Educating Qualitative Researchers in Management: Toward Performative Judgements

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to reflect critically on qualitative research education in doctoral management programs. The central idea is to offer a qualitative research education model supported by the concept of performative judgment. The notion of performative judgment draws upon Aristotle's virtues of thought via Strati's idea of sensible knowledge. The proposal focuses on a theoretical understanding of qualitative research education rather than prescribing pedagogical techniques or steps. The performative judgment education model is therefore open-ended and flexible and may fit in different doctoral program settings. It also helps to reveal the differences between the notions of training and education, showing how they can work together in the educational process. KEYWORDS | INTRODUCTIONOver the last two decades, management education-especially doctoral management education-has been given less attention than management and organizational research (Dent, 2002;French & Grey, 1996;Vaara & Fay, 2012). This situation reflects scholars' principal focus on research to the detriment of teaching and education, arising from the recognition that comes from publishing as opposed to classroom and other forms of education performance (Marx, Garcia, Butterfield, Kappen, e Baldwin , 2015).According to Vaara and Fay (2012), we are living in a period of reproduction of management education-which includes doctoral education-at large scale. This situation has been caused in part by the spread of university accreditations and rankings that lead to homogenization in management You management education regardless of the context in which it happens.One of these understandings is the idea of "publish or perish" that has increased the distance between research and teaching. This approach creates the sense that good universities should prioritize research over teaching. It has become common to find scholars working at universities who do not like teaching (Czarniawska, 2015;Marx et al., 2015).Even assuming that the most prestigious universities are those where good research is pursued, it is not possible to deny that universities are also places of education, teaching, and learning. Seeing universities primarily as research spaces violates their nature (Cassuto, 2015). Czarniawska (2015) discloses a situation to demonstrate carelessness with teaching. "Once when bemoaning a lack of interest from practitioners in front of a US audience, I met with the response that there was nothing to worry about: After all, there are so many doctoral students to teach!" (p. 111). This statement points toward a typical but worrying situation. It is worrying because doctoral education has problems (Cassuto, 2015;Dent, 2002;Marx et al., 2015). One of them is the lack of identity regarding doctoral programs' goals and ends These problems are partly due to poor qualitative research education in doctoral programs and a misunderstanding of the differences between education and training. Education presupposes learning and involves knowledge and underst...

Flesh-and-blood knowing

“…Impacted by the intensive rationalism as well as the methodological jails (Bispo, 2017), we still know little about the role of the body in the researcher's judgment, interpretation, and affective processes in the production of understandings of qualitative data. Nevertheless, the discussion on embodied research methods is gaining moment (Thanem & Knight, 2019) in a number of fields and disciplines that begin to reflect about how researchers are involved with their bodies in the research they do.…”

“…Qualitative research is heavily focused on researcher's interpretations upon the phenomena under investigation. The researcher's interpretation process is always mediated by performative judgements (Bispo, 2017) aiming to make meaning in a reasoning way on the data produced in the field. However, the notion of reasoning in organization studies is highly based on a mentalist perspective wherein the mind and the body are treated as two distinct entities (Gherardi & Perrotta, 2014).…”

Contradições da pós-graduação em administração brasileira

“…Inicio por aquele que penso ser o maior contradição no âmbito da pós--graduação em administração brasileira e que está muito relacionado ao que discutem autores como Khurana e Spender (2012) e Marx et al 2016, que é a falta de clareza do que é a pós-graduação em administração. Muita dessa falta de clareza, do meu ponto de vista, é resultado de uma atuação pouco ou nada reflexiva (Cunliffe, 2004;Cunliffe & Linstead, 2009;Bispo, 2017) por parte dos atores envolvidos (especialmente os docentes) na prática da pós--graduação. Afinal, qual é o propósito de um programa de pós-graduação em administração no Brasil?…”

“…Meu ponto aqui, como já mencionado no início, é que a pós-graduação é um espaço destinado ao ensino da pesquisa e não o espaço da pesquisa em si. Essa sutil diferença abre espaço para mais uma discussão nesta contradição que é justamente a falta de preparação para o ensino da pesquisa nos programas de pós-graduação brasileiros (Bastos, Tourinho, Yamamoto, & Menandro, 2011;Patrus & Lima, 2014;Bispo, 2017).…”

“…Ao assumir que a pós-graduação é um nível de estudos para formação de pesquisadores, é necessário que se crie um entendimento de que a missão dos docentes é o ensino da pesquisa. Assim, torna-se fundamental que haja uma preparação para o ensino de algo tão complexo que é a pesquisa e a construção de conhecimento (Patrus & Lima, 2014;Bispo, 2017). Santos (2017) conduziu um estudo com o objetivo de encontrar uma identidade do que é "ser docente" na pós-graduação em administração no Brasil.…”