Fast Facts
- Event Date: 28 June 2025
- Extended Registration Deadline: 31 May 2025 (Formerly 23 May)
- Point of Contact: Marianna Marra, Politecnico di Milano, marianna.marra@polimi.it
RM-SIG Workshops
Textual Data Analysis Approaches: From Open/Manual Coding to AI-Assisted and Points In Between
Workshop Leads: Anne D. Smith (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Jaewoo Jung (University of Dayton)
Time and Date: 28 June 2025, 9am-12pm EST
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); and, if time allows, (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.
Advancing International Business Research Through Meta-Analysis
Workshop Lead: Patricio Duran (University of Richmond)
Time and Date: 28 June 2025, 9am-12pm EST
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: Mary Yoko Brannen (San José State University & Copenhagen Business School)
Time and Date: 28 June 2025, 1:30pm-4:30pm EST
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 draw upon her recent book, Ethnography in International Business: Learning from the Field (Cambridge University Press, 2025), with 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)
Time and Date: 28 June 2025, 1:30pm-4:30pm EST
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.