Working empirically across paradigms in cross cultural management: The sequential strategy for interpretive and critical methodologies

Abstract

The paper raises the methodological question of how to work empirically across paradigms, adopting a sequential strategy to separately and successively apply two contrasting methodologies: first, the Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis from within the interpretive paradigm, and second, the Critical Discourse Analysis, anchored within the critical paradigm. One argument is that the sequential strategy allows for unfolding the potentialities of each methodology by establishing two separate and coherent research designs. A second is that the sequential strategy serves to process the application of contrasting methodologies to an established empirical puzzle. The paper illustrates the arguments with the example of a pilot study on international employees’ identities in Denmark: The Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis provides comprehension of international employees’ subjective experiences of lived mobility, while the Critical Discourse Analysis permits unmasking hegemonic discourses on migrants that enable and constrain identity constructions. The paper makes two contributions to the multiparadigm debate in Cross Cultural Management (CCM): first, that the multiparadigm approach can constitute a framework for processing successive use of methodologies to an established empirical puzzle; second, the value of sequential strategy when working empirically across paradigm boundaries.