Grounded approaches to research

Participatory, interpretive research can be a useful means of developing rich, context-sensitive theory in management and organizational research studies. However, it is also fraught with tensions, for example: the balance between presenting and representing data; the compromise between revealing local theory and constructing generalized conceptualizations; and deciding whether - and how - the role of the reseacher is to be made for explicit or neturalized in such conceptualizations. In this paper I explore tensions in the grounding, interpreting and explicating processes of participatory interpetive research and describe a particular, partial ethnographic approach to responding to them, to illustrate some possible compromises and partial responses to such tensions