Narrow Results

The common argument for the small business is that there simply is no strategy; that small businesses react heuristically to events, guided by the whims and passions of the owner-manager. Strategy, however, can be looked at from a behavioural perspective, as opposed to the more normative strategic planning schools that small firms rarely abide by. This concept of strategy as 'behaviour' encompasses the actions of the owner-manager, the context of the small firm, and the consequences of the actions taken. It looks at strategy as part deliberate and part emergent, allowing for the inclusion of both external influences and internal decision making. Grounded theory research on small firms in Malta has in fact shown strategy to be a dynamic phenomenon, one that can be viewed as a set of defined pathways between identifiable life cycle states. The paper shall outline the research findings that have identified five distinct patterns of small firm strategic behaviour, each with its own unique trajectory and performance implications. Understanding which strategic pathway a small firm belongs to allows for a comprehensive insight into the firm's competitive behaviour, and a prediction of the consequences of that behaviour.

This collaborative paper aims to reflexively evaluate the versatile and comprehensive application of grounded theory, comparatively using two studies researching the strategic behaviour of small organisations within a small island state. The methodological stance adopted is that of practitioner researchers, critically analysing the research positioning and processes in two large grounded theory studies that mapped the competitive behaviours of some 100 small businesses in the small island EU state of Malta. The study evaluates grounded theory processes and actions taken in the two studies, depicting the systematic collection, comparison and analysis of the data gathered, concept generation, continuous interaction between actions and context, use of in-depth interviews combined with quantitative data, coding, mapping and categorisation of the data collected, and the use of MAXQDA as a viable software tool to carry out grounded theory. This practitioner research study comprises detailed practice-related implications for the use of grounded theory in researching small organisations, in a manner that a novice grounded theory practitioner can adopt and a manager in a small business can appreciate.

Despite the rapid development, the field of data mining and knowledge discovery (DMKD) is still vaguely defined and lack of integrated descriptions. This situation causes difficulties in teaching, learning, research, and application. This paper surveys a large collection of DMKD literature to provide a comprehensive picture of current DMKD research and classify these research activities into high-level categories using grounded theory approach; it also evaluates the longitudinal changes of DMKD research activities during the last decade.

A qualitative empirical study explores the psychological process by which transportation consumers adopt alternatives to single occupancy vehicles. The study's findings give rise to the Motive-Technology-Belief (MTB) framework, a theory that conceives of technology adoption in terms of three mental structures: motives are inner mental reasons; technologies are tools that pertain to motives; and beliefs are associations between motives and/or technologies. Their behavioral interactions are governed by three conscious processes: selecting is the process of choosing a tool in response to an immediate need; evaluating is the process of forming beliefs about tools; and maintaining is the process of determining the functional status of tools. They are augmented by five unconscious auxiliary processes: perceiving, focusing, framing, consolidating, and acting.

The primary contribution of this paper is the first coherent theory that explains some of the inner mental processes pertaining to technology adoption. However, the study described in this paper also combines existing theory with original field research to lay the foundation for a more comprehensive causal theory of the adoption process that will provide a step-by-step explanation of how events or life experiences cause a consumer's beliefs about a technology to change over time. Finally, the study identifies evaluating, selecting, maintaining, and the auxiliary processes that govern motivation as fundamental "microlaws" of innovation i.e. regular rules describing the generating processes of emergent innovations.

Artificial markets are an emerging form of agent-based simulation in which agents represent individual industries, firms, or consumers interacting under simulated market conditions. While artificial markets demonstrate considerable potential for advancing innovation research, the validity of the method depends on the ability of researchers to construct agents that faithfully capture the key behavior of targeted entities. To date, few such methods have been documented in the academic literature.

This article describes a novel method for combining qualitative innovation research (case studies, grounded theory, and sequence analysis) with software engineering techniques to synthesize simulation-ready theories of adoption behavior. A step-by-step example is provided from the transportation domain. The result was a theory of adoption behavior that is sufficiently precise and formal to be expressed in Unified Modeling Language (UML). The article concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the method and recommendations future applications to the study of diffusion of innovation.

This study explores how China’s solar photovoltaic (PV) industry can catch up so rapidly without radical technological innovation. Through the grounded theory method, we found it was the industrial innovation ecosystem construction and industrial innovation ecological relationship maintenance that made China’s solar PV industry gain competitive advantages. From the perspective of the industrial innovation ecosystem, clustering and colocation provided a foundation for industrial innovation ecosystem construction. China’s solar PV enterprises maintain the ecological relationship among the actors of the industrial innovation ecosystem through several ecological strategies, including resource orchestration and co-opetition. Hub firms played an important role in overcoming the liability of newness and putting forward the vision of shared fate in the early stage of industry development. Local governments and industry associations provided institutional support, coordination, and intermediary to enterprises.

There are many underlying reasons justifying the importance of researching the informal economy from the academic and the practical perspectives. Evidence suggests that commercial activities generated by the informal economy could constitute an average of thirty percent of all commercial activities across the world with informal entrepreneurship consuming a big chunk of such activities. This research will focus on exploring the antecedents of informal entrepreneurship in Egypt as a developing country that is still undergoing a complicated political and economic phase that started in the financial crisis of 2008 passing by the revolution in 2011 and the subsequent corrective revolution in 2013.

Based on grounded theory and combined with empirical investigation of self-organized entrepreneurial behavior, we explored the difference between male and female’s cognitive mode, cognitive bias and behavior influence. It is found that the cognitive pattern of self-organized female entrepreneurs is more narrow and obtrusive, but a few outstanding female entrepreneurs show outstanding performance. Self-organized male entrepreneurs show open and divergent structured cognition. On cognitive bias, women of ordinary self-organized entrepreneurs have a greater range of deviations. In terms of behavior influence, self-organized male entrepreneurs are strongly dependent on prior cognition due to their more emphasis on their professional and technological foundation, and their behavior is more persistent.

This paper describes how facilitation, as distinct from focus groups, was used as a research method in a workshop situation (Woodhead and Downs, 2001). It explains the methodology to analyze qualitative data from a structured process acted out in a workshop. The structure, using a questionnaire as an agenda, was designed to elicit the experiences and expectations of Value Management (VM) clients in the UK. The subjects comprised 23 clients from a broad range of businesses. The paper describes various methods of analyzing qualitative data, and explains the novel method, based on grounded theory and other techniques that could be applied in other contexts such as part of an architect's briefing process. That is, the method discussed in this paper is not confined to the investigation of VM in which it was used. A clear advantage of this method is that it provides a clear audit trail, which shows explicitly how respondents' replies were clustered together, and how this was subsequently interpreted. This method offers the potential to be used by another VM team to collect data from a large sample of individuals. One can then define functions from the data before constructing a FAST diagram (Snodgrass and Kasi, 1986) to represent an "ideal" model of what has to be done; the dimensioning of this representation is where insights are developed.

With science-based research being promoted to a strategic level, accelerating technological transfer from universities/institutes has became an urgent subject in academia. Yet, research focusing on the entrepreneurial cognition of scientists remains a blank. Grounded theory was adopted to track and analyze the Science-Based Entrepreneurial Firms (SBEFs) from four universities/PRIs. The study finds that the entrepreneurial cognition of scientists plays a dominant role in activating entrepreneurial intention. Social network propels the entrepreneurial intention. Meanwhile, acquiring diverse capabilities embedded within entrepreneurial cognition will help scientists to discover entrepreneurial opportunity at an early stage and build up towards the entrepreneurial intention to become entrepreneurs. Such conclusions shed light on providing theoretical contribution for policy making on state independent innovation.

By studying and analyzing the advantages and characteristics of the business operation oriented teaching mode through the comparison with the traditional teaching mode under the background of advertising education in higher vocational colleges, this paper tries to solve the problem that advertising teaching in higher vocational colleges is out of line with market demand. By taking the service platform co-created by advertising teachers and students in Zhejiang Creative Park as the research object, this paper conducts interviews and questionnaires on the internship results of students from grade 2017 to grade 2019, carries out study on grounded theory, achieves theoretical saturation through the three-level coding program, analyzes and discusses the final results. Finally, this paper discusses the impact of the business operation oriented teaching reform on students’ professional level, practical experience and teachers’ teaching and project management abilities.

This study explores how China’s solar photovoltaic (PV) industry can catch up so rapidly without radical technological innovation. Through the grounded theory method, we found it was the industrial innovation ecosystem construction and industrial innovation ecological relationship maintenance that made China’s solar PV industry gain competitive advantages. From the perspective of the industrial innovation ecosystem, clustering and colocation provided a foundation for industrial innovation ecosystem construction. China’s solar PV enterprises maintain the ecological relationship among the actors of the industrial innovation ecosystem through several ecological strategies, including resource orchestration and co-opetition. Hub firms played an important role in overcoming the liability of newness and putting forward the vision of shared fate in the early stage of industry development. Local governments and industry associations provided institutional support, coordination, and intermediary to enterprises.

We encourage fully enacting grounded theory (GT) to help enable organizational science to make a turn toward relational process ontologies (RPOs). RPOs unify practice and philosophy and enable more positive aspirations for organizational futures. How researchers enact GT has changed over three waves, waves which we explore in depth in terms of theoretical mindset and practice. GT is presently inadequate for the complex theorization RPOs require; therefore, we need a fourth wave of GT. Using an RPO of theory-as-historical, we guide the development of a fourth wave of GT. Theory-as-historical sees first- and second-order codes as serving different historical aims, thus second-order codes do not have to build on first-order codes. We discuss the fourth wave GT’s implications for new methods, questions, forms of knowledge, and insights, which enable organizational science to create theories that perform better organizations.

Glaser and Strauss’s grounded theory (GT) was a new theory of conceptual sociology. GT emerged from Glaser’s empirical sociology and Strauss’s pragmatic symbolic interactionism. The result of GT was a practical method to build theory from qualitative data. Unfortunately, the practicality of GT hid its ontology, epistemology, and philosophical foundations. Three waves, or historical periods, of scientific philosophy have attempted to reveal GT’s foundations. These waves, inductivism, positivism, and social constructivism, left GT with no ground and no theory. This chapter pinpoints where GT went off track by examining the foundations of GT. We use Hegel’s philosophy to develop a fourth wave of GT using a foundation of dialectic ontological processes, with precisely what that means being explored in-depth. The intent of this fourth wave of GT is to get it back on track. Fourth-wave GT recognizes the multiplicity of intra-active, self-organizing ontologies necessary to defining ground and theory. Fourth-wave GT embraces Peirce’s, Heidegger’s, Bhaskar’s, and Žižek’s ontologies, resisting the grounding fallacies of logical positivism and social constructivism, contributing to the question of what theory can be, creating both ground and theory by attending deeply to philosophical concerns.

One of the most intriguing and up-and-coming debates within qualitative research concerns a discussion about the role of ontological significance regarding distance versus depth within research. Traditional qualitative methodologies for interpreting experiences and stories, such as first-, second-, and third-wave grounded theory and structured interviewing techniques, are built on underlying assumptions regarding linear assumptions about experience rooted in traditional Western approaches (Boje, 2019; Boje & Rosile, 2020). These methodologies prioritize the role of distance, which refers to the tendency to fit experience within preexisting narrative structures with a clear and linear beginning, climax, and resolution. The result of this tendency to prioritize the distance within qualitative research has come at the expense of exploring depth within qualitative research, which refers to rejecting traditional Western assumptions about linearity in favor of nonlinear approaches to examining experience in light of ontological significance. This chapter explores the implications of exploring depth over distance within qualitative research and examines a methodology designed to access greater ontological depth in qualitative research through the use of nonlinear conceptualizations of the nature of experience, the triskelion multiplicity of ontological understanding model (TMOUM). TMOUM is a Heideggerian self-correcting phenomenological methodology that incorporates living stories to reveal multiplicities of ontological understanding (Saraceno, 2021). This model incorporates storytelling, grounded theory, and a variation of a Peircean self-correcting methodology to engage in a spiraling toward an aspect of the ontological structure of phenomena.

Grounded theory, as a qualitative research method, constructs theories grounded in data on previously unexplored phenomena. To this end, it requires the researcher to be able to form concepts and ideas from the data, to withstand uncertainty and a lack of understanding, and to accept the return, at any point, to the initial stage of the research process. Although grounded theory permits the required flexibility to produce and interpret themes that emerge from the data, its three dominant “waves” are techniques of knowing that are separated from “being-in-the world.” This means they discard the existence of the researcher’s ontological status and that of others in time, space, and matter. This state of affairs maintains the “(inter)subjectivity–objectivity” dualism and yields a “disembodied organization research” that develops and turns inductive inferences into general categories. Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses the fallacies of each of the three waves of grounded theory and advances a fourth one that adds theoretical anchoring and, therefore, provides a basis for developing theories.

This paper presents the aims, the methodology and the preliminary results of an in-progress investigation into the users of four libraries belonging to the City Library Network (one main library and three satellite public libraries) in Perugia, a city in the centre of Italy with 160,000 inhabitants. The main aim of the investigation is to explore the degree of satisfaction, the needs, the motivation and the perceptions of both real and potential users, by means of quantitative and qualitative research methods. It also aims to be a reflection on the methodology used, accepting that the dichotomy "qualitative versus quantitative" has long been set aside and considers the two approaches in fact deeply complementary. On an operational level, the investigation foresaw the use of questionnaires to evaluate user satisfaction, and face-to-face interviews and focus group sessions aimed at examining specific issues raised by the questionnaires, enquiring not only into the "how much" of the incidence of certain variables but more interestingly into the "why". Finally, the paper examines the relationship between empirical research and theoretical speculation. The investigation has attempted to ascertain the validity of the application of Grounded Theory Methodology and to establish whether the ATLAS.ti program is able to guarantee greater objectivity when applying qualitative research techniques.

The paper reflects on the methods used to carry out user segmentation and the positioning of library services in comparison to other forms of cultural offers through the use of the qualitative approach. The reflection is based on the results of an in-progress investigation into the users of four libraries belonging to the City Library Network (one main library and three satellite public libraries) in Perugia, a city in the centre of Italy with 160,000 inhabitants. On an operational level, the investigation foresaw the use of questionnaires, face-to-face interviews and focus group interviews. Regarding user segmentation, specifically the possibility to simplify the market (in our case both real and potential) by dividing it into the most homogeneous segments of users possible and also the most different, we are encouraged to enquire if when examining libraries, like other forms of cultural consumption, the socio-demographic variables are still efficiently discriminating.

Demographic and socio-economic variables, such as age, gender, income and social class, widely used in analyses of library service users due to the fact they are easily accessed and inexpensive, nowadays risk being considered out-dated, as their treatment of user needs and desires is superficial and leaves a discrete margin of imprecision in dealing with the advantages and disadvantages of library services. Using qualitative survey techniques, our aim was to carry out a psychographic segmentation of the library user which would allow us to identify within the potential user basin homogeneous groups characterized by a shared image of what the library represents to them, sharing similar tastes, perceptions and habits, to whom the library can offer made-to-measure services through appropriate strategies in line with their preferences and expectations.

This paper presents results of a piece of research conducted in order to determine user preferences as to the nature of virtual worlds to be used as an environment for information retrieval. A study was carried out amongst postgraduate students and staff at Robert Gordon University, using a Grounded Theory methodology. Over one hundred interviews were carried out, in three cycles of interviewing, analysis, and integration with literature. The findings revealed that user preferences were determined less by structural features than by affective factors, such as familiarity, organisation, assistance, and quality of information and presentation.