Events
May
2025

The Best Student Paper Award at the Academy of Management Conference 2023

Institute of Marketing and Communication Management

The paper titled “Using Counterfactuals for Theory Building in Management and Organization Studies” co-authored by Gizem Kadıoğlu, Bareerah Hafeez Hoorani, and Michael Gibbert has received the Sage Publications/ Research Methods Division Best Paper Award at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2023 held in Boston.

This paper explores the role of counterfactuals in qualitative field research, shedding light on their immense potential to enrich the theory-building processes in management and organization studies. Counterfactuals as a powerful tool for generating and framing alternative explanations, uncovering deeper details about phenomena, and establishing plausible causal relationships offer a substantial methodological refinement. By demonstrating different ways of engaging with counterfactuals and their manifold advantages throughout various stages of qualitative theory building in management and organization studies, this study benefits researchers when designing, conducting, and writing up their qualitative research for scientific discovery with a higher explanatory power, as well as other stakeholders such as reviewers, editors, and readers.