A brief note on the hermeneutic circle: for MBA students

A brief note on the hermeneutic circle: for MBA students

 

Highlight 5 main ideas of the hermeneutic circle and then on the main steps of the circle, done in a straightforward way in the context of MBA dissertation project study.

The hermeneutic circle is a practical way to interpret qualitative MBA research data: you repeatedly move between individual pieces of evidence and the overall business context until a coherent explanation emerges. It is especially useful for interview-based, case-study, or organisational-change dissertations.

Five main ideas

1.    Parts and whole depend on each other. You cannot fully understand one interview quote, decision, or departmental practice without considering the organisation’s wider strategy, culture, and history; equally, the overall story is built from those individual parts.

2.    Understanding is iterative, not linear. You do not analyse all data once and finish. You revisit transcripts, notes, documents, and themes as your interpretation becomes more refined.

3.    The researcher brings prior knowledge. Your MBA knowledge, work experience, and initial assumptions shape what you notice. These are not automatically bad, but they must be recognised, questioned, and checked against the data.

4.    Context matters. A manager’s comment about “poor communication” may mean something different in a family-owned SME, a multinational, or a post-restructuring organisation. Interpretation should connect the evidence to its organisational and industry context.

5.    The aim is deeper interpretation, not simply reporting answers. Rather than only counting how many participants said something, you explain what the pattern means, why it occurs, and how it relates to management theory and practice.

Main steps for an MBA dissertation

Step	What you do	MBA example
1. Define the research focus	State the business problem, research questions, and the phenomenon you want to understand.	“How do middle managers experience digital transformation in Hong Kong SMEs?”
2. Identify your starting assumptions	Write down your prior expectations, professional experience, and theoretical lens before detailed analysis.	You may assume that resistance to change is mainly caused by lack of training.
3. Read the whole dataset first	Read all transcripts, company documents, survey comments, or case material to gain an initial sense of the whole.	Read all 12 manager interviews before coding in detail.
4. Analyse the parts	Code meaningful segments: recurring words, stories, decisions, conflicts, and examples.	Code references to “training,” “workload,” “leadership support,” and “customer pressure.”
5. Return to the whole	Compare the coded parts with your initial understanding of the organisation, industry, and research question. Ask whether the parts change the bigger picture.	You may find that “resistance” is less about skills and more about unclear strategic priorities.
6. Revise and repeat	Go back to the data, revise codes, merge themes, and test alternative explanations. Keep an audit trail of decisions.	Move repeatedly between individual interviews and emerging themes until the interpretation is stable.
7. Develop themes and link to theory	Build final themes, explain their relationships, and connect them to relevant management literature.	Develop a theme such as “leadership communication shapes employee readiness for digital change.”
8. Reflect on your role	Explain how your background and assumptions may have influenced the interpretation, and show how you used evidence to support claims.	State that your experience in operations may have made you attentive to process barriers, so you deliberately sought contrary evidence.

Simple way to write it

You could write:

This study used a hermeneutic circle approach to analyse qualitative data. First, the researcher gained an overall understanding of the organisation and research context. The researcher then examined individual interview extracts and coded recurring ideas. These parts were repeatedly compared with the wider organisational context and the research questions. Through this iterative process, preliminary interpretations were revised and refined. Final themes were developed by integrating participants’ accounts, organisational documents, and relevant management literature. The researcher also reflected on prior assumptions to reduce the risk of imposing unsupported interpretations on the data.

Key point for your dissertation

Think of the hermeneutic circle as a loop:

Initial understanding → detailed evidence → revised understanding → wider context → final interpretation

For example, an interview quote about “too many systems” may initially suggest a technology problem. After reviewing the whole dataset, you may find that the real issue is unclear roles and poor change communication. You then revisit the data to check whether this broader interpretation is supported. That repeated movement between detail and context is the hermeneutic circle.

 

Provide 2 academic references on the topic discussed here (in Harvard reference format).

Here are two suitable academic references in Harvard format for your MBA dissertation discussion of the hermeneutic circle.

Reference list

Alsaigh, R. and Coyne, I. (2021) ‘Doing a hermeneutic phenomenology research underpinned by Gadamer’s philosophy: a framework to facilitate data analysis’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, pp. 1–9. doi: 10.1177/16094069211047820.

Debesay, J., Nåden, D. and Slettebø, Å. (2008) ‘How do we close the hermeneutic circle? A Gadamerian approach to justification in interpretation in qualitative studies’, Nursing Inquiry, 15(1), pp. 57–66. doi: 10.1111/j.1440-1800.2008.00390.x.

How to use them

·        Alsaigh and Coyne (2021) is especially useful if you are explaining how you moved between interview extracts, emerging themes, and the wider organisational context during qualitative data analysis. It explicitly addresses Gadamer’s ideas of pre-understandings, the hermeneutic circle, and fusion of horizons.

·        Debesay, Nåden and Slettebø (2008) is useful when justifying the credibility of your interpretation. It discusses how researchers can support interpretations developed through the hermeneutic circle in qualitative research.

For an in-text citation, you could write: “The analysis followed an iterative hermeneutic process, moving between individual data extracts and the broader organisational context (Alsaigh and Coyne, 2021; Debesay, Nåden and Slettebø, 2008).”