The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, United States
We know that separating knowledge from its social context contributes to fragmentation of this knowledge, yet an absence of contextual engagement continues to characterize underexplored paradigms in management and organization research. Given broad recognition that qualitative methods are appropriate for the local grounding of research phenomena, we explore the extent of their effectiveness at contextually grounding theories in an under-researched empirical setting – the continent of Africa. We focus on qualitative studies in Africa due to scholars’ use of the term “silence” to describe the state of research on Africa in leading management and organization (M&O) journals. Through an exploratory evaluation of qualitative studies undertaken in Africa and published in top M&O journals, we identify how African contexts have informed theory development work. We investigate how authors employed the strengths of qualitative research methods to embrace context effects in their theorizing efforts and then highlight exemplary illustrations to substantiate our findings. We also evaluate unique ways in which contextual inclusion enabled theory enrichment and leverage our findings to provide ways forward for designing and conducting contextually embedded theory development research. Our thematic coding of qualitative studies undertaken in Africa identified three distinct categories of work based on the combined criteria of the depth of theoretical insights generated and the extent of contextual connections incorporated in the theoretical findings. By bringing together multiple characteristics of what authors considered quintessentially “African,” we highlight how these authors elaborated on the local grounding of environments within which their theoretical phenomena of interest exist.
