Discusses seven basic themes that underlie the author's "direct research" activities. These themes include reliance on research based on description and induction instead of prescription and deduction, and the measurement of many elements in real settings, supported by anecdote, instead of few variables in perceptual terms from a…

Heavy prior reliance on self-report has excluded crucial populations from organizational inquiry, postponed cross-checking of propositions, inflated the apparent consequentiality of minor irritations in the workplace, and imposed a homogeneity of method that raises the prospect that the findings of the field are method-specific. (Author)

Open-ended interviews and participant observation are instruments for discovering how economic participants think about the world. They are a means of identifying the model of that portion of the socioeconomic world that the participants themselves use in making decisions. (Author/IRT)

Field stimulation is a method of investigation designed to encourage researchers to uncover the nature of organizations without asking for an accounting on a questionnaire, which is a method that may only play back an investigator's fantasies because of the way questions are posed in it. (Author/IRT)

Describes the use of triangulation in a study by the author, and argues that triangulation heightens qualitative methods to their deserved prominence while demonstrating that quantitative methods can and should be used in a complementary fashion. (Author/IRT)

Argues that most social science does not take into account the way in which the master tropes (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony) shape the writing as well as the gathering of qualitative data. (Author/IRT)

Introduces this special volume whose purpose it is to encourage the further development of qualitative study as a way of increasing the diversity of the field, thus increasing the sources of insight and discovery. (Author/IRT)

Addresses the issues and problems in analysis of qualitative data through a review of experiences in a four-year project that relied centrally on such data. Asserts that the attractive aspects of qualitative research are real and that the nuisances can be reduced by thoughtful methodological inquiry. (Author/IRT)

While preserving the distinctive features of the case study, the case cluster method employs replicable sampling and, if desired, quantitative measurement procedures to complement qualitative analysis. It creates units of analysis that are based on theory and that have meaning for the actors and observers of the case. (Author/IRT)

Details the crucial analytic distinctions to be drawn when assessing the kind of data one must deal with in ethnographic studies. Includes the necessity of separating first- and second-order concepts, a separation based primarily on whether the point of view reported is that of the informant or the researcher. (Author/IRT)