Mats Alvesson - Re-imagining the Research Process: Conventional and Alternative Metaphors

Conventional & Alternative Metaphors

Conventional & Alternative Metaphors

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Like many others we often doubt the meaningfulness and relevance of social research. Many, if not most academics follow established scientific ways for doing and conducting research, but their results are often predicable and boring. Conventional ideas and rules for doing social research are helpful, but also constraining and seem to work against imagination, creativity and thus interesting results. As Murray Davis has emphasized, social science needs to be seen as interesting in order to have influence. We think we can do much better than we currently do, and suggest that working with alternative metaphors for the research process can be very helpful in generating more imaginative and interesting research. It can lead to mind-stretching and rejuvenated research through re-imagining various key elements in the research process. This is what we set out to do in this book.

We would like to thank Ron Barnett, Yvonne Billing, Martin Blom, Yiannis Gabriel, Rolf Lind and Roland Paulsen for helpful comments on a draft of the book.

Some of the ideas in this book first appeared in Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2018). Metaphorizing the research process: Reflexivity, imagination and novelty. In C. Cassell, A. Cunliffe & G. Grandy (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative business and management research methods: Methods and challenges (pp. 486505). London: Sage.

Thinking about how we can improve the way we develop knowledge is a key concern in academia. Often such thinking means learning how to conduct research in a rational and reliable way. The use of scientific methods is thus a cornerstone in the activities of the social researcher. Although following strict methodological guidelines is most salient in quantitative studies, it is also common in most qualitative research. Rationality and rigour are seen as the foundation for developing scientific knowledge and social research are seldom on the safe side when it comes to demonstrating these virtues. The messiness and indeterminacy of many social phenomena, as well as the importance of the researchers paradigmatic background and his or her idiosyncrasies, make both the doings and the results of social research ambiguous. There are also situation-specific influences on responses from those being studied: they may produce different accounts about an issue depending on how the interviewer is perceived. For example, a young ethnic woman with an accent from a sociology department or an older white man with an upper-middle-class background from a business school may trigger different responses even if the interview questions are the same. Much social research is disputed or disputable. Relying on responses to a questionnaire or what people say in interviews may be seen as a rather uncertain foundation for establishing the truth. But as they are established methods, researchers tend to use them regularly without much signs of doubt or worry. However, rather than denying or marginalizing the ambiguity and messiness of social research it could be acknowledged, and options for thinking seriously about and dealing with it could be considered. Such considerations call for reflexivity rather than a recipe-following view on research.