자연주의적 탐구조사(Naturalistic Inquiry)

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Author Q&A with Eli Pariser Q: What is a Filter Bubble? A: Were used to thinking of the Internet like an enormous library, with services like Google providing a universal map. But thats no longer really the case. Sites from Google and Facebook to Yahoo News and the New York Times are now increasingly personalized based on your web history, they filter information to show you the stuff they think you want to see. That can be very different from what everyone else sees or from what we need to see. Your filter bubble is this unique, personal universe of information created just for you by this array of personalizing filters. Its invisible and its becoming more and more difficult to escape. Q: I like the idea that websites might show me information relevant to my interestsit can be overwhelming how much information is available I already only watch TV shows and listen to radio programs that are known to have my same political leaning. Whats so bad about this? A: Its true: Weve always selected information sources that accord with our own views. But one of the creepy things about the filter bubble is that were not really doing the selecting. When you turn on Fox News or MSNBC, you have a sense of what their editorial sensibility is: Fox isnt going to show many stories that portray Obama in a good light, and MSNBC isnt going to the ones that portray him badly. Personalized filters are a different story: You dont know who they think you are or on what basis theyre showing you what theyre showing. And as a result, you dont really have any sense of whats getting edited out or, in fact, that things are being edited out at all. Q: How does money fit into this picture? A: The rush to build the filter bubble is absolutely driven by commercial interests. Its becoming clearer and clearer that if you want to have lots of people use your website, you need to provide them with personally relevant information, and if you want to make the most money on ads, you need to provide them with relevant ads. This has triggered a personal information gold rush, in which the major companies Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the like are competing to create the most comprehensive portrait of each of us to drive personalized products. Theres also a whole behavior market opening up in which every action you take online every mouse click, every form entry can be sold as a commodity. Q: What is the Internet hiding from me? A: As Google engineer Jonathan McPhie explained to me, its different for every person and in fact, even Google doesnt totally know how it plays out on an individual level. At an aggregate level, they can see that people are clicking more. But they cant predict how each individuals information environment is altered. In general, the things that are most likely to get edited out are the things youre least likely to click on. Sometimes, this can be a real service if you never read articles about sports, why should a newspaper put a football story on your front page? But apply the same logic to, say, stories about foreign policy, and a problem starts to emerge. Some things, like homelessness or genocide, arent highly clickable but are highly important. Q: Which companies or Websites are personalizing like this? A: In one form or another, nearly every major website on the Internet is flirting with personalization. But the one that surprises people most is Google. If you and I Google the same thing at the same time, we may get very different results. Google tracks hundreds of signals about each of us what kind of computer were on, what weve searched for in the past, even how long it takes us to decide what to click on and uses it to customize our results. When the result is that our favorite pizza parlor shows up first when we Google pizza, its useful. But when the result is that we only see the information that is aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, its difficult to maintain perspective. Q: Are any sites being transparent about their personalization? A: Some sites do better than others. Amazon, for example, is often quite transparent about the personalization it does: Were showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984. But its one thing to personalize products and another to personalize whole information flows, like Google and Facebook are doing. And very few users of those services are even marginally aware that this kind of filtering is at work. Q: Does this issue of personalization impact my privacy or jeopardize my identity at all? A: Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop. A lot of people see a simple version of this on Facebook: You idly click on an old classmate, Facebook reads that as a friendship, and pretty soon youre seeing every one of John or Sues posts. Gone awry, personalization can create compulsive media media targeted to appeal to your personal psychological weak spots. You can find yourself eating the equivalent of information junk food instead of having a more balanced information diet. Q: You make it clear that while most Websites user agreements say they wont share our personal information, they also maintain the right to change the rules at any time. Do you foresee sites changing those rules to profit from our online personas? A: They already have. Facebook, for example, is notorious for its bait-and-switch tactics when it comes to privacy. For a long time, what you Liked on Facebook was private, and the site promised to keep it that way. Then, overnight, they made that information public to the world, in order to make it easier for their advertisers to target specific subgroups. Theres an irony in the fact that while Rolex needs to get Tom Cruises permission to put his face on a billboard, it doesnt need to get my permission to advertise my endorsement to my friends on Facebook. We need laws that give people more rights in their personal data. Q: Is there any way to avoid this personalization? What if Im not logged into a site? A: Even if youre not logged into Google, for example, an engineer told me there are 57 signals that the site uses to figure out who you are: whether youre on a Mac or PC or iPad, where youre located when youre Googling, etc. And in the near future, itll be possible to fingerprint unique devices, so that sites can tell which individual computer youre using. Thats why erasing your browser cookies is at best a partial solutionit only partially limits the information available to personalizers. What we really need is for the companies that power the filter bubble to take responsibility for the immense power they now have the power to determine what we see and dont see, what we know and dont know. We need them to make sure we continue to have access to public discourse and a view of the common good. A world based solely on things we Like is a very incomplete world. Im optimistic that they can. Its worth remembering that newspapers werent always informed by a sense of journalistic ethics. They existed for centuries without it. It was only when critics like Walter Lippman began to point out how important they were that the newspapers began to change. And while journalistic ethics arent perfect, because of them we have been better informed over the last century. We need algorithmic ethics to guide us through the next. Q: What are the business leaders at Google and Facebook and Yahoo saying about their responsibilities? A: To be honest, theyre frustratingly coy. They tend to frame the trend in the passive tense: Googles Eric Schmidt recently said It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them, rather than Google is making it very hard Mark Zuckerberg perfectly summed up the tension in personalization when he said A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. But he refuses to engage with what that means at a societal level especially for the people in Africa. Q: Your background is as a political organizer for the liberal Website MoveOn.org. How does that experience inform your book? A: Ive always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. Thats what excited me about MoveOn here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change. But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think its partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), its not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive. And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems cant be solved by a person or two they require whole societies to participate. And that just wont happen if were all isolated in a web of one.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Understanding the small business sector

In order to thrive, small businesses are often advised to develop relationships with external organizations that have the potential to assist business development, survival, and growth. A focus on the external relationships of the small business underlines the vital importance of external resources in moving a small business toward increased success and profitability. Covering the period from 1990 to 2002, this paper reviews the small business literature as it relates to the use of these external relationships (such as organizational partnerships, networks, and alliances). In response to both academic and practitioner demand for further research in this area, an exhaustive analysis of the relevant literature was conducted and three “meta” research questions representing the connections within this literature were formed. The resource-based view of the firm, resource dependency theory, and punctuated equilibrium theory are proposed as useful starting points for exploring these research questions and can give direction for moving forward in this research area.

External Relationships and the Small Business: A Review of Small Business Alliance and Network Research*

Individual level innovation studies often assess only one dimension of innovative behavior. As such, they do not sufficiently capture the richness of the construct of individual innovation. Develops and tests a multi‐dimensional measure of individual innovative behavior. Identifies descriptions of 289 innovation related behaviors and codes these into a hypothesized factor structure consisting of the following five dimensions: opportunity exploration, generativity, formative investigation, championing, and application. Structural equation modeling used on a sample of 225 employees from nine different organizations delivered a relatively poor fit between the hypothesized factor structure and respondents’ job behaviors. However, a single factor measure based on items representing all five factors resulted in an alpha reliability of 0.95 thus supporting a multi‐dimensional conceptualization of innovative behavior in general. Discusses implications for future research.

Toward a multi‐dimensional measure of individual innovative behavior

While many large businesses start out as a small enterprise, remarkably little is known about how an organization actually changes internally during the periods of growth. Small business growth is known to strain internal communication processes, for example, which likely limits growth opportunities. Information systems are often called upon to remedy such deficiencies. Through a participatory action research project, we investigated the ways in which a small business management team developed an IS-enabled solution to address their growth needs. During the progression of the project, a new outcome of organizational effectiveness, internal transparency, was identified and developed. Adopting a punctuated equilibrium perspective, a theoretical process model is proposed that sheds light on a relationship between internal transparency, small business growth, and IS. The paper concludes with observations that internal transparency may well be a concept that offers significant potential for MIS research as well as a discussion about the applicability and credibility of participatory action research for this project.

Small business growth and internal transparency: the role of information systems

Management Information Systems researchers rely on longitudinal case studies to investigate a variety of phenomena such as systems development, system implementation, and information system...

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fejis.2011.53.pdf

Improving validity and reliability in longitudinal case study timelines

This study explores the homogeneity of small firms that have achieved and sustained high growth. Using a recent population of the 50 "Best Managed" Canadian firms identified as achieving high business growth for three or more consecutive years, firm homogeneity in terms of current management challenges is analyzed. In contrast to the rich body of literature available regarding the heterogeneity of managerial challenges and patterns during small business growth and development, this study finds that once small businesses begin to sustain high growth, their reported management challenges converge. We find that, controlling for location and performance, the high-growth small firms in our population experience similar management challenges regardless of the specific firm size, revenue level, or industry. Our results challenge the "received wisdom" that suggests the managerial challenges faced by small firms during their business growth and development always vary. Management implications and future research directions are discussed. "All roads lead to Rome." Author unknown Introduction Small business development has long been an important management research theme. The topic has significant appeal to small business owners, management researchers, business consultants, and economic development agencies (Huang and Brown 1999). Each of these distinct stakeholders has an interest in understanding how and why growth occurs, as well as the entrepreneurial, organizational, and strategic factors that influence a firm's ability to achieve sustainable economic development (Storey 1994). A common objective of these research efforts is to understand more about the processes involved in becoming a successful small business. Recently, researchers have focused on successful high-growth small businesses and examined the styles and characteristics of the owner-entrepreneur (for example, Sadler-Smith et al. 2003; Wasilczuk 2000), firm strategies (for example, Delmar, Davidsson, and Gartner 2003; Qian and Li 2003), and, to a lesser extent, organizational characteristics (for example, Smallbone, Lieg, and North 1995). This research shines a spotlight on small businesses that have achieved the important goal of sustainable growth. A dominant view has developed within this collection of research holding that successful small firms are more different than similar. That is, the path to sustainable high growth is heterogeneous (Delmar, Davidsson, and Gartner 2003), and the journey uniquely affects firms in individual ways (Orser, Hogarth-Scott, and Riding 2000; Huang and Brown 1999; Terpstra and Olson 1993). However, at the same time, a conflicting view of sustainable high growth argues that successful small businesses are actually quite homogeneous in strategy and style, and that a relatively small "repertoire" of skills and characteristics is associated with sustainable high growth (Sadler-Smith et al. 2003; Miller and Chen 1996; Smallbone, Lieg, and North 1995). Exploring deeper into these apparently contradictory views has practical, academic, and policy implications. From a practical standpoint, insight regarding how small businesses change during growth has the potential to provide useful guidance for organizational planning. In the spirit of scientific discovery, further refinement of the differences between achieving and maintaining high growth is a key step in understanding the subject as a whole. Finally, in light of the extent to which public policymakers have historically been concerned with assisting small business development, this research provides useful knowledge to guide policy regarding the specific needs of small firms. Conducting this exploration and making these contributions are the foci of our study. One key division within the body of this research centers on the differences between small firms that are developing but have not yet achieved sustainable growth and those that have. …

Christopher T. Street

Papers

External Relationships and the Small Business: A Review of Small Business Alliance and Network Research*

Toward a multi‐dimensional measure of individual innovative behavior

Small business growth and internal transparency: the role of information systems

Improving validity and reliability in longitudinal case study timelines

Having Arrived: The Homogeneity of High-Growth Small Firms*