Promoting research access and informant rapport in corporate settings: Notes from research on a crisis company

Abstract

Obtaining evidence on managerial action is inevitably difficult. Although it has been suggested that critical events such as corporate crises provide opportunities for research, there has been a lack of discussion on what aspects of management such conditions help to illuminate and how they could be exploited in obtaining both formal access and rapport with individual informants. Based on fieldwork experience this paper suggests that corporations in crisis should be taken seriously in research on managerial action because they may both facilitate access and liberate and motivate individual managers to reflect on both their own acts and intentions and on those of other individuals.