What happens to Reflexivity? Centering the traditional qualitative research process in a world of AI tools
Watching the curve bend toward AI. I am seeing qualitative work drift toward computation across my field of managment research. Certainly a lot of it at the academy in Copenhagen this year. This is not a surprise. As organizational digital traces become increasingly abundant and in some ways essential to inquiry what kinds of questions become thinkable that were previously out of reach, and what kinds of questions become harder to keep going? Is there even a future where we can get away with not using AI? In this blog post I want to noodle on some thoughts on using AI while keeping the traditional qualitative research process at the center. If one thinks of research with AI as a spectrum that starts on the one hand from “computationally entangled research” meaning a more-or-less traditional scholar using off-the-shelf tools to enagage with a corpus, to the more invovled prompt-based structuring of qual reserach (see Matt Grimes or Henri Schildt 's efforts), all the way to “inter...