Qualitative Research as Emergent Inquiry: Reframing Qualitative Practice in Terms of Complex Responsive Processes

Commercial qualitative research is employed in both the public and private sectors to help organizations understand their customers or clients, with the aim of providing them with better services, products or environments. Using their research knowledge, the researchers act as consultants, helping their clients to shape their strategy and decision making. The role of the commercial qualitative researcher is therefore quite different than that of most academic researchers. Commercial qualitative research has long an uncomfortable position straddling a positivist and a socially constructed understanding of knowledge generation. This often creates misunderstandings between researchers and clients, not least because these different epistemological stances are not explicit. This essay explores how the concept of emergence derived from the complexity sciences, alongside contributions from neuroscience, can help us to conceptualise an holistic theory of commercial qualitative research-emergent inquiry-which embraces the role of emotion in judgement and decision making.