Innovative and alternative research methods in economics and business administration[Méthodes de recherche alternatives et innovantes en Gestion et Economie]

This book brings together various contributions on research methods that can be qualified as innovative or alternative in the fields of economics and management. The idea came about during a discussion with colleagues from these disciplines. We had all explored and deepened our understandings of methodologies that are more or less atypical in our respective research. These are methodologies that are atypical as defined by their novelty, but even so this is quite relative; often, these methodologies are already commonly used in other disciplines, but still unknown in economics or management. We all wanted to share these approaches, but they could not easily find their place in other publication formats; they were considered as not sufficiently innovative for academic journals centered on methodology and too varied to be able to constitute a complete collection. So, we decided to bring our research together in this book, which contains six different contributions. Some of our texts were in French, others in English. Rather than translate everything into one language and "deny" some of our potential readers access to our texts, we chose to write a bilingual book. Thus, all the six chapters are included in both French and English. The methodologies presented in this book cover the entire spectrum including intrinsically qualitative methodologies such as action research and biographical analysis, quantitative methodologies such as experimentation and analysis of interval scales, as well as a methodology considered as halfway between "quali" and "quanti": the QCA method.