Abstract
Counterfactuals can play a fundamental role in the quest of seeking extraordinary topics, novel methods, and unconventional insights to challenge the taken-for-granted knowledge. In essence, counterfactuals run counter the facts and can be an important ingredient in theorizing in qualitative studies. Counterfactuals provide a welcome broadening of scope when it comes to exploring the context, thus they are particularly useful theory-building tools for qualitative research, which values the in-depth exploration of the context and the phenomenon. Nevertheless, we currently do not know whether and how researchers can leverage counterfactuals as a methodological tool in qualitative research. To rectify this, we offer a systematic review of all empirical qualitative papers actively engaged with counterfactuals published in six management journals, from the first volume to the latest published in 2023. Our review study reveals that counterfactuals (somewhat surprisingly) can take the form of a factual scenario (i.e., an unexpected occurrence in the given research setting) or of a fictional scenario (i.e., mentally generated ‘what-if’ schemata that probe the causality of the emerging findings). In another dimension, counterfactuals can be employed to zoom in on the phenomenon to capture the fine-grained details of the phenomenon and/or zoom out to explore it from a broader perspective. We illustrate the different theoretical gains accruing to the authors by using these four types of counterfactuals individually. Notably, we find that only a minority of authors used several of these types in concert and we reveal how their complementarity can provide further impetus to theorizing.