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Publication: Comprehensive Research. A methodological and epistemological introduction to qualitative research

Reference
Dumez Hervé (2016) Comprehensive Research. A methodological and epistemological introduction to qualitative research, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School Press.

Abstract

You are a sociologist, a researcher in management, political science or anthropology, and you have chosen to meet people in a company, in an organization or in the social world to interview them and observe their day-to-day behavior. In short, you have chosen the comprehensive methodology that is usually called qualitative research.

The questions you ask yourself are practical: How and where to start? How to do a review of the literature? How to develop good ideas? They are also technical: How do I describe what I see and work out a narrative of what is going on? Finally, they are epistemological (but it turns out these are just as practical): What kind of theory can I use and produce? In what sense can what I am doing be said to be science?

Aimed at a broad range of researchers, beginners or advanced, historians, management scientists, sociologists, anthropologists or economists, all looking to develop a rigorous understanding of interactions and actors’ behaviors, this book should help them to formulate the right methodological questions and to find ways of addressing them in original ways.