Narrow Results

Women’s entrepreneurship has taken its position in the sphere of entrepreneurship research as well as in the business world. Several features and attributes characterize and distinguish women entrepreneurs across countries. This paper aims at identifying and discerning the various factors influencing the entrepreneurial career of Tunisian women entrepreneurs and the impediments they face. For this, a qualitative exploratory study was conducted with a sample of 23 women entrepreneurs in Tunisia. This study shows the existence of several factors spurring the entrepreneurial career of the women entrepreneurs, including personal, social and environmental factors as well as following obstacles.

This study aims to explore the interrelationship between different types of stigma experienced by people with mental illness. A multiple case studies approach was adopted, and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with ten Chinese with mental illness in Hong Kong. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that the respondents were stigmatized by the public, their significant others, and themselves. Results suggested that stigma from the public and significant others might have remarkable association with self-stigma among the respondents. Moreover, self-stigma might reinforce the sense of powerlessness and the adoption of negative coping strategies. A self-disruptive vicious cycle of stigma of people with mental illness is proposed and discussed.

Social work research is an important part of social work practice. It adds to the knowledge base of the profession, facilitates understanding of the challenges facing society and encourages researchers to find solutions to these challenges. The focus of qualitative research in social work in India has likewise been generating and adding to the knowledge base of the profession. More specifically, qualitative methods of data collection have not been interrogated from the perspective of their potential to enhance competencies such as empathy and critical reflection amongst the students of social work. This paper examines the possibility of using observation, a method of data collection in qualitative research, to enhance empathy and critical reflection amongst students of social work. The paper is based on the outcomes of an assignment on observation given to second semester postgraduate students of social work in the Department of Social Work, University of Delhi, India. The assignment required the students to take on the role of marginalized members of society and use observation as a method in the field to record the responses of the generalized others towards them. The assignment also encouraged the students to reflect on their reactions and responses to the behavior of people towards them when they performed the specific roles. The outcome of the assignment points towards the possibility of using practical training in observation as a method of data collection in facilitating empathetic understanding and critical reflection amongst students, when used in conjunction with role-taking.

In this paper we challenge the traditional notion of ambiguity as an undesirable element in New Product Development (NPD) and explore how companies sometimes sustain or even increase ambiguity during their NPD projects. Based on qualitative analysis of case data from four NPD projects in the medical-device industry, we present a model by which this process can be better understood. We identify four ways that NPD projects can benefit from temporarily sustaining ambiguity: retaining fallback options, saving costs, saving time, and retaining ideas.

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.

Many advanced economies are at the forefront of the growth of university–industry (U–I) collaborations. But many developing countries have yet to fully implement this type of important linkage phenomenon. We report empirical findings from our study conducted in Sri Lanka to provide more explanations on the nature of U–I collaboration in developing countries. We used multiple methods to collect empirical data, namely a questionnaire survey, interviews with university academic staff and a few company managers, held focus group workshops and exploited secondary data on national government sponsorship initiatives linked to U–I collaborations. This paper discusses key practical implications around current modes of U–I collaborations, barriers to collaboration and funding of collaborations, which provide a number of valuable lessons for the advancement of knowledge.

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.

As strategic innovation may lead to high revenue and profit growth a deeper understanding of any enabling organizational capabilities is highly relevant to both researchers and managers. Therefore, in this paper we focus on the concept of "ambidexterity". More specifically, we use a qualitative research in five Dutch industrial sectors to study the ambidexterity strategies that established firms use for their systematic creation of strategic innovations.

We find that established companies have to cope with different ambidexterity frictions in the initiation and commercialization phases of strategic innovation projects. These results add to the emerging academic discussion on ambidexterity by showing that the appropriate ambidexterity approach may not only differ by innovation type but also by the specific phase of the innovation project. Our findings are also relevant to managerial practice as they suggest a limited value of isolated business development units for strategic innovation initiation.

While it could be argued that globalisation would diminish the importance of a company’s location, research has shown that in an increasingly complex, knowledge-based and dynamic economy, regional collaboration has in fact become a critical aspect of enhancing competitiveness, locally as well as globally. Still, in order to create sustainable, innovative and successful clusters, interaction and collaboration among its members is necessary, which is not always easy to accomplish and requires actions that stimulate bottom-up activity rather than top-down directives.

Taking a practice-based perspective, this paper explores what cluster management do in their everyday activities to support collaboration among cluster members, based on a qualitative case study of 14 Swedish regional clusters and cluster initiatives. The paper contributes by outlining and discussing two distinct and essential practices–orchestrating and narrating.

This paper contributes to the literature and management practice by opening the “black box” of firms’ absorptive capacity (AC) processes. Following a process research approach and based on in-depth comparative case studies of four German manufacturing companies, we develop and empirically validate a procss model of the firm-internal AC process. Our model integrates the different single elements (e.g., individuals, teams, departments) as well as the different linear and nonlinear causal interactions that constitute the firm’s ability to identify, adopt, implement and exploit external information and knowledge. Furthermore, the paper elaborates on various organizational leverages to increase the effectiveness of the identified process flows. The findings provide explanatory insight into the organisational prerequisites of AC. Thus, the paper simultaneously contributes to enhance the academic and management’s understanding of firms’ AC by identifying its constitutional key elements, their different kinds of processual interrelation as well as organisational prerequisites and points of leverage to modify, measure, and improve the AC of a company.

Over the past decade, Open Innovation (OI) literature has extended its scope beyond strictly economical contexts to the context of societal value creation. This has given rise to the notion of distributed knowledge as a driver for sustainable innovation development. Over the past 15 years, the concept of Urban Living Labs (ULLs) has gained popularity to put social OI into practice. Hence, this concept is often applied in urban environments to support transition processes that try to tackle so-called wicked problems. However, a fuzzy understanding of this ULL concept still exists, due to an unclear understanding of its value creation mechanics. Therefore, this paper aims to both conceptualise and gain a better understanding of how ULLs are instrumentalised and create value. This is studied from the perspective of “ecosystem stakeholders” that participate in ULL projects. These insights are obtained through a case study with a multimethod qualitative research approach. The main data sources are a series of 20 semi-structured key-informant interviews, four focus groups, and participatory observation. The results show that the value creation for the participating stakeholders can be summarised in two main clusters: (1) the ULL as a way to build and strengthen the capacities of participating stakeholders; and (2) the ULL as a way to facilitate purpose driven fulfilment in urban transition processes.

Innovation hubs are a promising new way to foster innovations in rural areas. However, research in this field is still at a preliminary stage. The literature neither provides a clear definition, nor a systematic overview of roles and types of these hubs. To help close this research gap, we first conducted expert interviews with 10 different innovation hubs in rural areas in Germany. Based on our qualitative content analysis, we were able to identify four central roles of such hubs (supporters, knowledge brokers, networkers, and physical experiment spaces) and develop an analysis scheme for evaluating hubs regarding these roles. Second, we applied these findings to a total sample of 45 innovation hubs in rural areas in Germany which enabled us to provide a detailed characterisation and comparison of different types of innovation hubs. Further, we offer first insights into the specific role of these types in regional development as well as requirements for their long-term survival. With these insights, our study provides a useful basis for future research on the concept and impact of innovation hubs as well as the successful management of innovation hubs in practice.

This paper contributes to the literature and management practice by opening the “black box” of firms’ absorptive capacity (AC) processes. Following a process research approach and based on in-depth comparative case studies of four German manufacturing companies, we develop and empirically validate a procss model of the firm-internal AC process. Our model integrates the different single elements (e.g., individuals, teams, departments) as well as the different linear and nonlinear causal interactions that constitute the firm’s ability to identify, adopt, implement and exploit external information and knowledge. Furthermore, the paper elaborates on various organizational leverages to increase the effectiveness of the identified process flows. The findings provide explanatory insight into the organisational prerequisites of AC. Thus, the paper simultaneously contributes to enhance the academic and management’s understanding of firms’ AC by identifying its constitutional key elements, their different kinds of processual interrelation as well as organisational prerequisites and points of leverage to modify, measure, and improve the AC of a company.

In this chapter, we challenge the traditional notion of ambiguity as an undesirable element in New Product Development (NPD) and explore how companies sometimes sustain or even increase ambiguity during their NPD projects. Based on qualitative analysis of case data from four NPD projects in the medical devices industry, we present a model by which this process can be better understood. We identify four ways that NPD projects can benefit from temporarily sustaining ambiguity: retaining fallback options, saving costs, saving time, and retaining ideas.

This chapter elucidates the science of business storytelling uniquely applied through the prism of Rosile and colleagues’ storytelling diamond. It draws on a nascent study of business venture creation for poverty eradication in an Indigenous South African setting. It is one of the first qualitative single-case studies — to the knowledge of the author as the writing of this chapter — to apply self-correcting storytelling science using Karl Popper’s deductive falsificationist epistemology. The chapter begins by explicating the newly emerging fourth-wave relational ontology and then proceeds to demonstrate the practical applications thereof, drawing on this landmark sustainable development study.

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.

Attitudes towards mathematics has a long history in mathematics education research. Over the time, research on attitudes and, more in general, on affective aspects developed a wide range of methodologies and perspectives in mathematics education, playing a growing role in the field. In this chapter, I will describe the development of the research about attitude in mathematics education, discussing the main issues emerged in this field. In particular, I will discuss the definition problem, that is the emergence of the need for a clear definition of the construct, and the ground for the development of our (TMA) three-dimensional model of attitude (Di Martino and Zan, 2010). In the last part of the chapter, some fields of application of the TMA model will also be discussed.

Look at a typical microfinance institution’s website and you will find heartwarming stories about people who managed to dig themselves out of poverty and into prosperity. Often, these narratives, like the one in Box 9.1, suggest people did not do it just for themselves, but also for their children and communities, so that they, too, could have a better future.

Qualitative research is a broad approach for studying social phenomena albeit being time-consuming when used for data analysis. There has been some research work in the application of text mining in traditional Chinese textual data in recent years. This paper investigates the performance of PolyAnalyst text mining software in traditional Chinese textual data. 200 Chan Ding practitioners’ testimonies were downloaded from Shakyamuni Buddhist Foundation website and analyzed. The keywords were extracted, counted and correlated automatically by the software. The results implied that the practitioners should follow the teaching and practice diligently, so that they will gain the power to change their body and life. This result was consistent with Chan Ding practitioners’ experience and previous Chan Ding studies. Therefore, PolyAnalyst text mining software is a rapid and reliable tool for qualitative research and has the potential to be applied in various fields of social research.

Mixed methods research is becoming increasingly articulated, attached to research practice, and recognized as the third major research approach or research paradigm, along with qualitative research and quantitative research. Inquiry and investigation about problems of an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary domain, such as library and information science studies require decision to be taken about an appropriate research design. In making such a decision, the researcher must tacitly assume a philosophical point of view or a research paradigm. There are four research paradigms which construct the basis of the selection of research methodology and research methods designs. These paradigms include: a) positivism, b) interpretivism, c) critical theory, and d) post-structuralism (Bazargan, 2007). Positivism is the basis of quantitative research method, and of the qualitative research methods are the three paradigms mentioned above (namely; interpretivism, critical theory, and post-structuralism). Because of the nature and complexity of problems in library and information science settings and also the newly matters evolved in this multidisciplinary field, such as information technologies, digital libraries and so on, neither of the quantitative nor qualitative research methods, alone, are able to investigate problems pertaining to them thoroughly. Therefore, researchers of this domain require have a shift toward applying a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods designs that is named mixed methods research. In this article, first of all we concisely review the philosophical point of views (paradigms) which construct the basis of research methods. Thereafter history and the characteristics of mixed methods research will be reviewed. Finally, applications of mixed methods research in the library and information science (LIS) are discussed.