Let’s give Michael Pratt (2008) another go. I remember coming across his article while reading Nguyen and Makoni’s (2026) article about entangled cosmopolitanisms. Particularly, I was attracted to Pratt’s notion of power quotes, which he defines as the rich exemplary extracts from interviews that best illustrate themes. I recall my surprise as an applied linguist to read that organization scholars at this time advocated for the inclusion of direct verbatim quotes, something that we take as a given in our field. But I wanted to revisit this article because Pratt jump-started my thinking on the politics of representation in qualitative research – namely that qualitative researchers often bump up against postpositivist, quantitative norms when engaging with editors, reviewers, or the academic publishingscape at large. This is especially true in social science fields, of which applied linguistics (sometimes) considers itself a member.
One strategy for publishing qualitative research in top-tier North American journals is to make research more palatable to quantitative (or more specifically, positivist) reviewers. Given the perceived bias toward quantitative work, this strategy has been highly effective for some authors. Qualitative research can be made more palatable in two ways: mimicking quantitative research and including quantitative data. With regard to the former, two general types of mimicking have been proposed: mimicking structure and mimicking criteria (Pratt, 2008, p. 499).
When I reread this passage, my mind returns to a YouTube video I saw a couple days ago. YouTuber PRINCE HENRY asked, “why are parents, specifically Black parents, so obsessed with low haircuts?” He links such discourses to a politics of respectability. Short haircuts, he argues, represent historical pressures on Black parents to appropriate White hair and aesthetics so their children can better fit-in with White-dominated spaces, cast a wider employment net, and kick-start upward social mobility.
Of course, this belief is nonsense. As a top-rated comment bluntly states: “It’s anti-Blackness no matter how we try to spin it.” Or another:
“Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin?” – Malcolm X
PRINCE HENRY draws from respectability politics to frame his argument against parents pressuring kids to cut their hair. Respectability politics is the misguided strategy of marginalized groups policing the aesthetics and behaviors of fellow group members against White norms – that policing such behavior will produce bodies legible to a White gaze; that this will engender respect among those in power in White supremacist institutions. This will, in turn, lead to greater acceptance among the White (supremacist) community and therefore contribute to upward mobility and political equality. This stance receives heavy critique because, as HENRY argues, it was never about the hair. The hair always stood in the place of a broader ideology of anti-Blackness. Yet it is also difficult to critique such practices when survival is at stake.
No, I do not see bias against qualitative research as equal in size, strength, or scope to anti-Blackness. Erickson’s chapter in The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in fact implicates the origins of qualitative research with colonial and White supremacist projects. But when I read Pratt’s quote in a contemporary contact zone of quantitative and qualitative paradigms, I see shades of respectability politics. I see this when qualitative researchers emphatically (over)explain how they used techniques like “inter-rater reliability” or “triangulation” to “ensure the validity of the analysis.” To be fair, I see nothing wrong with the techniques. It’s the airtight verb “ensure” that puts an uncomfortable quantitative taste in my mouth, reminding me that qualitative research is written and read through the eyes of dominant quantitative (Western) methodological and epistemological commitments — even when writers and readers do not themselves subscribe to such commitments. When I read a qualitative researcher talk about how to adopt quantitative conventions, types of data, or norms of representation in order to get themselves accepted into top-tier North American journals, I have to wonder (1) whether legibility to a quantitative audience can truly elevate qualitative research as an equal peer, and therefore (2) how qualitative researchers can reconcile their decentralized eclecticism unified by a movement away from quantitative constraints with a drive to generate new constraints under the banner of appearing respectable to a quantitative-driven technopoly. In fact, drawing on Postman (1992), the term technopoly implies that an over-technification of knowledge (機心) also suggests that checklist-bearing framework-forming qualitative researchers are not fighting only for respectability on the path to legibility – a problem only accelerated by the proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The question is whether such a practice will fail to achieve legibility among quantitative scholars while further driving qualitative scholars into a vicious cycle of self-policing. In short, who are we talking to? And are they even listening?
This is why I appreciate Braun and Clarke’s 20-year war against those who misunderstand their reflexive thematic analysis framework. For them, they do not stand by and idly accept people who cite their framework only to lean on quantitative units of measurement like inter-rater reliability, counting of codes and themes, power analyses of sample sizes, or thresholds of saturation. They want qualitative analysis to lean into its own strengths, not approximate dominant epistemological traditions only to dilute the quality of its own products. Through my foray into reading qualitative methodological conversations, qualitative researchers do not want to be just any kind of scientist. Qualitative researchers adopt their methods because mainstream epistemological assumptions of positivist generalization, random sampling, and presumption of constructs proved unsatisfying. Yet exiting the mainstream path of positivist paradigms of knowledge-making does not negate the need to survive.
However, thick description is difficult to publish in top-tier North American organizational journals because (a) it often takes too much space to provide such a description and (b) in and of itself, thick description does not necessitate taking the further step to build or extend theory (Pratt, 2008, p. 499).
The challenge of publishing qualitative research lies not only in the dispositions of other positivism-infused scholars. It also lies in the grid of intelligibility of what gets to count as a journal article – a grid conditioned by its dimensions of 8,000 words and an Introduction-Methods-Results-Analysis-Discussion framework. Quantitative researchers carry epistemological assumptions that most qualitative researchers struggle to align with. Or put differently, qualitative researchers, since the publication of Braun and Clarke (2006) pushed thematic analysis into the mainstream, have sought to create a unifying framework to evaluate the quality of qualitative studies across a shared playing field. Yet other scholars even challenge the quantitative-qualitative divide altogether, saying that both are aesthetic rhetorical exercises in taste and representation (Sandelowski, 2015; Sandelowski & Barroso, 2002). On another closing wall, to lean too heavily on the qualitative description or to over-explain one’s analytical process is also to transform one’s empirical analysis into a methodological investigation. In this way, while Chamberlain (2000) used the term methodolatry to advocate against qualitative researchers’ dogmatic insistence on particular methods or standards of quality, another facet of methodolatry is to descend into methodological rabbit holes and suck the air out of the core purpose of qualitative research – telling the stories of participants’ life worlds.
My answer to this question of representation, method, and epistemological commitments brings me back to my own dissertation data. I work with a graduate student organization (GSO) dedicated to science policy – a broad umbrella of practices that includes advocacy among policymakers, outreach to non-scientist publics, and conducting research for evidence-based policymaking. This GSO engages with everyone from Washington staffers to other science policy GSOs to local community members to children. As I dive into this daunting world, I have thus far conducted several interviews and begun walking and voice-recording field notes as I think through parallels and divergences of participants’ stories.
What I have learned thus far is that involvement in GSOs contributes not only to the development of skilled networks and career opportunities outside of academia; for some, engagement in science policy makes them a better academic because they practice articulating their research (1) in relation to policies or social outcomes, and (2) in relation to the knowledge base of non-academic audiences. As a qualitative researcher, this multidirectional relationship between professional development and professional goals reminds me how and why I should make my scholarship more legible to people outside of the niche of my research interests – a skill that doubles as a transferrable ability to communicate across cultural contexts. But, against respectability politics, how can I do so without compromising my own values and my own epistemic and ontological commitments?
For many, including Braun and Clarke (2025) and Pratt (2009), checklists or guidelines seem to be the answer. Braun and Clarke’s war positions qualitative scholars on the razor’s edge of embracing creativity while disciplining legibility. Folks want to create a framework to promote an equitable field of evaluation for qualitative research reports while also embracing the counterflow movements against such technologizing constraints. Perhaps the goal of the war is not to reach a destination, but to oscillate between these two needs like a clock’s pendulum.
The problem is that reviewers and writers often produce friction by positioning themselves and each other at different phases of this pendulum. Veletsianos et al. (2025), for instance, engaged in a discussion with graduate students on peer review of qualitative research reports. Yet friction emerged when graduate students asked for clearer frameworks for evaluation of quality while editors pushed back, saying such evaluations of quality often depend on situated knowledge and intuition rather than a priori criteria. An evaluation of quality, in other words, comes from a development of taste and pattern recognition exercised through reading and evaluating many manuscripts over time (Sandelowski, 2015). This parallels a famous constellation of psychology studies (Chase & Simon, 1973; de Groot, 1965) where chess grand masters were able to memorize the position of chess pieces on a board with an accuracy that dwarfed novice players. Yet that result only held up if the pieces on the board resembled a legal, structurally coherent game state. When the board pieces were arranged randomly, neither group guessed better than chance. In other words, grand masters implicitly learn the position and spacing of pieces through the experience of playing thousands of games. Likewise, qualitative scholars over time might develop a more holistic process of evaluating a manuscript. As Braun and Clarke often argue, thematic analysis is not an act of inductive experimentation, but an act of storytelling grounded in data. In other words, while Braun and Clarke’s (2025) guidelines may be helpful for novice researchers to develop awareness of the common core components of a qualitative manuscript, such guidelines operate as a starting point and not an end state for a qualitative researcher’s evaluative acumen. The quality of the story is worth more than the sum of its parts.
For me, this means leaning into a practice of science that hard scientists, soft scientists, and humanities scholars all seem to share: storytelling. My goal for the rest of my PhD is to develop and refine my storytelling skills. For example, as I converse with and analyze the stories of STEM graduate students, I also relate my own anxieties of an uncertain job market. I recognize how soft skills like communication or networking remain unevenly distributed across my department and academia as a whole – soft skills that are not neutral but always culturally contextualized. Yet one similarity I see across cultures and contexts is how storytelling brings people together, sparks engagements, makes ideas relatable, and stimulates productive disagreement.
Likewise, as I write about qualitative paradigms, my goal will be to slowly separate myself from jargon. This will be difficult. Part of me loves jargon – how the sounds of words send a tingle down my spine. I love to read theory, and theory has a contentious love affair with jargon. But ultimately, my goal is to tell a story — to find those micro-moments where I can, as Karl Weick (1996) advocates, set down my methodological tools, set aside my analytical argumentative mind, and just sit with the storied stream of experience. Not to strictly describe, not to analyze for the sake of research, but for the sake of myself as a researcher — as a person, and as a being inseparable from other beings.
Pratt is right that space constraints in journals muzzle qualitative inquiry. So I will take up space on my blog. Pratt says that the description does not necessarily take a further step to build or extend theory. But I can describe my academic existence right here. Because honestly, who knows if my academic journey will continue beyond 2028? Who knows if anyone’s will? For me, research is a creative act. But creativity need not be limited to research. I’m just along for the ride – a ride respectable to no one but myself.
References:
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2025). Reporting guidelines for qualitative research: A values-based approach. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 22(2), 399–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2024.2382244
Chamberlain, K. (2000). Methodolatry and qualitative health research. Journal of Health Psychology, 5(3), 285–296.
Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55–81.
de Groot, A. D. (1965). Thought and choice in chess. Mouton.
Erickson, F. (2024). A history of qualitative inquiry in social and educational research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (6th ed.). SAGE.
Nguyen, T. T. T., & Makoni, S. (2026). On Northern, Southern, and entangled cosmopolitanism: English language ideologies among migrants in Australia. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 1–28.
Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Knopf.
Pratt, M. G. (2008). Fitting oval pegs into round holes: Tensions in evaluating and publishing qualitative research in top-tier North American journals. Organizational Research Methods, 11(3), 481–509.
Pratt, M. G. (2009). From the editors: For the lack of a boilerplate: Tips on writing up (and reviewing) qualitative research. Academy of Management Journal, 52(5), 856–862.
Sandelowski, M. (2015). A matter of taste: Evaluating the quality of qualitative research. Nursing Inquiry, 22(2), 86–94.
Sandelowski, M., & Barroso, J. (2002). Reading qualitative studies. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(1), Article 5.
Veletsianos, G., Arabadzhy, G., Athilat, V., Bartucz, J., Dogra, S., Fredrickson, N. R., Goeke, M., Jeon, S. T., Urena, M., Jandrić, P., Green, B. J., & Jackson, L. (2025). Postdigital peer review: A vulnerable space between freedom and responsibility. Postdigital Science and Education.
Weick, K. E. (1996). Drop your tools: An allegory for organizational studies. Administrative Science Quarterly, 41(2), 301–314.
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