Qualitative Paradigm

The literature review process gave rise to three research questions. It found that although there is a growing body of literature on contemporary career management, the focus is only on developed contexts with very few studies conducted in emerging economies such as the Middle East, giving the example of the Kingdom of Bahrain. Therefore, one aim of this thesis is to plug this gap by exploring the nature of career self-management within the context of ascription culture which, to some extent has similar characteristics to the Bahraini culture. It also pursues the literature in career theories that are related to organisational and cultural factors that have impacted career self-management behaviours. As was mentioned earlier, the literature review disclosed a list of three research questions which this thesis explores.

Yin (2009) states that if the research question concentrates mainly on 'what' questions, there might be two possibilities: 1) some of the 'what' questions are exploratory, justifying the rationale for conducting an exploratory study and any of five strategies can be used, for instance, an exploratory survey, exploratory experiment, or exploratory case study; and 2) the second type of 'what' question is a form of 'how many' or 'how much' line of inquiry and in this case the survey strategy or archival strategies are more favourable than other strategies.

An inductive exploratory research is important to adopt in this research to explore thesis questions. By so doing, this helps to investigate the characteristics of career self-management behaviours exhibited by Bahraini manager participants. The qualitative rather than quantitative approach is adopted in this research because the author in this thesis believes that this method is best suited for an exploration of the phenomena under the study, that is 'career self-management' exhibited by Bahraini manager participants in the sample and for the following reasons:

1. There are few studies that address career management, particularly from a contemporary perspective in developing countries (for example, the Kingdom of Bahrain). Hence, there is a shortfall in comprehending the nature of career self-management in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

2. Little is known about the social factors (i.e. structural and organisational) that encourage and/or limit the embracing of career self-management of managers not just in the Kingdom of Bahrain but even in developed countries (Budhwar and Baruch, 2003).

The qualitative method has been used extensively in past decades. Its nature is exploratory and used for collecting, analysing, and interpreting human behaviour data. While both qualitative and quantitative methods are important, the selection of the appropriate method depends on the nature of the research questions. Since it is quite hard to use the whole tools and theories of qualitative methods, different methods are considered in order to justify the appropriate one that matches the purpose of this research. According to Collis and Hussey (2009) the following methodologies that are employed in qualitative paradigms are:

1. The 'ethnography' methodology; this is derived from the study of people, their societies and their customs, focussing on world and observational data to study human behaviours and cultures. Ethnography exploits work-field, participant observation, and in-depth interviews in addition to other techniques to offer a descriptive study of various human cultures and societies. Consequently the main reason to justify this method is to assist in reviewing or improving existing dilemmas.

Such a method is appropriate for this thesis because this study attempts to explore the phenomena under the study (i.e. career self-management). This is because there is uncertainty about its existence in the context of the Kingdom of Bahrain.

2. 'Grounded theory' was originally developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and can be described as a research method which uses a systematic set of procedures to develop an inductively derived theory about phenomena. In this method the theory is developed from the data itself and this means that there is transition from more specific to more general.

3. The 'hermeneutics' methodology focusses on interpretation and understanding text in the context of the fundamental historical and social forces. This approach assumes that there is a connection between direct conscious descriptions of experience and the underlying dynamics or structures. The hermeneutics methodology was created by interpreting ancient scriptures. It is broadly applied in law; however it is still associated with interpreting historical texts.

4. 'Participative enquiry'; this makes participants entirely involved in a study that is conducted in their organisation or in their groups, including the involvement in collecting and analysing the data. The participants are also involved in determining the progress and direction of the research, which might allow the researcher to create questions and answers based on both participant/researcher experiences (Traylen, 1994). As a consequence of the imbalance in conventional research methods that have concerns about the unethical issues of participant involvements, this method has been developed.

5. 'Feminist, gender and ethnicity' studies. Feminist studies are applied to investigate and interpret phenomena that concern the role of women in society as well as men.

Gender studies are concerned about men and women. Ethnicity studies are used to examine the experiences of ethnic groups in society and mainly consider sexual or racial equality.

6. 'Action research' is a methodology employed in applied research to find an effective way of bringing about a conscious change in partly controlled environments. The main purpose in this type of research is to go into a situation, try to bring about change and to monitor the results.

7. The 'case study' is a methodology employed to explore a single phenomenon (i.e. the case) in natural settings using different methods to obtain in-depth knowledge.