Abstract
Qualitative methods can help business communication scholars effectively describe, interpret, and analyze phenomena which are challenging to measure numerically. After describing the strengths of qualitative methods, the paper then briefly describes some core tenets of the seven qualitative methods represented in this issue: discourse analysis, ethnographic analysis, Communication Constitutive of Organizations analysis, narrative analysis, interaction analysis, corpus linguistic analysis, and systematic literature reviews. These methods each feature distinct ways of seeing and interpreting that allow business communication researchers to understand communication phenomena in a unique way; we demonstrate how each paper of the Special Issue brings these unique views forward. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the enduring value of qualitative research in a quantified era.
Keywords
Introduction
Business communication seeks to understand the complex, ubiquitous, integral communicative activities that take place in professional organizations. While communication has always been integral to professional activity, our digital era has amplified the ubiquity and complexity of business communication. Given now-commonplace digital storage practices, business communication researchers studying an organization’s communication can find themselves with vast quantities of public-facing business communication to analyze. This amount of data can grow exponentially if the researcher partners directly with an organization and gains access to their internal communication. With these vast troves of data, approaches that look for statistically significant patterns in the mass seem called for. In other words: we are in a quantitative era.
Yet the
Business communication researchers are not the only scholars interested in communication activities in professional settings. Researchers across the social sciences and humanities have seen the value of examining business communication and its place in society, with dedicated research communities now spanning linguistics, communication science, psychology, sociology, organizational studies, and management studies, amongst others. Popular sites of research enquiry have included internal communication, stakeholder communication, crisis communication, social media presence, change management, and more. Each of these research communities looks at each of the topics in their own disciplinary way, with their own disciplinary methods (qualitative and quantitative), and discourse. This polyphony of voices seeking to understand business communication is a strength: To develop an understanding of the phenomena of the complex, ubiquitous, integral activities of business communication, we need a whole arsenal of research methods to tackle it.
Here, we focus on one category of methods from this panoply: qualitative methods. By definition, qualitative methods are the ways that qualitative research is developed. However,
Yet even a focus on “qualitative methods” requires definition. Words like methodology, approach, and method may be perceived as overlapping or even consubstantial in meaning. We do not think this is the case. Instead, we see uses for each of these three words. Methodology is the underlying philosophical commitments that power a method or methods. A method is a set of activities that produce data; each set of activities that comprises a method has a strong form and a local form. The strong form of method is the minimum activities that must be done for this research to be considered as part of the method. The local form of method is the actual description of activities a researcher did to gather and analyze data in a particular project, which includes the minimum activities of the method from the strong form and all other activities that took place in gathering and analyzing data.
An approach is a collection of methods that share a similarity. The similarity could be a methodological underpinning: the approach of ethnography has many distinctive methods of ethnography (virtual ethnography, sensory ethnography, etc.) that share philosophical underpinnings from the methodology of ethnography. The similarity could also be in activities: the approach of interviewing has many methods of interviewing under it (semi-structured interviewing, exploratory interviewing, document-mediated interviews) that are similar due to the sort of activity that is being conducted in the method (the researcher talking to a person about their experience or insights outside of the natural flow of an experience, or the interview).
Thus: methodologies are philosophical underpinnings, methods are activities, and approaches are categories that contain methods that have similarities. While we have discussed the methodological underpinnings of qualitative research above and to some extent will describe the methodological underpinnings of some methods below, the focus in this special issue will be on the methods (the activities a researcher does to collect and analyze data) that qualitative researchers employ.
This special issue features qualitative methods in business communication as a way forward to understanding the distinctive value of the output of qualitative research. The papers of the special issue are intentionally wide-reaching and flexible in their innovative methods: methods of data
Strengths of Qualitative Analysis
While the definition of qualitative research is challenging to pin down, the strengths of qualitative analysis are easier to define. Qualitative research looks to gather and interpret representations of experiences in ways that reveal insights about the phenomena or experience being studied. Those phenomena which are most helpfully understood by qualitative research are those that are challenging to measure numerically: discussions about values and emotions associated with people, places, organizations, and experiences; sensemaking and meaning making in organizational contexts; complex systems with many interlocking, overlapping, or confounding variables; concepts that are emerging, poorly understood, or under-researched; local communication practices that are unspoken, tacit, misdirective, directly performative, and/or strategic; sites where many stakeholders each bring complex concerns to the forefront of an issue; or areas where quantitative data may be challenging to gather. On this last note especially, qualitative methods shine. Doll (2024) mentions at the end of a quantitative study on psychological stress induced by employees participating in nondisclosed workplace romances that “it may be challenging to gather a sufficiently large sample size of nondisclosers for quantitative analysis” and that “for a deeper understanding of the differences and experiences between WR disclosers and nondisclosers, future research should consider qualitative studies, such as ethnographic research” (p. 18).
In recent business communication scholarship, we can see these distinctive aspects of qualitative research at work. Qualitative researchers have investigated phenomena such as negotiation processes in a “complex and protracted” merger and acquisition deal (Townley, 2023), the “emotional unrest that results from communication across cultures in multinational teams” (Weinzierl, 2024), the “role of an English technical and business writing course in a multicultural workplace” of engineers in Qatar (Hodges & Seawright, 2023), and entrepreneurs’ use of podcasting in their work (Jacobs, 2024). These studies each investigate topics that point toward critical areas of business communication (high-stakes communication, emotional work, intercultural business communication, and emerging media) and investigate important aspects of these phenomena that would currently resist reduction to numerical data.
With these phenomena often resisting transformation into numerical data, distinctive ways of seeing must be developed to understand these situations, experiences, and ideas. Several ways of seeing undergird many qualitative methods: depth of analysis, gathering a wealth of information on the topic and then focusing closely on distinctive elements of the phenomena from within that information; description, conveying that complex information to the reader in detailed, often long, sections of prose—what Geertz (2008) called
While each of these elements point to distinctive elements of qualitative analysis, it is this last element (interpretation) that most specifically varies from quantitative research. The power of quantitative research is drawn in large part from the possibility of other researchers replicating the answers of a study by conducting the same procedures with the same data under the same conditions. Qualitative research does not assure the reader that a third party researcher would be able to draw the same conclusions from the same data by conducting the same procedures in the same conditions, because the experience of qualitative research data gathering requires the individual researcher to conduct inquiry into live experiences—often (as in ethnography) participating to some extent in the experience itself. Two different people might gather completely different data from the same conditions due to the way that people, places, and things respond to the individual researcher’s presence. (Two people getting two different versions of the same story from the same person, based on different types of relationship to that person, is a common human experience—and thus would be considered a potential confound in direct replicability of qualitative research.)
Yet qualitative researchers are concerned about the credibility of their findings; if research does not respond to reality, then those being researched will be misrepresented (not to mention offended, if they come across the research). So while qualitative research cannot and should not seek to be directly replicable, there are ways in which qualitative researchers pursue validity and verifiability. Ways of being reliable and valid are connected to each method’s distinctive ways of seeing; thus, there are many ways to ensure validity and verifiability. Qualitative researchers’ distinctive ways of conveying validity and verifiability are an element of particular interest in this special issue, and many papers address it directly.
Deciding which qualitative research methods to focus on in the present paper was no easy task. As discussed in our opening section, the ubiquity of business communication has meant that it is a site of research for a whole range of disciplines, and with a wide array of disciplinary interest comes a range of research traditions, theories, and epistemologies. We thus focus in the present article on those research methodologies that are featured throughout the remainder of the special issue: discourse analysis, ethnographic analysis, communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) analysis, narrative analysis, corpus linguistic analysis, interaction analysis, and systematic literature reviews. Each of these methodologies have methods within them that are conducted in this special issue.
Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis is a methodology that can be implemented on its own or along with other methodologies in a variety of methods. Many definitions of discourse exist, including the influential distinction between small “d” discourse and capital “D” discourse (Gee, 2011; Johnstone & Andrus, 2024). Small “d” discourse focuses on how aspects of language are adapted by particular individuals in specific contexts, such as conversations and texts, to create meaningful interactions. It is language in use, imbued with the intention of a speaker/writer. Capital “D” discourse takes a wider view and considers situational and non-linguistic aspects of meaning-making, including actions, non-verbal behaviors and objects in the physical surroundings of the interaction. Context is vital in both approaches to discourse analysis. Language, as a formal system, becomes discourse when produced by a speaker with an intention in a situation. Discourse analysis requires describing a social process and the effect communication has on creating, maintaining, and/or modifying that process. Its methods include observations, recordings, and transcriptions of talk, and the collection and analysis of documents belonging to a genre, historical period, or speaker/writer.
Discourse analysis can be deployed to various ends. Discourse analysis research results can be solely descriptive, didactic (as when research is conducted in second language learning contexts; consider Derin et al., 2020), or critical/political—as in the case of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Van Dijk, 1993). Each of these approaches to discourse analysis seek to interpret what people do with language in real-world contexts and apply those findings to similar or related real-world contexts. The specific methodological tactics of discourse analysis vary widely across and even within these approaches to discourse analysis, but a commitment to studying the ways that language users intentionally deploy communication tools (including but not limited to language) in specific contexts to create effects in those contexts is a hallmark of discourse analysis. This varies from methods that prioritize a more formal approach to language study, such as traditional corpus analysis, or the integrative approach of systematic literature reviews. However, corpus analysts and creators of systematic literature reviews can involve principles of discourse analysis in their work (Carradini & Swarts, 2024).
Given this wide remit, it is important to know what other methodologies or method tactics are being employed under the banner of discourse analysis in any given research effort. Several methodologies described below can incorporate elements of discourse analysis (interaction analysis, communicative constitution of organizations, narrative analysis, and corpus analysis) alongside other methodological commitments.
Discourse analysis is committed to studying language in its context and interpreting the language amid the actions that it causes, supports, and resists. This situated experience of language allows for language to be reported directly, but the goals of discourse analysis require that language to be interpreted. Especially regarding critical discourse analysis, the rigor and systematicity of the interpretation have been questioned (Breeze, 2011); to conduct valid interpretations in discourse analysis, the analyst must take care to describe the analytic practices being undertaken and the analytic frames being used, as well as “take care to test interpretations against the available data objectively” when this is possible (p. 520). Discourse analysis’ commitment to interpretation of language in its context requires that researchers carefully describe the interpretation and the context, so that the reader understands the practices and conclusions of the research.
Anchored in discourse analysis, De Malsche, Tobback, and Vandenbroucke’s study in this Special Issue focuses on negative feedback in performance appraisals in a small Belgian company. They examine naturally occurring data from both in situ observations and written documentation which feature “restance”; that is, the ability to exist and signify outside particular interactive situations, be referred to, re-interpreted, and re-contextualized. Their choice of methods is eclectic, consisting of video recordings, written text analysis, and follow-up interviews. Their analysis highlights the “dispreferred,” or socially problematic, nature of negative feedback, characterized by indirect strategies and hesitation, even though overtly the goal of this genre is to construct transparent and clear communication as part of the institutional feedback process. The authors reflect on their methodological practice and choice of a multi-pronged approach, showing how it is best suited to the complexity of organizational communication.
Ethnographic Analysis
Ethnographic research can include elements of discourse analysis, but ethnographic methods often feature a wider scope of analytic efforts than just discourse. The many methods that hold to the methodological underpinnings of ethnography—visual ethnography (Pink, 2008), sensory ethnography (Nakamura, 2013), and virtual ethnography (Carradini & Hommadova Lu, 2023), just to name a few—expect the researcher to be part of the experience or phenomena that are being studied. Ethnographies allow researchers to describe and interpret experiences from the vantage point of a person observing or even participating in the experience. This type of analysis is situated: it requires the researcher to be present. The researcher must observe and record the events and activities happening around them as these are happening. The data gathering, then, is the recording of observations: descriptions of places, people, events, and communicative activity that the researcher witnessed first-hand or gathered from people in their research field who saw the events first-hand. This type of data gathering results in data that is
While observational data can be very complex and difficult to categorize on first reading, ethnographers have developed methods to systematically analyze the data and produce findings. Glaser and Strauss (2017, orig. 1967) codified the “constant comparative method” of analysis for observational data. The method requires the researcher or researchers to consistently compare new findings against old findings to understand whether themes or patterns are becoming clear over multiple observations. The constant comparative method pairs neatly with ethnographic methods due to its requirements of time and close awareness of the field. For the constant comparative method to work, the data need to be collected and compared over a long period of time (instead of in one burst of data collection, such as a standalone survey or one set of interviews). This collection of data over time helps ensure that patterns which are being seen are not specific to one moment in time, but are realistic across a larger timeframe of observations. Ethnographies require time in the field (Carradini & Hommadova Lu, 2023), and thus the constant comparative method offers a valuable approach for researchers to use the time in the field to develop findings that hold across time. Similarly, the constant comparative method requires a close, detailed knowledge of the field and the data collected. Repeatedly analyzing data for emerging themes requires the researcher to know what types of emerging patterns are valuable to track over time, and a deep engagement in the field encourages development of this type of knowledge and awareness. Thus, the constant comparative method allows ethnographers to turn their work into findings that are valid over time and realistic to the study at hand.
The results of the constant comparative method can be related to pre-existing findings or theories, or they can be part of a “grounded theory” analysis. Grounded theory analyses (Glaser & Strauss, 2017) draw themes from the constant comparative analysis and establish them as a theory for the phenomena at hand, instead of drawing from pre-existing theories or frameworks. Grounded theories emerge in areas where little or no research has been done on the phenomena at hand, or where existing theories are no longer applicable. They are theories that can be further tested by other methods.
Because the constant comparative method and grounded theory analyses rely heavily on interpretation, questions often arise about the validity of the research. Ethnographic research methods have several ways of determining validity. The first way of determining validity of findings is member checks (Birt et al., 2016): the researcher takes their findings to the people they observed or interviewed and asks them to determine whether the findings are representative of their experience or the phenomena at hand. This allows the respondents/participants in the ethnography to check the validity of findings by reporting whether the researcher has accurately interpreted the researcher’s observations of the experience. Researchers can also use expert checks, which consist of sending the findings to an expert or peer in a different but related situation to see if the findings make sense. For example, if one were conducting a study on conflict resolution practices in a Detroit urban garden, findings may be sent to a colleague in a Chicago urban garden to see if the findings make sense. Privacy and confidentiality issues must be considered when doing expert checks; not all studies are appropriate for expert checks, as experts may be too close to the situation (even if they are not in the situation directly) to make impartial assessments.
Triangulation is another way of validating findings (Tiainen & Koivunen, 2006). Ethnographies can gather data in many ways, including observations, interviews, surveys, impromptu or formal focus groups, and more. Researchers that collect data in more than one of these ways should ensure that the findings of each method reflect the same emerging themes in the comparisons that the researcher is doing; if multiple methods are producing different or contrasting findings, then more work needs to be done to figure out why this is the case. Triangulation, therefore, allows researchers to check their findings in another way.
In this special issue, Amber Lynn M. Scott’s “When I Don’t Want to Do Something, I Just Delete the Email” demonstrates the thick description of ethnography. Her article describes the complex and subtle communicative experiences of an aerial firefighting organization. To understand the conditions that create this complexity and the reasons for the subtlety, Scott describes the conditions of aerial firefighting and the experience of this particular group of firefighters extensively. This extensive description leads up to an important moment where a supervisor uses a subtle maneuver to give a direct, public reprimand to a subordinate and reestablish control over the safety and efficacy of an emergency response. Without the thick description preceding and interpretation following the quote, the quote may seem pedestrian, even unimportant. But Scott’s deployment of ethnographic methods allows the quote in its context to take on the appropriate level of importance. The quote also further demonstrates how aerial firefighters operationalize the concept of street credit in communication, which contributes to the organization’s strong safety record. Thus, ethnographic methods allow this complex, nuanced finding to come to the fore. Ethnographic methods of data collection excel in this area, as Scott’s findings show.
Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) Analysis
While ethnography views communication in the context of a larger situation, the group of methods encompassed under the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) approach see communication as not just what takes place within organizations but what, in fact, creates, or constitutes, them. In this view, there can be no concept of organizing without communicating because all forms of organizing presuppose interaction, negotiation, information exchange, and relationship building—all of which are defining elements of communication. Although this claim may sound at first self-evident or even tautological, proponents of CCO argue that much organizational research sees communication as just one element in the array of practices, values, and identities that form organizational life. For CCO, on the other hand, these practices, values, and identities do not precede communication nor are they merely described by it; they are constructed and shaped by it (Brummans et al., 2014; Cooren et al., 2006).
CCO denotes a multifaceted methodology, typically divided into three branches (Schoeneborn et al., 2014): the Montreal School (e.g. Cooren et al., 2011), the Four Flows model (e.g. McPhee & Zaug, 2008), and Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory (e.g. Luhmann, 1995). Firstly, scholars in the Montreal School approach the communication processes that constitute an organization as relational and discursive. Organizing occurs through communicating with different modes and artifacts. Communicating involves performing actions, many of which reflect hierarchical and asymmetrical structures and the rituals of authority (J. R. Taylor & Van Every, 2000). The concept of
Secondly, McPhee and Zaug posit that organizations are constituted through four distinct but interrelated communicative “flows.” Briefly,
Thirdly, taking a sociological perspective, Social Systems Theory holds that organizations are self-referential and self-producing systems constituted by communication. According to this approach, decision-making is a key communicative activity that distinguishes the organization as an entity from its social environment: each decision taken in an organizational setting is based on previous communications and influences future ones. Organizations are constituted through the network of decisions that connect to other decisions in a self-reflexive process (Blaschke et al., 2012). According to Luhmann (1995), communication comprises three key components:
Despite differences in scope and focus, all CCO approaches share at least three main principles. First, they emphasize the co-relational and constructive aspect of meaning-making in organizational interactions; second, they espouse the tenet that organizational culture and values are dynamic and negotiative, reflecting the sensemaking perspectives of their participants; and third, they acknowledge, albeit in different ways, that agency in organizational events can be human, non-human, or inanimate. Connecting these principles with our previous discussion in this article, we see similarities of CCO with capital “D” discourse analysis, for which language is but one component of the communicative event, and with narrative semiotics, which attributes equal agential power on tools and objects as it does on human agents. In fact, CCO employs a variety of methods, including narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, video-shadowing, and ethnography, and it researches both observational data and texts.
In this Special Issue, Dana Marshall’s article, “Constituting Compliance,” takes a CCO perspective informed by the Montreal School to explore the complexities of regulation and compliance within organizations, particularly in accounting practices, a hitherto undeveloped field of study in CCO research. She highlights the methodological challenges in studying compliance, which is regulated by both external and internal processes. Employing discourse analytic and ethnographic methods, she shows that compliance practices are not just representations but are integral to organizational operations, influenced by economic theories, transparency ideals, and regulatory ambiguities. Her research shows how organizations navigate regulatory demands and the subjective nature of compliance exams through accounting practices.
Narrative Analysis
Narrative is generally accepted by social scientists as a universal and fundamental way in which humans use language and other semiotic modes to communicate values and share knowledge. At the same time, what narrative is and what
Labov’s (1973) pioneering research of narrative among Black youth in New York has provided the foundations of much sociolinguistic, ethnographic research. Labov’s work focused on how narrators tell personal stories in vernacular to construct and negotiate their identities in social contexts. Comparing strategies of storytellers, he identified a common temporal sequence: the
De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2011) introduced the concept of “small stories”—allusions to, fragments, or snippets of narratives that are formed in everyday conversations, in which interactants co-construct the meaning given to social relationships and shared experiences. Also, Bamberg (2011a, 2011b) examined presentations of self and identity in terms of three “challenges,” (a) how narrators present themselves as having changed over time and how they remained constant; (b) how they present themselves as similar to and different from others; and (c) how they present themselves as passive or active agents of events. Holmes (2005, 2006) sees narratives told in the workplace as constructing the work-related goals of the narrators and their perceptions of the power dynamics that underlie professional relationships. Despite differences in focus and purpose, the researchers in this branch of narrative studies focus on oral stories told in interaction. Their object of study consists of texts collected during fieldwork observation or interviews, and their concern is for
The other narrative branch takes its cue largely from the work carried out in literary studies where narrative has a rich tradition. In particular, the comparative study of folktales by Vladimir Propp (1968) inspired the discipline of narratology, which explores narrative as a foundational text structure, one that underlies most genres. The work of narratologists has branched into cognitive areas, examining how narrative elements are not only found in talk, but also shape perception. Propp’s work has been revised extensively by scholars, who have applied it to the modeling of narrative structures in different texts, from film to scientific theories. In business communication, the organization, seen as a system of processes, actions, and (human and non-human) agents, is a text and can be read like a story. Organizations are formed and grow, like stories, through the multiple discourse strategies and actions of different agents (J. R. Taylor, 1993). Their physical manifestations (e.g. buildings) and the objects they produce (e.g. products and services) also consist of narrative elements. Narrative studies of organizational practices include workplace layout (S. Taylor & Spicer, 2007; Ropo & Höykinpuro, 2017) and product branding (Floch, 2001; Ruiz Collantes & Oliva, 2015), among others. This group of scholars recognizes that we live stories, not just narrate them in words. As Czarniawska (1997) points out “in order to understand our own lives, we put them in narrative form [ . . . ] every action acquires meaning by acquiring a place in a narrative of life” (p. 14).
An offshoot of Proppian narratology, narrative semiotics posits that a sign (word, image, or character in a story) signifies by means of its interrelational positioning with other signs (Greimas, 1987; Hébert, 2020). Following syntactic logic, narrative semiotics maps narrative agents into three interrelated pairs whose interactions propel the action: the protagonist(s) and the goal they seek to reach (Subject-Object); those that direct the protagonist and those that benefit from this direction (Sender-Receiver); and those that help and hinder the protagonist in their quest (Helper-Opponent). Organizational scholars have found these heuristic distinctions fruitful in exploring the alliances, conflicts, and contradictions that fuel many professional relationships.
For example, J. R. Taylor and van Every (2014) explored the reasons that organizations fail in terms of misaligned Sender-Subject relations—the values of the dictating Sender (e.g., top management or the organization itself) are not clearly communicated or fluctuate, thereby misleading the Subject (workers) in the performance of their duties. In a similar vein, Marsen (2014) examined the events that led to the Columbia Space Shuttle crisis through a narrative semiotic lens and suggested that if the shuttle project had been envisioned by participants as a narrative, with NASA administrators and engineers playing defined roles, much of the misunderstanding underlying the disaster could have been avoided.
By comparing and exploring different kinds of texts, narratological approaches also challenge the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, bringing to light how human behaviors bridge the two. The post-positivist work of Boje (1995, 2014) on the storytelling organization emphasizes the non-linearity and fluidity of organizational narrative. Boje uses the metaphor of Tamara, the longest-running play in Los Angeles, to evoke the conflicting multiplicity of points of view in discourses about and from an organization. In Tamara, the audience follows different characters into separate rooms and observes events from their perspective, leading to a fragmented perception of these events. Even when two audience members find themselves in the same room, they entered it from different directions, thereby bringing a different set of assumptions that colors their understanding of what goes on. This
In their article in this Issue, “Tyrants of Polyphonic Capitalism,” Boje and Pelly apply the Tamara metaphor to the exploits and persona of tycoon Nelson Peltz, following the different narrative strands, from personal accounts to media reports, that compose his public identity. They show how Peltz’s attempt to control this plurivocal narrative is intertwined with his efforts at corporate acquisition.
Interaction Analysis
Interaction analysis describes and interprets situations, just as the previous methodologies do. Ethnography requires the researcher to be present in a community for a long period of time to be able to understand, interpret, describe, and report information about the communicative experience or phenomena at hand; interaction analysis requires the same attention to communicative experience or phenomena, but in a much more condensed amount of time—sometimes as little as a single conversation (Clifton, 2006; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2008).
Interaction analysis is concerned with the way that discourse transpires, and the elements of the communicative experience (words, sounds, pauses, and non-verbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions; Kusmierczyk, 2014) that impact the communicative situation. This allows researchers to understand how communication is experienced and understood in certain contexts (in this case, professional contexts) in specific ways. It might ask, for example, how decisions get to be made within business meetings, how conflict is managed, how rapport is constructed, how interactions differ when someone leaves the meeting, or how leadership is discursively constructed and mediated. Indeed, key work in this area has examined the place of humor in workplace conversation (e.g., Holmes & Schnurr, 2005); small talk (e.g., Koester, 2021) the construction of trust (e.g., Clifton, 2012); and identity negotiation (e.g., Van Die Mieroop, 2023). According to Keyton (2018, p. 4), “researchers using deductive or inductive theorizing can find instances and patterns in conversations that would remain hidden from the conversational partners or a casual observer.” It is this focus on discursive negotiation and construction, stemming from the interaction itself, that makes this method stand out.
The outcomes of this type of research can point toward communicative strategies to adopt or avoid in certain professional contexts for particular ends. This necessarily fine-grained analysis is heavily descriptive, but in a different way than ethnography. While interaction analysis has to describe the conditions that the interaction under consideration occurs in, the description of the interaction is often a transcript of a situation notated in detailed ways with specific terms, symbols, and characters called “conventions.” Such conventions differ depending on the specific interaction analysis being conducted: a conversation analysis, for example, is likely to finely annotate for turn-taking, pauses and overlaps, along with physical actions which may have a bearing on the interaction under study (Keyton, 2018). This notation process produces unique analysis artifacts that may be unfamiliar to readers who have never encountered interaction analysis, and also allows for distinctive insights into the process of communication.
In this issue, Janssens and Van De Mieroop conduct an interaction analysis that looks at a professional meeting where the head of the meeting is called away unexpectedly. Thus arises a question of a relatively common communicative situation in business: How does (or could) a meeting that loses the person in charge proceed? Janssens and Van De Mieroop approach this question with the detailed transcript and conventions of interaction analysis, but also include non-verbal elements into the analysis via their analysis of a recorded video interaction of the meeting. Thus Janssens and Van De Mieroop extend the method here by integrating multimodal elements into interaction analysis that further develop the understanding of how the meeting was able to proceed. The highly detailed, descriptive analysis of the meeting allows for a greater understanding of leadership practices in meetings and beyond.
Corpus Linguistic Analysis
The methodology of corpus linguistic analysis focuses more tightly on language than ethnographic, narrative, or even interaction analysis methodologies. Corpus linguistics refers to “the study of language based on examples of real life language use” (McEnery & Wilson, 1996, p. 1). These examples of real life language use are
There are different flavors of corpus linguistics. Lexicographers, for example, use corpus linguistics to help in dictionary compilation; language teachers use it to help teach collocational meaning to students; and discourse analysts across the social sciences use it to help explore the construction of discourses through repeated constructions. This has led to a subfield known as corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS; Baker, 2024; Gillings et al., 2023; Partington et al., 2013). In keeping with a social constructionist perspective, we can assess how the repeated usage of certain words and constructions builds certain images, perspectives, and ideologies from the ground up.
Researchers utilizing corpus linguistics have a range of techniques available to them to interrogate their corpora in different ways. The four most frequent techniques are word lists, concordance analysis, collocation analysis, and keyword analysis (see McEnery & Hardie, 2012 for an overview). These techniques all work on word frequency, based on the broad assumption that the more frequently a word appears in a corpus, the more salient it is, and the more likely it is to be of interest to the researcher. The first technique, word lists, are a prime example of how this can be useful. By examining a list of all the words contained in a corpus, ranked in order of frequency, the researcher can build up an idea of the key discourses being represented within it. When limiting the word list to only nouns, the researcher may spot which social actor terms frequently appear, for example; or when limiting the list to only adjectives, they may get an idea of the general sentiment of a corpus.
Viewing decontextualized words in a word list is not enough, though. To take an example, seeing the term
When examining concordance lines, the analyst may note that certain words tend to co-occur with other words more frequently than others. These co-occurring words are known as
Finally, a keyword analysis allows the analyst to determine exactly which words occur statistically more frequently in one corpus when in direct comparison with another corpus. This can give a good indication as to which words are considered particularly salient, and will likely highlight some of the key discourses. Fuoli and Beelitz (2024), for example, carried out a keyword analysis between CSR reports published before and after the adoption of the Paris Agreement. They found that those reports published after adoption contained keywords such as
Importantly for our purposes here, it is worth emphasizing the iterative process entailed in a CADS analysis; the constant back-and-forth between the more quantitative corpus linguistic element with the more qualitative discourse analytical side. This approach has several benefits: it allows the business communication researcher to work with more data, which helps representativeness (Egbert et al., 2022); and because there is so much data, it means that statistical techniques can be applied to word frequencies, offering further verification to our findings. In selecting which linguistic items to follow up on, and to use as examples in work, it helps avoid the accusation of cherry-picking data that is so often leveled at qualitative research (Mautner, 2015). Corpus linguistics is also a method that can be combined relatively easily with others, with recent work examining how it can fit in with other methods of linguistic analysis (Egbert & Baker, 2020).
Corpus linguistics is represented in our special issue by Smith and Batchelor, a paper which examines how qualitative decisions taken in the early stages of corpus compilation affect the findings and conclusions that can reasonably be drawn later on. In particular, they reflect on language-domain operationalization and corpus balance, and offer recommendations for business communication scholars who use corpus data in their work.
Systematic Literature Reviews
Systematic literature reviews are distinct from previous methodologies presented here in that the systematic literature review is closer to a true method (a set of definable activities with a minimum set of activities required to be counted as doing the method) than the others (Page et al., 2021). The systematic literature review offers a systematic way of identifying, evaluating, and synthesizing relevant publications within a particular research area. They allow researchers to collect articles that haven’t yet been put in conversation with each other and advance the field’s understanding of the topic as a result. The literature may not have been put in conversation because it is spread across different fields, because the topic is an emerging topic that has had much recent work but not an overview of key tenets, or because a major shift happens in the topic that prompts reconsideration of work on the topic. Some recent literature reviews in business communication include corporate social responsibility communication in Chinese contexts (Dong et al., 2024), humor in employee-to-employee communication (S. Taylor et al., 2022), and the intersection of communication and entrepreneurship (Shin & Fu, 2024), among others. Ultimately, this method allows researchers to interpret a wide range of studies to develop further insight into what the field knows about a particular topic.
Systematic literature reviews require a detailed recording of the research process. The process of gathering, selecting, evaluating, and analyzing data must be clear and replicable; one important element of a systematic literature review is to establish the area that is being searched for relevant information on the topic. As mentioned above, these literature reviews may cover multiple fields or one field, a few journals that are very focused on the topic at hand or many journals, a single database, multiple databases, or other search areas. After establishing this area, researchers typically search that area to identify relevant works by setting certain search criteria: specific keywords, publication dates, journals, and so on. These criteria all must be reported. Inclusion and exclusion criteria help the researcher in deciding which publications are relevant to synthesize or not, ensuring that it is relevant to the research question(s) laid out in advance (Page et al., 2021).
The second step is extracting the relevant data in a structured manner, often with the help of specialist forms or software to ensure all relevant information related to methods, findings, and interpretation are included. However, this can also be done by reading the articles or abstracts individually and recording the important information for the literature review (Schryen, 2015). The relevant information will vary, depending on the topic or goal of the study; a study of methods or findings will require the researcher to record different data. The process of determining what aspects of the articles should be recorded, and how to record them, are also elements that should be reported in the systematic literature review.
The third step of a systematic literature review is to synthesize all of that data in some way, either qualitatively (Schryen, 2015) or quantitatively in the form of a meta-analysis. Quantitative meta-analyses fall outside the scope of this article (Hansen et al., 2022). Researchers reporting findings qualitatively can use thematic analysis to report findings, deliver answers to a direct research question, or both. However, qualitative reporting of systematic literature reviews should focus on what the integration of the studies provides to the reader and the field. What new knowledge is obtained by examining all of these studies together? What themes or concepts emerge?
While researchers can outline their own steps, there are extant systems that guide the creation of systematic literature reviews. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method outlines 27 steps that researchers should take when considering creating a systematic literature review, ranging from “Describe the rationale for the review in the context of existing knowledge,” to “Specify the methods used to decide whether a study met the inclusion criteria of the review” to “Cite studies that might appear to meet the inclusion criteria, but which were excluded, and explain why they were excluded” and beyond (Page et al., 2021, pp. 4–5). The PRISMA method was specifically developed to be “a reporting guideline designed to address poor reporting of systematic reviews” (p. 1), which places the focus squarely on the
Ultimately, systematic literature reviews are designed to be transparent and replicable. They deliver findings that couldn’t be gathered or discovered in ways other than a wide overview of findings within a specific field of study (Page et al., 2021). They are particularly useful to readers who want to assess an area of study before diving in, and for those attempting to cumulatively build knowledge and fill in gaps within a specific field of research.
The systematic literature review is represented in the present special issue by Cardon, Marshall, and Risvold’s paper. Their investigation is, in fact, self-reflexive, assessing sampling practices in interviews. The authors reviewed 440 business communication journal articles which utilize interviews in some way. They then extracted information on the sampling and degree of storytelling in those research papers, and examined how those trends correlated with citation counts. In essence, then, whilst the paper consists of a systematic literature review, it reflects on best practices for interview research.
The Enduring Value of Qualitative Research in a Quantified Era
In the present paper, we have thus given a brief overview of seven different qualitative research methods. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, but we hope it provides a gentle introduction for those wanting to use qualitative methods in their own work. In an age where big data, LLMs, and AI are becoming ever more popular, the tried-and-tested methods of qualitative research offer ways forward that remain close to the text and close to the data. The more widespread that the AI and LLM use becomes, the more we must be on our guard and look critically at how the underlying algorithms work, what kind of discourse they produce, and how the output produced by these tools impacts different social groups (Gillings et al., 2024). Qualitative researchers are best placed to offer not only commentary, but also remedy, on these issues. One key issue, for example, is in the inherent bias contained within LLM training data: The training data for ChatGPT is believed to include most or all of Wikipedia, pages linked from Reddit, a billion words grabbed off the internet. [. . .] The humans who wrote all those words online overrepresent white people. They overrepresent men. They overrepresent wealth. What’s more, we all know what’s out there on the internet: vast swamps of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, neo-Nazism. (Weil, 2023).
These are not small issues created by quantitatively-generated output of text, but instead they are the result of key decisions taken far earlier in the process when scraping training data. It is research conducted using qualitative methods, and qualitative decision-making throughout the process, that will ultimately lead to a more fair and just use of LLMs in the future. Given the implementation of AI tools into business communication (Getchell et al., 2022), considering AI in business communication in relation to qualitative research seems apt. Statistically generated text has a place in business communication, but what is that place? How do people understand, interpret, and feel about AI tools in the workplace? How can AI be useful in academic research? Qualitative research can bring insight into these issues in ways that are distinctive and fine-grained.
Qualitative research spans an enormous range of activities. This special issue barely scratches the surface of what qualitative research is and can do in business communication. Yet all these articles do sum to argue that qualitative research has distinctive ways of knowing that shed light on issues that are not easily quantified. These ways of knowing are instantiated in diverse and unique practices that can be trusted for validity and credibility. We hope that this article and the rest of the articles in the issue encourage and support qualitative researchers in the work of developing clear and helpful ways to demonstrate the value, validity, and credibility of qualitative research.
This special issue could not have come together without the efforts of the reviewers, to whom we offer great thanks. Among the reviewers are Almut Köster (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business), Boris Brummans (University of Montreal), Chantal Benoît-Barné (University of Montreal), Jacob Rawlins (Brigham Young University), Jana Declercq (University of Antwerp), Jason Swarts (North Carolina State University), Jonathan Clifton (Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France), Joseph Jeyaraj (City University of New York), Karin Tusting (Lancaster University), Leslie Seawright (Missouri State University), Madeleine Bausch (University of Chile), Marie-Claude Rabeau (HEC, Montreal), Mike Zundel (University of Liverpool), Nicolas Bencherki (Teluq University), Robert Poole (University of Alabama), Stephanie Smith (Virginia Tech), and Susanne Kopf (WU Vienna University of Economics and Business). Their methodological expertise has made this issue into what it is.
Where textual issues arise in business communication, we must find ways to understand the meaning of language and discourses, how those meanings work, and how business is affected by those meanings. Qualitative research offers a wide variety of ways forward, and will continue to offer those ways forward in a changing world.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
None.
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.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Approval and Informed Consent Statements
This research complied with all requirements at each authors’ institution.
