Nomination for The Academy of Management's Carolyn B. Dexter Award
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
Nomination for The Academy of Management's Carolyn B. Dexter Award
Counterfactuals are one of the distinctive features of human intelligence. From an early age, we start to look for and imagine a world, an event, or a situation where it would have been otherwise. We ask counterfactual questions and form counterfactual conditionals to make causal links by speculating, searching atypical occurrences, and generating scenarios. Why not use this creative tool to uncover richer details about phenomena and establish plausible causal relationships in qualitative studies to address the call for novel methods?
The paper “Using Counterfactuals for Theory Building in Management and Organization Studies” co-authored by Gizem Kadıoğlu, Bareerah Hafeez Hoorani, and Michael Gibbert is accepted and will be presented at the Academy Management Annual Meeting 2023 in Boston. In this paper, the authors aim to illustrate the ways of engaging with counterfactuals and offer guidance to fellow researchers on how to employ counterfactuals in qualitative field research in management and organization studies to gain a deeper understanding of the phenomena being studied. This paper has been nominated for the 2023 Carolyn B. Dexter Award.