Abstract
This essay challenges the prevailing externalist orientation of management scholarship by calling for a return to interiority: the attentive engagement of the researcher’s own knowing process. Anchored in Bernard Lonergan’s framing of the structure of human knowing, the authors argue that acts of experience, understanding, judgement and decision are central to scholarly rigour but often remain unexamined. Through reflexive critique and philosophical grounding, the piece advocates for a scholarship that recognises the subjectivity of the knower as a source of insight rather than bias. By ‘putting the knower back into knowing’, the authors offer a compelling agenda for integrating first-person inquiry, reflexive training, and methodological innovation in doctoral education and academic research. The essay ultimately positions interiority as a means to enhance both the relevance and rigour of academic inquiry.
Introduction
‘How do you know when you have enough data?’ At a research methods workshop, a doctoral student posed this earnest question. A senior colleague responded confidently: ‘The data will tell you’. This answer, implying that the data itself somehow signals its sufficiency, did not sit well with us. In reality, data does not literally ‘tell’ the researcher anything; the researcher must decide when enough is enough. One of us interjected, suggesting that we make that judgement, and that it is only by paying attention to how we arrive at that judgement that we can reasonably affirm we have gathered ‘enough’ data. In other words, determining data saturation is not an automatic, external revelation but an act of the human mind, an interior process of judgement.
This anecdote illustrates a broader provocation: in the training and practice of management and entrepreneurship research, we often emphasise what is observed and known (the external data and outcomes) while neglecting the knowing subject – the scholar’s own interior process of coming to know. Our argument is that how scholars come to know – if and how they attend to their own thinking, reflecting, intuiting and judging – is largely neglected in doctoral training and academic practice. We aim to retrieve this neglected dimension by calling for a renewed focus on interiority: a focus on how we know rather than merely what we know. In doing so, we anchor our core thesis in philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s framing of human knowing and interiority (Cronin, 2017; Lonergan, 1992). Lonergan’s work, alongside related ideas in reflective practice and phenomenology, provides a language for understanding the epistemological and philosophical underpinnings of this interior dimension of scholarship. Our goal in this provocation is to sketch how embracing interiority – ‘putting the knower back into knowing’ – can enrich management scholarship, and to discuss the challenges and implications of doing so.
The structure of human knowing
In the Introduction to his major philosophical work, Insight, Lonergan (1992) states that his concern is not with the existence of knowledge or with what is known but with the structure of knowing and with the personal appropriation of the dynamic and recurrent operative structure of cognitional activity as a method of coming to terms with oneself as a knower. Lonergan says of Insight, The present work is not to be read as though it described some distant region of the globe which the reader never visited, or some strange and mystical experience which the reader never shared. It is an account of knowledge. Though I cannot recall to each reader his personal experience, he can do so for himself and thereby pluck my general phrases from the dim world of thought to set them in the pulsing flow of life. (1992, p.13)
In Lonergan’s framing, the structure of human knowing and acting is an invariant heuristic process comprising three operations – experience, understanding, and judgement – with decision and action (Cronin, 2017; Lonergan, 1992).
Insights recur and accumulate, and the habit of understanding develops over time. We continuously seek to transform ourselves from questioners into ‘understanders’ by coming to understand our own activity of understanding. Accordingly, Lonergan (1992) identifies five key elements of insight:
Insight comes as a release from the tension of inquiry. It arises because we are questioning and searching for something that puzzles us. Archimedes gained his insight while trying to solve a problem posed by the king.
Insight comes suddenly and unexpectedly. Archimedes was relaxing in the baths when the insight struck – he was not in the contemplative posture of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’.
Insight is a function not of outer circumstances, but of inner conditions. Others were also in the baths that day, but only Archimedes received the insight, because he alone was struggling with the problem.
Insight pivots between the concrete and the abstract. For instance, we physically see and use a chair but also form an abstract concept of ‘chair’ that allows us to recognise others like it. We inquire, conceive, conceptualise, and articulate what we have understood.
Insight becomes part of the habitual texture of the mind. Once we understand something, it is hard to recall how it was ever puzzling. What was once incoherent now appears simple and obvious.
Insights are interrelated. They accumulate, trigger one another, and extend our understanding. Memory plays a key role, as insights often connect present experience to past events. They can also expose the limitations of earlier understandings, prompting the emergence of higher-level viewpoints.
Consider the recurring methodological question: ‘How do you know when you have enough data?’ This is ultimately a question of judgement. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) illustrate how, through experience, the act of knowing evolves from a novice stage to expertise, where decision-making becomes increasingly intuitive and reliable.
A general empirical method
The above-examined operations of experience, understanding, judgement, and action comprise a general empirical method – which Lonergan considers the authentic enactment of knowing. This general empirical method comprises the following:
Being attentive to data of sense and of consciousness (experience).
Being intelligent in imagining possible explanations of that data (understanding).
Being reasonable in preferring explanations that best account for the data (judgement).
Being responsible in what one decides and does (action).
Enacting the general empirical method is what researchers, scholars, practitioners and entrepreneurs do. They use their experience, intelligence and reasoning in order to come to know their own experience, understanding, judgements, decisions and actions and those of the systems with which they engage.
Differentiated consciousness
Human knowing is polymorphic: it operates in different modes in different settings (Lonergan, 1992). Heron and Reason (1997) have expressed it as an ‘extended epistemology’. They present four modes of knowing: experiential, presentational, propositional and practical. They describe experiential as knowing through direct experience, and presentational as knowing through music, art and literature. Propositional knowing is what we understand as theoretical or scientific knowing, acquired through systematic investigation, and finally, practical knowing as the know-how in completing everyday tasks, dealing with situations as they arise, and discovering solutions that work.
These four forms of knowing can be strengthened by relational knowing, which is the knowing we employ in building and maintaining relationships with people. Each mode of knowing is governed by rules and norms appropriate to its own form and has its own criteria for affirming what is so. For instance, the criteria for practical knowing are whether it works; the criteria for science are whether it is based on evidence rigorously gathered and analysed. How we can recognise and value these different forms of knowing in their respective contexts is an issue of differentiated consciousness and which is accessed through interiority.
Interiority
Interiority is a philosophical term that expresses a way of holding both the outer data of sense with our inner data of consciousness (Cronin, 2017). It is a mark of differentiated consciousness through which we can recognise different realms of knowing, acknowledge the value of each and be able to move from one realm to another as appropriate. For the organisation scholar, differentiating propositional/scientific knowing and practical knowing is typically pertinent (Coghlan, 2017). Through interiority we can apply the general empirical method of being attentive to experience, intelligent in understanding, reasonable in judging and responsible in taking action to the data of consciousness as well as to the data of sense.
In the management space, Edgar Schein offers an apt example of interiority (Coghlan, 2024). Reflecting on his life and work, Schein (1993) demonstrated his interiority by portraying himself as an artist. He noted that his experience of the traditional model of science was somewhat limiting and depressing; and that it had not influenced him. He reported that what excited him was the ability to represent something that was meaningful to others, and to do so was partly an artistic skill. He considered that the features of the artist should be regarded as a model for behavioural scientists working with human systems. In seeing artistry in his own work, Schein referred to himself as a creative opportunist, illustrating how insights into phenomena come unexpectedly and how he has creative outbursts when things click. Hence, he pondered, I see ‘artistry’ in my work at several levels. My insight onto phenomena came unexpectedly and often at times when I was not thinking about that phenomena at all. It was therefore always wise for me to juggle several intellectual domains at the same time instead of working on one thing until I was finished. I see in my writings the same kinds of ‘problems’ of how to render something that artists talk about. I have creative bursts when everything seems to click and a paper or part of a chapter just flows in an uninterrupted way. (1993: 50–52)
Similarly, Shani and Coghlan (2021), in their review of action research studies in the fields of management and organisational scholarship, adopted an interiority approach. Rather than taking an impersonal analytic approach to their review of published works, they reported how they experienced, understood and judged the outputs of action research in business and management. Next, they invited readers to engage similarly in their interiority to reflect on their assumptions, questions and insights in coming to judgement about the state of the field and its future.
Reclaiming interiority in management scholarship
If the structure of human knowing invariably involves the knower’s interiority operations, why is this often neglected in practice? In contemporary scholarship, especially in the social sciences, prevailing research training has tended to emphasise technique over reflection. Doctoral students learn how to design studies, gather and analyse data, and build theoretical models. These are essential skills, yet explicit attention is often missing to what Gearty and Marshall (2021) refer to as the inner arc of research work. We train competent analysts, but not necessarily reflective thinkers who understand their own cognitive processes. As a result, researchers may follow methodological protocols without recognising how much relies on their subjective judgement calls. The result is a kind of hidden ‘black box’ in which insights and decisions appear mysteriously, uncaptured by our official methodologies. Schön (1987) famously called this unarticulated framework a researcher carries, their tacit epistemology – an implicit theory of how to know, which guides their practice without them being fully aware of it. We contend that it is time to bring this tacit dimension into the open. In other words, scholars need to reclaim interiority – to turn attention to their own knowing as an object of inquiry and source of insight.
In their exploration of the developments of the philosophies of social science, Delanty and Strydom (2003) note a move away from any intra-disciplinary philosophical debate and towards the applications of social science (i.e. questions of knowing, of practice, and of societal structures and cultural processes that influence social science research). They conclude that within this epistemological turn, challenges to conventional scientific truth tests – those meant to distinguish valid, reliable facts from opinion or fiction – render such tests ineffective. Instead, the quality of knowledge is assessed based on the reflexivity of the actors involved, rather than on the empirical independence of the facts produced. Coghlan et al. (2019) support this perspective through their emphasis on the notion of interiority.
Some movements within social sciences are already advancing in this direction. The tradition of reflective practice in management learning and education argues that professionals (including managers and researchers) improve by systematically reflecting on their experiences and assumptions (Kolb and Kolb, 2009; Schön, 1987). For example, Hibbert (2021) and others advocate embedding reflexive exercises in research education, so that budding scholars learn to examine how they are shaping the research process through their questions, interpretations, and choices. Coghlan (2022) presents the general empirical method as an educational tool for undergraduate business students. Such reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action were also core to Schön’s work, encouraging practitioners to become aware of how they think in the midst of action. In research, this could mean, for instance, a qualitative scholar keeping a reflexive journal during data analysis to track how initial hunches form and evolve, or a scientist pausing to articulate the intuitive reasoning behind choosing one experimental approach over another. These practices externalise the interior process, making it available for critique and learning.
In specific fields of management, such as entrepreneurship, there have been explicit calls to ‘put the practitioner back’ into our studies. For example, Aguinis et al. (2022) argue for bringing the manager back into management research – meaning research should focus on real managers’ problems and contexts. Our provocation aligns with this sentiment but shifts its emphasis: beyond just focusing on the practitioner as an object of study, we argue for the researcher as a subject – the researcher’s own lived experience and insights (Berglund, 2007) – to be recognised as a legitimate source of knowledge. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the field of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship, dealing as it does with the pursuit of opportunity (Ramoglou and Gartner, 2023) as design-based action under uncertainty (Berglund and Dimov, 2025; McMullen and Shepherd, 2006), and dynamic human initiative, cannot be fully understood from a detached vantage point.
After decades of favouring largely detached, externalist inquiry, the field of entrepreneurship increasingly recognises that genuine insight requires embedding researchers as co-designers in the very processes they study, engaging the full bandwidth of human knowing (Berglund and Dimov, 2025; Dimov, 2016, 2021; Johannisson, 2011; Steyaert and Landström, 2011). Interiority advances this shift in two complementary ways. First, entrepreneurship programmes can bring entrepreneurs in by cultivating systematic self-inquiry (journalling, critical incident reflection, guided Lonerganian self-assessment), turning lived experience into scholarly data. Second, it can send scholars out – that is, step into venture creation themselves, in both interventionist and participant-observer roles whose first-person experiences become disciplined evidence. Together, these ‘inside-out’ and ‘outside-in’ moves enlarge the epistemic bandwidth of entrepreneurship research, dissolve the false dichotomy between knower and known, and model a scholarship that is at once reflexive and generative.
Accordingly, emerging research suggests that ‘putting the entrepreneur back’ often means scholars founding ventures or partnering closely with founders, using their own interiority-driven processes to inform theory (Dimov and Pistrui, 2022; Nzembayie and Coghlan, 2024). Immersion in entrepreneurship’s messy realities, Berglund (2007) notes, reveals how decisions actually unfold, compelling researchers to draw on intuition, real-time judgement, and emotion alongside conventional observation.
Yet engaging one’s first-person experience in research is precisely what traditional academic training cautions against. Doctoral students aspiring to adopt insider or design-oriented approaches often face sceptical – if not dismissive – responses. The questions come swiftly: ‘How is this rigorous?’ ‘Isn’t this hopelessly biased?’ One of the motivations for this essay emerged from a vivid memory; as a scholar-practitioner pursuing doctoral studies in entrepreneurship, one of us recalls facing explicit disparagement for selecting an insider action research approach in a design-based study of digital entrepreneurship. In a qualitative research workshop, a prominent scholar labelled the methodology ‘biased’ and ‘worthy of the trash’, warning that leading journals would categorically reject such work. Now an established academic, he frequently looks back at that moment and thanks his gut instincts for ignoring such criticisms that ‘defied commonsense’. However, that this reaction came not from an anonymous reviewer but from a public, authoritative voice in an academic training space is telling – and troubling. The intuitive, interiority-driven motivation driving that research (the nascent scholar’s felt sense that firsthand engagement would yield deeper insights) ran up against the wall of academic convention. This example highlights the crux of the issue: to reclaim interiority in research, we must confront the tension between first-person knowing and traditional notions of scholarly rigour.
First-person insight versus traditional notions of rigour: navigating tensions
A likely criticism of our call for interiority is that it opens the floodgates to subjectivism. If every researcher privileges their own first-person insights, how do we ensure the credibility of knowledge? Academia, after all, rests on the idea of intersubjective verification – that knowledge claims are vetted through shared standards of evidence and reasoning, not just personal conviction. We fully acknowledge this tension. Emphasising interiority does not mean discarding established scholarly axioms of rigour; rather, it challenges us to develop new ways of incorporating first-person insights in a scholarly community.
A dialogue with phenomenological traditions and reflexive methodology can be fruitful here. In philosophy, phenomenology (Husserl, 1965; Merleau-Ponty, 1962) long ago argued that all knowledge begins from lived, first-person experience – the ‘life world’ of the knowing subject, as Husserl put it. Rather than being a barrier to knowledge, the subject’s experience is the foundation for meaning. However, following the descriptive traditions, phenomenologists also developed rigorous methods (such as epoché or bracketing, and intersubjective dialogue) to ensure that insights derived from first-person experience could achieve a form of objectivity or universality (Cronin, 2017). Nonetheless, interpretative phenomenologists caution that complete bracketing is unattainable; our meanings are always already embedded in language, history, and culture. As Zahavi notes, the aim is therefore not value-free detachment but an intersubjective validation of first-person insights through dialogue and critique (Zahavi, 2019, 2021).
The lesson for us is that first-, second- and third-person perspectives need not be opposites; they can be integrated. A researcher can start with interior insights and then subject them to peer and scholarly scrutiny, much as one would any data. For example, a researcher’s gut feeling or epiphany (a classic moment of understanding in Lonergan’s terms) can be treated as a hypothesis to be validated through further inquiry or dialogue with peers. In this way, the interior spark of insight becomes the beginning of a research trajectory, not the end.
Moreover, an insight derived from interiority can often reveal new questions or variables that a purely external approach might overlook. Consider again the scenario of an entrepreneurship scholar doing an insider study (perhaps launching a venture and documenting the journey). Their lived experience in first-person inquiry might alert them to phenomena that conventional surveys or interviews might miss – for example, the visceral anxiety of risking one’s savings to create a startup, or the tacit prior knowledge involved in sensing a market opportunity. Once noted, these phenomena can be explored, articulated, and connected to means-driven theories of new venture creation such as entrepreneurial bricolage (Baker and Nelson, 2005) and effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001). The researcher’s task is to translate the raw first-person insight into a form that others can evaluate. This typically means being reflexive: explicitly writing about how the insight arose, what steps were taken to examine it, and what potential biases were considered. By making the subjective process explicit, the researcher invites the community to consider the insight’s validity. This is analogous to how ethnographers include reflexive accounts of their role in the field, or how qualitative researchers use member checks, triangulation, and rich descriptions to bolster trustworthiness (Schwandt et al., 2007). In short, interiority can be brought into the fold of scholarly rigour through reflexive techniques that demonstrate the researcher’s self-awareness and critical evaluation of their own contributions to the knowledge produced.
It is also worth recognising that the absence of interiority does not guarantee objectivity – it often simply hides the subjective influences. The colleague who insisted ‘the data will tell you’ might have believed they were being objective, but in truth they were enacting their own tacit epistemology (one that possibly assumed an inductive signal from data, perhaps shaped by their training or mind-set). By contrast, our stance is to acknowledge subjectivity – to say ‘we must judge’ – and thereby to make that act of judging a conscious focus. In doing so, we can apply reasoned criteria to the judgement (What counts as sufficient data? What am I looking for in the data to decide it’s enough? Have I seen that? etc.), which is actually more scientific than simply waiting for a vague feeling that ‘the data said so’. Thus, turning to interiority can reduce unexamined bias by forcing it into the light.
In short, the tension between first-person insight and traditional scholarly rigour is real, but a combination of methodological flexibility and clear communication can manage it. As researchers, we can embrace new methodologies that legitimise first-person involvement – for example, autoethnography, design science, insider action research, first-person inquiry (Coghlan, 2019; Le Roux, 2017; Reason and Torbert, 2001; Sein et al., 2011) – and adapt our review and evaluation processes to recognise the value of contributions that come from such approaches. Criteria such as authenticity, resonance, and practical adequacy might supplement the traditional positivist criteria when judging work high in interiority. The phenomenological idea of intersubjectivity also offers a resolution: what starts in one person’s experience can often be validated by others who have similar experiences. In a sense, first-person accounts, when read by peers, allow those peers to check the account against their own lived experience. If it ‘rings true’ in a deep way, that is a form of validation (albeit different from statistical significance). Management learning as a field has increasingly accepted such forms of knowing, especially in research on leadership, learning, and critical management studies, where reflexivity is part of rigour.
Interiority: implications for scholarly development and education
Placing interiority at the centre of scholarship is a significant shift that has implications for educating and developing scholars (and even practitioners). If we are to ‘put the scholar back into scholarship’, our academic socialisation processes must change accordingly. Here we offer a few provocations for what that might entail:
An interiority perspective for management education and practice suggests that developing an aspiring manager’s judgement and practical wisdom (phronesis) is as important as teaching business models or financing. In entrepreneurship, for example, educators could incorporate exercises where students reflect on their decision-making process in a venture simulation: What internal signals did they heed or ignore? How did their prior experiences shape their opportunity recognition? By making students cognizant of their own way of knowing opportunities and risks, we potentially create more self-aware, adaptable entrepreneurs. In research on entrepreneurship, scholars who are also entrepreneurs (scholar-practitioners) might document their first-person transformation through the research process. Recent work has even proposed interiority as a mechanism for such first-person development in entrepreneurship education, underscoring that the integration of theory and practice happens inside the person.
Conclusion
We began with a simple question from a PhD student and an unsatisfying answer from a mentor. We end by suggesting that the way we answer such a question goes to the heart of what scholarship could be. ‘The data will tell you’ represents a mind-set where the researcher’s role is minimised in favour of external procedures. We have argued for the opposite: it is the researcher who must tell – through careful attention to their own experiencing, understanding, and judging – when enough is enough, what it means, and why it matters. This is not a licence for arbitrariness, but a call for authentic, conscious engagement with the act of inquiry.
Putting the scholar back into scholarship, the researcher into research, the knower into knowing (and yes, the entrepreneur into entrepreneurship) means reclaiming the human centre of our knowledge processes. It means accepting that our subjectivity is not a weakness to be suppressed but a resource to be harnessed, tempered by critical reflection and dialogue. By cultivating interiority, we can produce knowledge that is not only intellectually robust but also alive – knowledge that recognises the full context of its creation, including the knower who creates it. Such knowledge is likely to be more pertinent to practice, innovative, and transparent about its limitations.
Finally, embracing interiority carries a humble recognition: that knowing about the world is intertwined with knowing oneself. As management scholars, if we better understand how we arrive at our insights and conclusions, we can communicate them more clearly and teach the next generation of researchers not just the methods of research, but the mind of the researcher. In doing so, we answer the call to interiority – turning our attention inward not out of narcissism, but as a disciplined quest to improve the rigour and relevance of what we claim to know. The contextual significance of researching in a world increasingly dominated by agentic artificial intelligence is not lost on us; it underscores the timeliness of our call to interiority, placing the voice of the human researcher at the centre of research. We hope this provocation stimulates reflection and debate on how to achieve this balance. The next time a student asks, ‘How do I know I have enough data?’, consider not only the checklist of external criteria, but also guide them to examine their own knowing process. After all, the ultimate instrument in research is the self of the researcher – and honing that instrument may be the surest way to advance our understanding of management in a complex and emergent world. In the final chapter of his book, Cronin (2017) has a heading titled ‘being at home in a philosophy of interiority’. Our hope is that management scholars will become at home in a philosophy of interiority.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.