From the Editors Qualitative Research and the Academy of Management Journal

Editor's note: For this issue's "From the Editors," I invited Robert Gephart of the University of Al-berta to reflect on his observations as a long-serving , award-winning reviewer of qualitative research for A!vII Over the past two and a half years, I have developed a tremendous respect for Bob's keen eye for evaluating qualitative research submissions , and great admiration for the painstaking advice he provides authors about how to improve their work. As a world-renowned qualitative author himself, Bob is in an excellent position to provide observations about how authors might increase the chances of having their qualitative research accepted for publication at AMI In a three-way electronic mail conversation about the challenges and opportunities of qualitative research , Bob, Tom Lee, and I all concluded that many authors with potentially very interesting data sets don't seem to know how to analyze them to their full potential. This is perhaps not surprising, gi ven the clear predominance of quantitative methods and statistics courses over qualitative ones, particularly in North America, as well as the inherently greater subjectivity involved in designing and analyzing qualitative research. As such, we encouraged Bob to provide a bit of a minitutorial-complete with reference citations and examples of high-quality papers that use particular qualitative approaches-in addition to his observations about qualitative research submitted to AMI The result is a longer-than-usual "From the Edi-tors" column. but one that we believe is well worth the extra reading time for anyone interested in producing , reviewing, or attempting to coax greater insights from qualitative research. We are fortunate to have someone with Bob's expertise share his observations, and we hope that his thoughts will prove useful to researchers for many years to come. Sara Rynes Incoming Editor I am thankful to Sara for inviting me to write this editorial column encouraging scholars to submit their qualitative research to the Academy of Man-I wish to thank Torn Lee and Sara Rynes for their helpful comments and encouragement in preparing this editorial. 454 agement Journal. Qualitative research is important to AMI Qualitative research is actively sought and supported by the Journal, its editors, and its editorial review board. Alv1Jhas published many qualitative papers. The coveted A/'v1jBest Article Award has been won by three qualitative papers-Gersick (1989), Isabella (1990), and Dutton and Duckerich (1991)-and by one paper that combined qualitative and quantitative methods: Sutton and Rafuclli, (1988). Despite these successes, most …