Breaking The Silence About Exiting Fieldwork: A Relational Approach And Its Implications For Theorizing
The Academy of Management Review
Published online on May 15, 2013
Abstract
It is surprising that, to date, a discussion of exiting fieldwork is absent from the management and organization literature - an absence that we believe is unjustified. We argue that analyzing exit from fieldwork is important for theorizing. We combine two streams of research - ethnography in the broader social sciences, and business marketing on dissolving relationships - to propose a relational framework for conceptualizing and analyzing exit. The framework represents a first attempt to examine exiting in a systematic and nuanced manner, with the objective of understanding why and how breaking the silence about exiting fieldwork may advance theorizing. We develop a typology of four exit types that lead to four different approaches to theorizing. We suggest that exit may bring about a new beginning in theorizing rather than closure, and that it is not only high-quality relationships in the field but also those that are disruptive that may lead to interesting theorizing.