The exploratory power of the qualitative approach and the case method for advancing management research, theory, and practice : Introduction

Abstract

Over the past decades, management scholarship has been shaped by a pronounced movement toward methodological sophistication, the accumulation of large-scale datasets, and the refinement of advanced quantitative techniques (Simsek et al., 2025). These advances have substantially improved measurement precision and statistical rigour. Yet they have also, and perhaps inadvertently, encouraged a subtle displacement of scholarly attention: from what is theoretically meaningful, contextually embedded, and processually dynamic toward what is most readily measurable (Bergh et al., 2022; Pillai et al., 2024). The recurring risk is that the phenomena most central to management – decisions, behaviours, relationships, emergent practices, and the mechanisms that connect them – come to be approached through the lens of available instruments rather than through the substantive questions that motivate the inquiry.