Qualitative Challenges

Organizations and organizational fields continue to experience transformations of various kinds—less hierarchy, more teaming, new types of collaboration, novel work locations and work practices, innovative practices and technologies, greater reliance on network structures, and process improvement—all of which create the need for renewed understanding of change and its consequences for organizations. Given that organizational change is longitudinal, complex, and has a dynamic, disintegrative, and situated nature (Langley & Denis, 2006), this special issue of JABS draws on qualita-tive research methodology to cultivate a deeper understanding of organizational change. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in qualitative studies of orga-nizational change (cf. Pettigrew, Woodman, & Cameron, 2001; Weick & Quinn, 1999). In fact, qualitative approaches are often the most effective way to uncover the particular and situated dynamics of change because they provide rich and compelling insights into how and why change unfolds in organizations and its impacts at various levels of analysis. The term qualitative research methods encompasses a wide array of approaches t