RM SIG Workshops:

Qualitative Workshop: Textual Data Analysis Approaches: From Open/Manual Coding to AI-Assisted and Points In Between

Workshop Lead: Anne D. Smith (Haslam College of Business, University of Tennessee Knoxville)

You have spent substantial time in the field and collected interviews, archival data, and/or observations or you have collected a trove of archival data like letters to shareholders, strategic plans, or interviews from an oral history project. All this data collection is in service of a research question that is of interest to you and of value to your discipline. Whatever the source of the textual data, you are now faced with making sense of it. Analysis is at the heart of any qualitative research project (Gibbs, 2007), and there are no short-cuts in making sense of your data. In this workshop, no background or prior experience with textual analysis is required. We will cover ways to interrogate your data for novel insights. To be clear, there is no “one right way” to analyze your data. Rather, there are a growing array of tools and approaches for use during the iterative process that encompasses textual data analysis.

We will look at how different tools, approaches, and techniques for analyzing textual data generate varying outcomes and insights. The textual data we will use are publicly-available interviews. We will only provide a brief overview and demo of the mechanics of the techniques. Going more in depth would require a days- or weeks-long course; we also can point you to resources where the technique is explained in detail. The focus of the workshop will be to review and critically discuss output from many text analysis approaches and its ability to further insights from the data.

The text analysis approaches covered include:

(1) open coding with some tips to enhance efficiency (Kreiner, 2016; O’Kane, Smith, & Lerman, 2021);

(2) focused unsupervised machine learning (Jung, Zhou, & Smith, forthcoming);

(3) AI-embedded tools in computer aided qualitative data analysis software (atlas.ti software);

(4) template analysis (King, 1998; Crabtree & Miller, 1992); and

(5) dictionary use (Short et al., 2010).

We will analyze what can be learned from each approach, its drawbacks, and how it might fit in with a project in which you are involved or thinking of undertaking. The activities involved in this workshop include looking at what these different tools can show in terms of patterns to researchers about their data – these will not do coding for an interpretive researcher but rather provide ideas about how to make sense of textual data for novel theoretical insights.

Quantitative workshop: Advancing international business research through meta-analysis

Workshop Lead: Patricio Duran (Richmond University, US)

Meta-analysis is a research methodology that offers insightful contributions to various fields, including international business. Journals are eager to publish rigorous, relevant meta-analytic studies that develop and expand theories. This workshop will explain how meta-analysis can advance the literature, make critical contributions, and guide future research agendas. Recent meta-analytic studies published in international business will illustrate these points. Additionally, attendees will learn about the principles and practices essential for conducting a meta-analytic study.

RM-SIG Masterclasses:

Ethnography and Learning from the Field

Masterclass Lead: MaryYoko Brannen (San José State University)

In today’s globalized world, a deep understanding of how culture affects international business phenomena is critical to scholarship and practice. Yet, armed with only superficial measures of national cultural differences scholars and practitioners find themselves stereotype rich and operationally poor where culture meets real-world international business context. “Culture” is substantially more complex than this and is made up of multiple interacting cultural spheres (national, regional, institutional, organizational, functional) which are differentially enacted by individuals many of whom are multicultural themselves. Settings in international business are therefore rife with multilevel cultural interactions as individuals with diverging cultural assumptions are brought together in real time (often virtually) across distance and differentiated contexts. Consequently, traditional positivist approaches to understanding culture fall short of adequately capturing the complexity of cultural phenomena in international organizations. Ethnography with its two essential elements – fieldwork, including its central methodological building block of participant observation, and its focus on culture – is the most effective approach for gaining insights into such microlevel embedded cultural phenomena. In this masterclass Professor Brannen will use exercises and discussions to take participants from the preliminary steps of matching research questions with appropriate ethnographic research design, to theory development, and provide pointers on writing it up.

Introduction to Responsible Research: Cultivating Responsible Cross-Language Research: A Focus on Responsibility and Transparency

Masterclass Lead: Agnieska (Aggie) Chidlow (University of Birmingham, UK)

Cross-language scholars actively contribute to advancing knowledge by engaging in research and debates that generate and disseminate scientific insights transcending linguistic boundaries. Consequently, their scholarly endeavours play a vital role in the intricate process of knowledge development, which is both linguistically and culturally embedded. The aim of the talk is to introduce participants to ongoing discussions about responsible research in the field of international business. In doing so, the talk seeks to catalyse an engaging discourse on responsible cross-language scholarship by drawing participants’ attention not only to researchers’ scientific responsibility and integrity but also to the roles of key stakeholders in higher education ecosystems. Key stakeholders include the Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) global network, established by the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) in collaboration with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), and the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), an initiative of the United Nations Global Compact. As thought leaders within the Higher Education ecosystem, these entities are dedicated to promoting responsible research and management education within business and management education.

RM-SIG Clinics

1. Qualitative Clinic RM-SIG

Title: Qualitative Case Study Research in IB

Speaker: Ziad Elsahn (University of Lancaster UK) 

This workshop will cover three interconnected topics in qualitative case study research: understanding different approaches to qualitative case study research and their underlying onto-epistemological assumptions; examining how these approaches align with specific research design choices and forms of theorizing; and discussing the importance of paradigmatic consistency. Participants will gain insights into making informed methodological decisions that enhance the rigor and coherence of their case study research.

2. Quantitative Clinic RM-SIG

Title: Using machine learning for empirical research in IB

Speaker: Thomas Lindner (University of Innsbruck) 

Machine learning (ML) techniques have become a hot topic in empirical IB research. While there are aspects ML techniques share with the econometric tradition in IB, there are also some fundamental conceptual differences. In this clinic, we will work on matching research problems to econometric and ML techniques and on establishing what works best under which circumstances.

3. Quantitative Clinic RM-SIG

Title: Plotting marginal effects

Speaker: Kai Xu PhD, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Marginal effects illuminate how changes in an independent variable relate to changes in the predicted outcome, often revealing nuances that raw parameter estimates alone cannot capture. This clinic will provide a practical overview of why marginal effects matter, how to calculate them, and, most importantly, how to visualize and interpret these relationships effectively.

4. Qualitative Clinic RM-SIG

Title: Qualitative Comparative Analysis in IB 

Speaker: Thomas Greckhamer (E. J. Ourso College of Business Louisiana State University )

This clinic will offer an introduction to crisp and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), its foundational elements, and practices of designing QCA research. It will motivate QCAs theoretical and methodological approach to study configurational phenomena and how it enables researchers to explicitly study causal complexity underlying International Business phenomena. The clinic will also address audience questions regarding applications of QCA in IB research

5. Qualitative Clinic RM-SIG

Title: Qualitative data analysis

Speaker Catherine Welch (University College Dublin)

In this clinic we will discuss the multiple options available for conducting qualitative data analysis. In particular, we will discuss options that go beyond standard thematic analysis. We will discuss what alternative forms of data analysis have to offer IB scholars, which options to choose, and how to write about these choices in the methodology section of papers.

6. Quantitative Clinic RM-SIG 

Title: Event study methodology for coping with complexity in IB

Speaker Stewart Miller (Durham University)

Professor Miller led a discussion around the use of event study techniques to address several of the complexity dimensions and provided examples of how to conduct such studies. His examples of how to create event widows around for instance stock market reactions to various events provided strong evidence of the strength of such dynamic and longitudinal event analysis for various types of IB phenomena, such as cross-border acquisitions or IJVs. This led to a spirited discussion about non-traditional event study opportunities given the nature and complexity of IB phenomena and the event of new datatypes (i.e. clickstream data and big data). Professor Miller also provided insight into pros/cons of the technique as well as suggestions regarding software.