The other "meta" of meta-analysis: Qualitative and text-based approaches to "analysis of analyses" in marketing

Abstract

In the exponential growth of scientific publication output and the growing maturity of the marketing discipline, doing literature and research reviews has become more than just a research convention, but rather a proper form of research. However, despite increasing attention and the number of published guides and handbooks, review methodologies tend to evolve in the direction of statistical meta-analyses, thus not only neglecting the knowledge-advancing potential of qualitative work, but also contributing to the widening of the qualitative-quantitative divide. By bringing attention to qualitative review methodologies and introducing a categorization of meta approaches informed by the insights from the sociology of knowledge, this critical review paper suggests that a stronger focus on text-based methods applied to the analysis of (marketing) literature can enrich (marketing) research, both in terms of methodologies and new knowledge generation.