interview, Dr. Ann Langley draws on her extensive pedagogical and research experience to share her insights on how to help students overcome these challenges. She further elaborates on how her teaching and research served as sparks for her many theory and qualitative methods-focused contributions. Taken together, these reflections will interest educators from all disciplines who seek to discover how other experts help students learn about qualitative research and methods, as well as foster synergies between their pedagogical and research activities.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: To directly address potential perceptions of conflict of interest, we note that this manuscript underwent the standard double-anonymous peer review. See the editorial for the assigned issue for more details.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
