Towards a genre repertoire approach to research transparency

There is a broad consensus that transparency is increasingly important in management and organisational research. However, in the context of qualitative research, there are concerns about researchers applying inappropriate transparency criteria or templates in their work. In this article, we sought to understand how qualitative management researchers are actually enacting and communicating transparency practices. To do so, we conducted a comprehensive genre analysis of qualitative research across six management journals, which enabled us to map out transparency practices and identify three genres of writing about research transparency: Protocol, Diary, and Critique. Based on our analysis, we motivate a genre repertoire approach to research transparency, a reflexive and pluralistic way of addressing transparency concerns in our field. This approach highlights researcher discretion and responsibility, moving the methodological debate beyond suggesting new practices, checklists, and templates for transparency in qualitative research. The genre repertoire approach aligns with the diversity of scholarship in organisation studies and further invites further critical scholarly debate on methodological transparency and its place in the future of qualitative research.