Investigating the extraordinary

Dörfler, V. and Stierand, M. (2009) Investigating the extraordinary. In: British Academy of Management Conference 2009, 2009-09-15 - 2009-09-17, Brighton, United Kingdom.

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Abstract

This paper is the first step towards establishing the investigation of the extraordinary as a valid method of research in the field of business research and hopefully beyond. We list sev-eral ways in which investigation of outliers is used; i.e. if we are interested specifically in rare phenomena represented by outliers; when trying to gain general knowledge by examining ir-regular instances that expose particular characteristics of the topic under scrutiny; and as a way of strengthening an argument by showing it to be valid for outliers as well. As the ex-traordinary are outliers themselves, the reasons for investigating outliers apply to extraordi-nary as well. After this we take several research projects that focus on the extraordinary under closer examination; this way finding additional reason for investigating the extraordinary be-yond those reasons given for the outliers. This leads us to the world of Platonic ideas; in which the extraordinary is defined.

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