Archive for

May 22

It’s about puzzles, not gaps: An interview with Karen Golden-Biddle

Karen Golden-Biddle; Senior Associate Dean and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Boston University School of Management

Karen must be one of the most generous and kind people I’ve met in academia. Even though she doesn’t know you, she has this knack of talking to you and engaging with you as if you were an old friend. You are immediately at ease, and if you don’t watch yourself, you might just start spelling out your whole life story to her. Which, I’m sure you all will agree, is not really a good thing when you are interviewing someone. This interview is a bit of a special case. Although it reads as a single interview, in truth it is a reconstruction of several conversations Karen and I had over several months, some recorded and transcribed and some not. Some of it even comes right out of the comments Karen made as one of the speakers in our Publishing Qualitative Research workshop (which you can see on video on this blog). There are many instances where Karen will talk about the writing process (she did a write a book on the topic, after all!), and I’ve been fortunate enough to be on the listening end of those moments on several occasions. So although our “formal” interview for this blog lasted well over an hour, I was not happy with it in the end. And nor was Karen. There was just so much to talk about, and the hour long interview we did ended up missing out on too much of the richness I felt I had gotten from these other instances of talking with and listening to her. So I did a bit of creative collating, and this is what you get. This is all Karen. Just not all Karen in one sitting. I hope you like it!