Customer Reviews

Understanding Management Research: An Introduction to Epistemology

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This text should be required reading for every aspiring management or organizational researcher. The bibliography alone is worth the price of the book. Johnson and Duberley provide a cogent overview of the major epistemological commitments. They deftly explore the strengths,weaknesses,applications and implications of each. Critical self-reflection is the perfect companion to this text. I have a renewed appreciation for the benefits, challenges and enduring importance of understanding my own epistemological commitments as well as the epistemological commitments that continue to influence the field of organizational studies.

For the past five years I have been struggling with the philosophical issues of management. Given my beliefs, am I a "postmodernist", "Critical Theorist", "symbolic/interpretivist", "constructionist"? I know I'm not a positivist anymore. To sort this out, I had read directly in philosophy (difficult going), social theory (less difficult but still not easy), and management theory but I was having trouble getting a handle on it. Then I found Hatch & Cunliffe's book on Organizational Theory and I thought it was great, that is, until I discovered Understanding Management Research by Johnson and Duberley.

Johnson and Duberly not only clearly define and describe the various views but more importantly they clearified two issues that had been bothering me. First, what is the role of ontology? To me that seemed to be a bifurcation point but this wasn't clearly laid out in Hatch & Cunliffe's book or the other readings. Johnson and Duberley make it very explicit in a table in the last chapter and I think they've got it right. Second, I was having trouble placing ethnography and other qualitative types of research. They are often placed in the constructivist/hermeneutical realm but I knew some of it was clearly positivistic. Johnson and Duberley clarified that it can be in either area. As with most things, it is not always black and white but shades of gray. And Johnson and Duberley do a great job of making the shades of gray clearer...