There is a growing consensus among management scholars that context matters for theorising management and organisation phenomena. This heightened interest in context signals a notable reversal of tendency, as the field has historically been skewed towards producing context-free, universal theories. Yet, while awareness of the importance of context grows, considerable ambiguity persists around how contextualisation should be undertaken in practice. In light of this uncertainty, we take a step back and look at how management authors actually address context in their empirical work. Focusing on arguably the most context-sensitive research design – the qualitative single case study – we review 117 empirical studies published between 2017 and 2021 across five management journals. Our analysis reveals that contextualisation may be undertaken at each stage of the theorising process from case selection and data collection to analysis, theorising, and establishing boundary conditions, and can advance authors’ theorising aims in numerous different ways. Based on our findings, we suggest that rather than talking of degrees of engagement with context tout court, our understanding of context would be enriched by distinguishing between different kinds of context, according to where it appears in the theorising process and the specific function it serves. We hope our insights may help authors navigate recent debates around contextualisation and make more informed decisions about where and how to integrate context to amplify the theoretical contributions of their empirical work.
