On reflexivity and bracketing for MBA students

 

On reflexivity and bracketing for MBA students

Highlight 5 main ideas on each of the 2 topics of "reflexivity" and "bracketing" in qualitative research, notably in doing MBA dissertation projects. Specifically, discuss how reflexivity and bracketing contribute to the quality of qualitative research project findings.

In qualitative MBA dissertation projects, reflexivity and bracketing both help make findings more trustworthy, but they do so in different ways: reflexivity keeps you aware of how you shape the research, while bracketing helps you deliberately manage your prior assumptions so participants’ meanings stay central. Together, they improve the quality of findings by reducing bias, increasing transparency, and strengthening credibility and confirmability.

Reflexivity

1.    Awareness of the researcher as an instrument.
In qualitative research, the researcher is not neutral; your background, role, values, and expectations can influence what you notice, ask, and interpret.

2.    Continuous self-examination.
Reflexivity is not a one-time statement in the methodology chapter; it is an ongoing process across design, interviewing, coding, and interpretation.

3.    Transparency about positionality.
For MBA dissertations, reflexivity helps you explain how your professional experience, industry knowledge, or managerial beliefs may shape the study, which makes the research easier to evaluate critically.

4.    Richer interpretation of data.
By reflecting on your own assumptions, you are less likely to rush to familiar explanations and more likely to detect subtle or unexpected meanings in participants’ accounts.

5.    Improved trustworthiness of findings.
Reflexive practice strengthens credibility because readers can see how conclusions were reached, not just the final claims.
In an MBA dissertation, this is especially important when the topic is close to your workplace or industry, because reflexivity helps show that findings are grounded in the data rather than in your preferences.

Bracketing

1.    Setting aside preconceptions.
Bracketing means consciously suspending prior beliefs, theories, and experiences so you can attend more openly to participants’ perspectives.

2.    Reducing researcher bias.
In qualitative inquiry, bracketing limits the extent to which your own expectations distort data collection or interpretation, which improves the credibility of findings.

3.    Keeping participants’ voices central.
The goal is not to eliminate subjectivity completely, but to prevent the researcher’s assumptions from overpowering the lived experiences described by participants.

4.    Supporting more authentic findings.
When bracketing is done well, the analysis is more likely to reflect what participants actually said, rather than what the researcher expected to hear.

5.    Strengthening rigor and confirmability.
Bracketing enhances methodological rigor by making it more likely that findings are shaped by the evidence, not by the researcher’s personal lens.
For MBA dissertations, this is particularly valuable when the researcher already knows the organization, sector, or problem area being studied.

How they improve findings

Reflexivity and bracketing contribute to quality in complementary ways: reflexivity helps you notice your influence, while bracketing helps you manage it during the research process. Used together, they support more credible, transparent, and defensible dissertation findings, especially in interviews, case studies, and phenomenological projects where researcher interpretation is central.”

 

When are reflexivity and bracketing mainly employed in an MBA dissertation report writing, i.e., chapter 1 (Introduction), chapter 2 (literature review), chapter 3 (research methodology), chapter 4 (presentation of research findings), chapter 5 (discussion of research findings), chapter 6 (conclusions and recommendations), and chapter 7 (reflection on the dissertation project experience). Try to clarify your discussion with reference to the research theme of "an evaluation of the charismatic leadership style on Gen Z employees' job engagement in the Hong Kong hotel sector.

For your MBA dissertation on “an evaluation of the charismatic leadership style on Gen Z employees’ job engagement in the Hong Kong hotel sector,” reflexivity and bracketing are used mainly across the methodology and interpretation-heavy chapters, not equally in every chapter. Reflexivity is a continuous practice that should be visible from design to final write-up, while bracketing is most important when you collect, code, and interpret data so your own assumptions do not dominate the findings.

Chapter-by-chapter use

Chapter	Reflexivity	Bracketing
Chapter 1: Introduction	Light use: explain why you chose this topic and any insider position you may have in hospitality or management.	Minimal use: not the main place for bracketing, except to note your awareness of possible preconceptions.
Chapter 2: Literature review	Moderate use: show how your prior beliefs are informed and challenged by the literature.	Some use: keep your assumptions from forcing the literature into a one-sided argument.
Chapter 3: Research methodology	Heavy use: explain your positionality, access to participants, interview role, and how you managed bias.	Heavy use: explicitly state how you bracketed assumptions during sampling, interviewing, coding, and analysis.
Chapter 4: Presentation of findings	Moderate use: briefly note how your interpretation process affected theme development.	Heavy use: ensure themes come from participants’ accounts, not from your expectations about charismatic leadership.
Chapter 5: Discussion of findings	Heavy use: compare findings with literature while acknowledging how your standpoint may shape interpretation.	Moderate use: check that you are not over-interpreting findings to fit pre-existing theories.
Chapter 6: Conclusions and recommendations	Moderate use: be careful that recommendations follow evidence, not personal preference.	Light to moderate use: confirm that conclusions remain grounded in the data.
Chapter 7: Reflection on the dissertation project experience	Very heavy use: this is the main chapter for reflexive reflection on what you learned about yourself as researcher.	Light use: you may mention how you continually tried to bracket assumptions, but the focus is reflection rather than bracketing itself.

How this fits your topic

In this study, you may already have views about whether charismatic hotel leaders improve Gen Z employees’ engagement. Reflexivity is needed because your managerial experience, hotel-sector knowledge, or beliefs about Gen Z can influence which interview answers you notice as important and how you interpret them. Bracketing is needed because participants may describe charisma differently from your own expectations, so you must avoid pre-deciding that “charisma” always means inspiration, motivation, or positive engagement.

Practical chapter guidance

Chapter 1

Use reflexivity only briefly, usually in a short paragraph explaining your motivation and possible insider status. This is enough to show transparency without turning the introduction into a reflexive essay.

Chapter 2

Use reflexivity when you critically assess the literature and recognise that your reading choices are shaped by your own assumptions. Bracketing is limited here, but it helps you avoid selecting only studies that support your preferred view of charismatic leadership.

Chapter 3

This is the main chapter for both concepts. Reflexivity explains your role as interviewer and analyst, while bracketing explains how you managed prior beliefs about Gen Z motivation, leadership style, and hotel work conditions. For example, if you believe Gen Z employees value authenticity more than hierarchy, you should state that this belief exists and explain how you prevented it from steering the interview prompts or coding.

Chapter 4

When you present themes such as “leader inspiration,” “personal recognition,” or “emotional connection,” bracketing helps ensure these themes emerge from participant narratives rather than from your expectations. Reflexivity can be used briefly to show that you remained aware of how your interpretive lens shaped theme naming and organization.

Chapter 5

This is a major reflexive chapter because you interpret the findings in light of theory and prior studies. You should also use bracketing here by checking whether your discussion is drifting into advocacy for charismatic leadership instead of staying faithful to the evidence.

Chapter 6

Use both concepts only indirectly. Reflexivity helps you make balanced recommendations for hotel managers, while bracketing helps you avoid overstating what the data can support.

Chapter 7

This is the strongest chapter for reflexivity because it is your personal research reflection. You can discuss how your understanding of leadership, Gen Z, and Hong Kong hotel workplaces changed through the project, and how your assumptions were challenged or confirmed. Bracketing may be mentioned as a technique you attempted throughout the project, but it is not the central focus of this chapter.

Best placement rule

A simple rule is this: reflexivity belongs everywhere, but especially in Chapters 3, 5, and 7; bracketing belongs mainly in Chapters 3 and 4, and then again in 5 when you check your interpretations. For your hotel-sector topic, that means the dissertation should show both that you were self-aware and that you actively prevented your own assumptions about charismatic leadership from shaping the findings too strongly.

A note on Romanticism in the context of dissertation projects

A note on Romanticism in the context of dissertation projects (information from perplexity.ai)

My question: "In the context of doing MBA and Housing Studies dissertation projects, does Romanticism has any relevance or useful ideas to inform the dissertation project works? Please highlight 6 main ideas of Romanticism and then offer your discussion on the topic raised here."

The reply: "Romanticism can be a useful “counter-tradition” to draw on in MBA and Housing Studies dissertations, especially for questioning technocratic, purely rational or market‑centric approaches to management, planning and housing.

Six main ideas of Romanticism

Here are six core Romantic ideas, simplified and synthesized from standard accounts.

1. Emotion over cold rationality

   • Feelings, passions and affect are treated as legitimate sources of understanding, not just noise to be controlled.

2. Subjectivity and individual experience

   • The inner life, personal perception and lived experience of individuals matter more than abstract, universal rules.

3. Imagination and creativity

   • Imagination is seen as a way of grasping truths that rational calculation alone cannot reach, including moral and social possibilities.

4. Reverence for nature and the non‑market world

   • Nature, the simple and the mundane are endowed with intrinsic value, often in protest against industrialization and commodification.

5. Critique of progress and alienation

   • Romantics question the idea that economic or technological “progress” automatically improves human life, and highlight alienation, loss of community and meaning under capitalism.

6. Individualism, authenticity and resistance to convention

   • Emphasis on being true to oneself, originality, and resistance to oppressive social norms or bureaucratic systems.

Relevance for MBA dissertations

In management research, Romantic ideas can help you interrogate the limits of purely rationalist or positivist models of organizations.

• Emotion and subjectivity: You can frame research questions around how managers’ and employees’ emotions, narratives and identities shape strategic decisions, rather than treating decisions as purely rational responses to data.

• Authenticity and meaning at work: Romanticism’s concern with authenticity and the “infinite value of the mundane” aligns with contemporary interest in meaningful work, burnout, and value conflicts in organizations.

• Critique of progress: You might critically study how “efficiency” or “innovation” discourse masks losses in worker autonomy, community or purpose, linking to Romantic critiques of modernity and alienation.

• Imagination in strategy and leadership: You can justify qualitative, interpretive attention to stories, metaphors and visions in leadership as expressions of imaginative work rather than mere “soft” factors.

For methodology, Romanticism supports interpretivist or critical approaches that foreground lived experience, narrative, and value conflict, instead of purely instrumental hypothesis testing.

Relevance for Housing Studies dissertations

Housing and urban questions sit right inside Romantic concerns about industrial modernity, nature, community and alienation.

• Place, attachment and lived experience: Romantic attention to subjectivity and emotion supports studying residents’ sense of home, belonging, stigma, or loss in redevelopment, using interviews, ethnography or narrative methods.

• Nature and the city: Romantic reverence for nature invites critical analysis of how green space, landscape and non‑market values are treated in planning and housing policy, beyond land values and densities.

• Critique of technocratic “progress”: You can frame a dissertation that questions whether large‑scale housing “upgrading” or smart‑city projects improve residents’ perceived quality of life or instead intensify alienation and displacement.

• Authenticity, heritage and community: Romanticism’s idealization of the past and the “organic” community can help you interrogate heritage conservation, displacement of long‑standing communities, and the commodification of “authentic” neighborhoods.

Conceptually, Romanticism offers a vocabulary for housing beyond units, tenure and price: home as meaning, memory, feeling and moral value, not just a commodity.

How you might concretely use Romanticism

You do not need to label your dissertation as “Romantic,” but you can use Romantic ideas strategically in three areas.

1. Theoretical framing paragraphs

   • Position your work as balancing “classical” rationalist traditions in management or planning (optimization, control, calculation) with a more Romantic sensitivity to emotion, imagination and lived experience.

   • Cite social science discussions that treat Romanticism and classicism as deep structures in research cultures, then explain how your project attends to the Romantic side often suppressed in business and housing research.
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2. Choice and justification of methodology

   • Use Romantic emphases on subjectivity and authenticity to support qualitative, interpretive or critical methods: in‑depth interviews, narrative analysis, phenomenology of home, etc.

   • Argue that to understand leadership, organizational culture, or lived experience of housing, you must access inner worlds of feeling and imagination, not just observable behavior or numeric indicators.

3. Critical discussion and implications

   • In your discussion chapter, relate findings about stress, loss of community, or environmental degradation to Romantic critiques of alienation, commodification and the cult of progress.

   • Reflect on non‑pecuniary values—dignity, beauty, tranquility, belonging—that emerge in your data but are invisible in dominant managerial or policy metrics, echoing Romantic defense of “the infinite value of the mundane.”

A possible integrative angle

One way to operationalize this is to treat Romanticism and rationalism as two ideal‑typical lenses: one highlighting calculability, control and efficiency, the other highlighting emotion, meaning and nature.

For an MBA project, you might compare how an organization’s official strategy documents (rationalist lens) and employees’ narratives of their work (Romantic lens) construct very different pictures of what “success” and “good work” mean.

For a Housing Studies project, you could contrast a redevelopment project’s economic and planning rationale with residents’ emotive accounts of home, loss, and place attachment, showing how Romantic concerns are systematically sidelined.

Used this way, Romanticism does not replace your main theories (e.g., institutional theory, governance, gentrification, housing policy), but it provides a powerful critical and interpretive backdrop that enriches your conceptual framing and your reading of empirical data."

A collection of blog notes on using chatgpt for research purpose.

** a video on Romanticism