Cultural and Political Factors in Conducting Qualitative Research in China

This paper explores the perception and politics of air pollution in Shanghai. We present a qualitative case study based on a literature review of relevant policies and research on civil society and air pollution, in dialogue with air quality indexes and field research data. We engage with the concept of China's authoritarian environmentalism and the political context of ecological civilization. We find that discussions about air pollution are often placed in a frame that is both locally temporal (environment) and internationally developmentalist (economy). We raise questions from an example of three applications with different presentations of air quality index measures for the same time and place. This example and frame highlight the central role and connection between technology, data and evidence, and pollution visibility in the case of the perception of air pollution. Our findings then point to two gaps in authoritarian environmentalism research, revealing a need to better understand (1) the role of technology within this governance context, and (2) the tensions created from this non-participatory approach with ecological civilization, which calls for civil society participation.

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Something borrowed, something new: Challenges in using qualitative methods to study under-researched international business phenomena

Reuber

Alkhaled

Barnard

et al. 2022

J Int Bus Stud

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This article responds to calls for IB researchers to study a greater diversity of international business (IB) phenomena in order to generate theoretical insights about empirical settings that are under-represented in the scholarly IB literature. While this objective is consistent with the strengths of qualitative research methods, novel empirical settings are not always well aligned with methods that have been developed in better-researched and thus more familiar settings. In this article, we explore three methods-related challenges of studying under-researched empirical settings, in terms of gathering and analyzing qualitative data. The challenges are: managing researcher identities, navigating unfamiliar data gathering conditions, and theorizing the uniqueness of novel empirical settings. These challenges are integral to the process of contextualization, which involves linking observations from an empirical setting to the categories of the theoretical research context. We provide a toolkit of recommended practices to manage them, by drawing on published accounts of research by others, and on our own experiences in the field.

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Cultural and Political Factors in Conducting Qualitative Research in China

Cited by 6 publications

References 15 publications

The emerging Shanghai city brand: A netnographic study of image perception among foreigners

The emerging Shanghai city brand: A netnographic study of image perception among foreigners

From Black to Blue Skies: Civil Society Perceptions of Air Pollution in Shanghai

Something borrowed, something new: Challenges in using qualitative methods to study under-researched international business phenomena

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