Exploring the Literature for a Doctoral Review through the Process of Questioning

A doctoral literature review in the field of research in management and strategy may often be a source of significant concern for researchers. Such concerns are raised in relation to the exploration of the literature, with the view of engaging in the process of formulating the research problem and refining the questioning. So far, this process has remained explored in insufficient depth. Thus, we make a methodological proposition based on its exploration from the initial questioning-which guides doctoral researchers through the literature-all the way to the definitive research question. We argue that the refining process is iterative and involves expansion and contraction of the literature being explored. We then propose to operationalise principles from Grounded Theory (GT), notably abduction, coding, and theoretical saturation to analyse the literature and to articulate the passage from expansion to contraction through the different iterations of the process. In so doing, we introduce two distinctive intermediate elements in this process: (1) relative empirical saturation (ESR) to mark the condition for timing the start of the contraction; and (2) relative theoretical saturation (TSR) to mark the end of a full iteration.