This paper draws from recent research on how methodology is taught across leading sociology, organisational psychology and management programmes in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and west coast of the USA. The focus is how best practice is constituted in terms of researching organisations, and its shortcomings in different disciplinary environments. While disciplinary and institutional contexts are noteworthy, the binary division into qualitative and quantitative approaches is very significant. The case of researching organisations (as an inter disciplinary topic of investigation) is instructive in highlighting two aspects of the qualitative / quantitative binary: (1) it tends to be fictive at the level of practice; but more importantly, (2) it tends to reify one-sided appreciations of contemporary organisations.