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The purpose of this paper is to further the discussion on points made by Giampietro Gobo, provide additional information on the place of qualitative research in management, and question the space of merged methods.

Use a conversational approach as well as a review of qualitative vs quantitative research in three top tier journals for the years 2013-2016 (by a simple count).

Quantitative methods remain very much mainstream in management research, yet one finds that for one of the journals, space is evenly shared between qualitative and quantitative methods.

This is a viewpoint and does not offer a systematic review of all top tier management journals.

It is hope that with this viewpoint debate as to the space of qualitative research, and merged methods can be stimulated.

The purpose of the paper is to propose a systems change lens to current approaches to assessing social impact in social ventures. Many existing tools for measuring social impact are limited in their capacity to assess the inherent complexities and interconnected nature of the work done by social enterprises.

The paper uses in-depth interviews with sector experts to gain insights into their needs related to impact assessment, as well as issues they face when attempting to understand and measure their impact.

Expert interviews provide insights into how social impact occurs through interconnected systems. It also highlights the need for impact assessment to better consider interaction within systems and networks. Results support previous work concerning the need for methods that can better account for complexity, interacting problems and the place of power in influencing actions.

Following results from interviews and review of existing literature, symbolic interactionism and Social Worlds/Arenas theories are used to gain insight as to how impact can be conceptualized in terms of systemic shifts in social equilibria. The model proposes to capture the contested definitions of problems and their negotiation in social structures.

Grounded in sociological theory, the model brings a new theoretical approach to social impact assessment, one that provides a different view of social structures than existing models that are grounded in economic metrics. The proposed model, therefore, provides a new lens for the detailed assessment of the complex interactions between systems.

The paper aims to answer how important institutional actors, such as academic researchers, consulting firms, and foundations, are tracing the boundaries of social entrepreneurship (SE) and how they justify SE as a legitimate form of social purpose organization.

The paper employs a discourse analysis methodology.

The paper finds traces of the legitimacy issues in the literature on non‐profits and, based on this, argue that a new institutional domain is being constructed. The paper concludes that in this new domain not only is the use of market‐based initiatives seen as a legitimate means of funding a social mission, but also it has now become the normative way and one that is promoted by consultants and foundations concerned with social entrepreneurs and their initiatives.

This paper highlights the developing norms of SE.

After the initial life (which coincides with the origins of social research in the 1850s, and lasts until 1940s), mixed methods revive at the beginning of 1970s. However, this second life (or renaissance) receives the deleterious imprinting of quantitative methods. In fact, some of the old positivist assumptions are still reproduced and active in most of mixed methods research. This imprinting is traceable in the ambiguity (and purposive semantic stretching) of the term “qualitative”: from the 1990s, it encompasses almost everything (even approaches considered positivistic in the 1950s!). Whereby the semantical extension of the term “qualitative” has become a sort of Trojan horse for a new legitimation of many quantitative and positivist researchers: a great swindle. Today “qualitative” is nonsense and acts as a bug, which muddies the qualitative-quantitative debate. For this reason, it would be better to remove the bug (i.e. to discharge the term “qualitative” from the language of social research and methodology), reset and start over from the level of specific research methods, considering carefully and balancing their diversity before mixing them. The purpose of this paper is to outline two (complementary) ways of integration of methods (“mixed” and “merged”), arguing that “merged” methods realize a higher integration than “mixed” methods, because the former overcome some weaknesses of the latter.

A semantic and pragmatic analysis of the term “qualitative.”

In social and behavioral sciences, the second life of mixed methods has been heavily affected by old positivist and quantitative assumptions.

The term “qualitative” should be discharged from the language of social research and methodology.

The coveted integration in “mixed” methods, could be better pursed through “merged” methods.

Disentangling the strands of a debate (the qualitative-quantitative one) become muddy.

An alternative framework, to interpret the mixed methods history and their recent developments, has been proposed.