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Laura Green, Director of Event Planning at the Nova Waterfront Hotel in Baltimore, had been through the hiring process many times. She was comfortable with Nova's selection and behavioral interviewing processes. They had only interviewed two candidates for the open senior event manager position, yet they had been discussing what decision to make for two and a half hours. Normally, these kinds of meetings wrapped up in 30 minutes with a clear consensus. Today, they were gridlocked, unable to agree on a path forward. Green suggested that they all “sleep on it.” They would get together first thing in the morning, when they were fresh, and decide what to do.

The data for this case were collected via personal interviews with employees of the hotel and from information on the company's website, other company resources, and publicly available information about the company. Only the hotel's name, parent company's name, and people's names have been disguised to protect the confidentiality and anonymity of the individuals. The author has no relationship to the host organization or protagonist.

This case is appropriate for an undergraduate or graduate course in Human Resources Management, Organizational Behavior, or Recruiting and Selection.

This case may be used to illustrate, analyze, and evaluate the selection process and interviewing approaches (e.g. behavioral interviewing). The importance of selection, best practices for selection, candidate assessment methods, best practices for candidate interviews, and common biases which affect the fairness of selection processes are reviewed.

The spatial and often binary orderings of development discussed above have underpinned the dominant formations of development knowledge and the configuration of whose authority counts in development decisions and debates. Since these orderings of knowledge, authority and space are a pivotal feature of development, it is important that qualitative researchers engage with and challenge them. The contributions by Humble and Smith and by Yanacopulos challenge the construction of development research along North/South lines. Exploring what counts as development research, Humble and Smith note a geographical orientation towards research in the South to the exclusion of other approaches, informed by the historical influence of colonialism, the anthropological tradition and an increasing de-politicisation of development. This spatial filtering privileges certain sets of development knowledge and hence conceptions of what development is or should be. Drawing on their experiences of research with NGOs and in UK schools the authors make the case for critical engagement with the meanings of development in the North, challenging the traditional boundaries of what counts as development research. Yanacopulos, in Chapter 3, also takes up this challenge, but in this case arguing that we need to “think about the ways that development actors, structures and dynamics operate at a global level” (p. 35). Focusing on the rise of Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) and their roles in development, Yanacopulos explores the methodological challenges of researching a potentially fluid formation across national boundaries. But in doing so, she also demonstrates the important role qualitative methodologies can play in generating new understandings which challenge the North/South boundaries of development.

Pat Allatt is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Teesside, U.K.Tim Dant is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia, U.K.Carolyn Dixon is a researcher and an independent artist.John Donnelly is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology and Criminology Division at the University of Northumbria, U.K.Alan Felstead is Professor of Employment Studies at the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, U.K.Barbara Harrison is Professor of Sociology at the University of East London, U.K.Rosalind Hurworth is Director of the Centre for Program Evaluation within the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia.Nick Jewson is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, U.K.John Martin is Principal Lecturer in Economic and Social History at De Montfort University, U.K.Ruth Martin was the Research Assistant for the “Asian Leicester” project.Sarah Pink is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Loughborough, U.K.Christopher Pole is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of Leicester, U.K.Andrea Raggl is a Research Assistant in the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.Michael Schratz is Professor of Education at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research of the University of Innsbruck, Austria.Matt Smith is a Lecturer in the Sociology and Criminology Division at the University of Northumbria, U.K.Sally Walters is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Labour Market Studies at the University of Leicester, U.K.

The previous seven volumes of Studies in Qualitative Methodology have brought together papers focusing on particular themes within the conduct, analysis and representation of qualitative research. Throughout, the emphasis has been on foregrounding new ideas, approaches and challenges to qualitative enquiry. In Vol. 8 while the general objective of high quality, innovative and critical contributions remains constant, our emphasis has shifted slightly. In this volume the chapters focus on one topic, that is the application of qualitative approaches to research within the field of Development.

This chapter explores what counts as research on development and argues for a challenge to conceptions which continue to define it geographically rather than systemically. It is argued that, despite an apparent openness and fluidity, qualitative research on development tends to be understood as referring to ‘field research’ in the South.¹ This can constrain the boundaries of development research, what is understood to be development and also the critical capacity of qualitative approaches to development. Challenging the traditional definitions and boundaries of development research will open spaces for critical analysis and research, which can reshape development theory. It also allows for engagement with the widening set of practices, policies and social relations which have a bearing on development, but which have so far been largely excluded from qualitative research on development. However, for qualitative research to play a critical role in challenging these boundaries, we need to acknowledge the roles qualitative research on development already plays and has played, and the ways this is shaped by the contemporary and historical contexts, traditions and preoccupations of development research.

Anyone attempting to write anything on the subject of development has to immediately confront the inherently contested and normative nature of the concept. Such have been the conceptual, theoretical, methodological and substantive debates over development that it has been seen as a concept, and indeed field of studies, in crisis: its aims, agents and unit of development have been questioned and challenged (Pieterse, 2001, Chapter 1). Development is ‘an idea, an objective and an activity’ (Kothari & Minogue, 2002, p. 12) that consequently gives rise to debates over theory, policies and aims. As Pieterse and Kothari and Minogue go on to argue, such debates cannot be separated from relationships of power and the different paradigms and ideologies that shape intellectual discussion, stakeholder perspectives and decisions in policy-making institutions.

When I began to think about this chapter, and to consider the impact of negotiating boundaries in my recent PhD research, there were a number of pertinent issues which could be understood in terms of ‘boundaries’. This chapter therefore considers the negotiation of multiple boundaries, in both the research process and the outcomes of development research. Using the case study example of research with a group of grassroots women health promoters, I explore the ways that adopting a qualitative feminist methodological approach served to unsettle boundaries within development research and development practice. As a feminist researcher, one of my key preoccupations has been negotiating and making visible issues of power and positionality in the research process, conceptualised here in terms of a series of boundaries. As this is something with which feminist researchers have struggled for over 20 years (see, e.g., Oakley, 1981; Acker, Barry, & Esseveld, 1983), I do not claim to offer any solutions to these issues, but rather this chapter will provide a discussion of how these dynamics and dilemmas were played out in the context of my own fieldwork. England (1994) highlights the importance of reflecting on the position of the researcher, and her role in the research process, as an integral part of producing qualitative research, and Rose (1997) suggests that this reflexivity should lookboth ‘inward’ to the identity of the researcher, and ‘outward’ in her relation to her research and what is described as ‘the wider world’. (Rose, 1997, p. 309)

In order to sustain our argument that a blending of visual sociology and the sociology of development can be productive and politically engaged, we need to locate the debate in the wider developmental context into which sociological interventions can be made. As this chapter will demonstrate, popular understandings of development, mostly mediated by visual imagery, reflect a rapidly changing development industry, as well as affording significant social theoretical insights. Thus, we need to briefly consider some of the key features of the development landscape, and the ways in which sociologists might engage in this, particularly in the context of the globalisation of development; the ways in which processes of globalisation are transforming the actors and agents involved in development, the roots of development authority and legitimacy and the changing ways in which development is defined and understood. This already hints at an important link with the visual; “development” must be understood as being linked to the same processes and relationships which underpin a world increasingly shaped by the visual image.

I stood in a pile of putrefying rubbish refusing to move until somebody called the dog off. At the same time, trying (quickly) to decide on the ethical issues of throwing rocks at a research participant's dog. These, for me, are the practical realities of fieldwork. It's dusty, it's hot, it's Lima, Peru, and we have spent all afternoon climbing through the gravel hills of San Gabrielle, Villa Maria looking for people willing to participate in my research. The accents are from all over Peru and for some Spanish is as much their second language as it is mine. Some people have been busy, some asleep, all the people have been women – and there have been a lot of angry dogs. I feel a long way from the neat methodology written back in England, which certainly did not make any mention of aggressive dogs, let alone the ethics of dealing with them.