Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/5/110/206.full.pdf

The american psychological association.

The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

PART 1 1. Business research strategies 2. Research designs 3. Planning a research project and formulating research questions 4. Getting Started: reviewing the literature 5. Ethics in business research PART 2 6. The nature of quantitative research 7. Sampling 8. Structured interviewing 9. Self-completion questionnaires 10. Asking questions 11. Structured observation 12. Content analysis 13. Secondary analysis and official statistics 14. Quantitative data analysis 15. Using SPSS for Windows PART 3 16. The nature of qualitative research 17. Ethnography and participant observation 18. Interviewing in qualitative research 19. Focus groups 20. Language in qualitative research 21. Documents as sources of data 22. Qualitative data analysis 23. Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis: Using NVivo PART 4 24. Breaking down the quantitative/qualitative divide 25. Combining quantitative and qualitative research 26. Internet research methods 27. Writing up business research

Business Research Methods

Qualitative research in business and management

Management academics have tended to rely on ethics codes developed by social researchers in related fields to inform their research practice. The point of this paper is to question whether this remains a viable approach in the current climate that is characterized by a significant increase in ethical regulation across the social sciences. We suggest that management researchers face ethical issues of a different nature to those most frequently confronted by other social science researchers, and argue for more explicit acknowledgement of contextual factors involved in management research. An exploratory analysis of the content of ethics codes formulated by nine social scientific associations is undertaken to identify the main ethical principles they cover and to analyse their underlying ethical tone. Drawing attention to the principle of reciprocity, which is found in very few codes, we suggest that an ethics code could be used to formulate new ways of thinking about management research relationships. Despite the risk that ethics codes may encourage instrumental compliance with minimal ethical obligations, we suggest they also have the potential to reflect a more aspirational agenda. The development of an ethics code for management research should therefore be seen as a potentially worthwhile project.

The Ethics of Management Research: An Exploratory Content Analysis

VOLUME ONE: CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY STUDIES Banana Time: Job Satisfaction and Informal Interaction - Donald Roy Perceptions and Methods in Men Who Manage - Melville Dalton Men and Women of the Corporation - Rosabeth Kanter Manufacturing Consent - Michael Burawoy Breakfast at Spiro's: Dramaturgy and Dominance - Michael Rosen The World of Corporate Managers - Robert Jackall Engineering Humour: Masculinity Joking and Conflict in Shop-Floor Relations - David Collinson Extract from Crafting Selves: Power Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace - Dorinne Kondo Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation - Gideon Kunda Theorizing Managerial Work: A Pragmatic Pluralist Approach to Interdisciplinary Research - Tony Watson Rational Choice Situated Action and the Social Control of Organizations: The Challenger Launch Decision - Diane Vaughan Strategizing as Lived Experience and Strategists - Dalvir Samra-Fredericks Power Control and Resistance in 'The Factory that Time Forgot' - Mahmoud Ezzamel et al. Extract from Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job - Julian Orr Extract from The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action - Diedre Boden Extract from Investigating Small Firms: Nice Work? - Ruth Holliday Narrative Interviewing and Narrative Analysis in a Study of a Cross-Border Merger - Anne-Marie Soderberg Speech Timing and Spacing: The Phenomenon of Organizational Closure - Francois Cooren and Gail T. Fairhurst, VOLUME TWO: METHODS APPROACHES TECHNIQUES: GUIDES AND EXEMPLARS The Infeasibility of Invariant Laws in Management Studies: A Reflective Dialogue in Defence of Case Studies - Tsuyoshi Numagami The Interview: From Neutral Stance to Political Involvement - Andrea Fontana and James Frey Rethinking Observation: From Method to Context - Michael Agrosino et al. Notes on (Field) notes - James Clifford The Textual Approach: Risk and Blame in Disaster Sensemaking - Robert Gephart Triangulation in Organizational Research: A Re-presentation - Julie Wolfram Cox and John Hassard The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Performance in an Office Supply Firm - David Boje Semiotics and the Study of Occupational and Organizational Cultures - Stephen Barley The Use of Grounded Theory for the Qualitative Analysis of Organizational Behaviour - Barry Turner Reflecting on the Strategic Use of CAQDAS to Manage and Report on the Qualitative Research Process - Mark Wickham and Megan Woods Longitudinal Field Research on Change - Andrew Pettigrew Historical Perspectives in Organization Studies: Factual Narrative and Archeo-Genealogical - Michael Rowlinson Action Research: Explaining the Diversity - Cathy Cassell and Phil Johnson Photography and Voice in Critical Qualitative Management Research - Samantha Warren Moments Mixed Methods and Paradigm Dialogues - Norman Denzin VOLUME THREE: PRACTICES AND PREOCCUPATIONS Extract from The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research - Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln Learning to Be a Qualitative Management Researcher - Catherine Cassell et al. Getting In Getting On Getting Out and Getting Back - David Buchanan et al. Reflections on the Researcher-Researched Relationship: A Woman Interviewing Men - Terry Arendell Real-Time Reflexivity: Prods to Reflection - Karl Weick Towards an Integrative Reflexivity in Organizational Research - Leah Tomkins and Virginia Eatough Appealing Work: An Investigation of How Ethnographic Texts Convince - Karen Golden-Biddle and Karen Locke The Philosophy and Politics of Quality in Qualitative Organizational Research - John Amis and Michael Silk Objectivity and Reliability in Qualitative Analysis: Realist Contextualist and Radical Constructionist Epistemologies - Anna Madill et al. Whatever Happened to Organizational Ethnography: A Review of the Field of Organizational Ethnography and Anthropological Studies - S.P. Bate Working with Pluralism: Determining Quality in Qualitative Research - Mark Easterby-Smith, Karen Golden-Biddle and Karen Locke The Role of the Researcher: An Analysis of Narrative Position in Organisation Theory - Mary Jo Hatch The Professional Apprentice: Observations of Fieldwork Roles in Two Organizational Settings - John Van Maanen and Deborah Kolb In Defense of Being "Native": The Case for Insider Academic Research - Teresa Brannick and David Coghlan Ethics and Ethnography - Robert Dingwall Extract from Qualitative Methods in Management Research - Evert Gummesson Making Sense as a Personal Process - Judi Marshall My Affair with the "Other": Identity Journeys across the Research-Practice Divide - Laura Empson VOLUME FOUR: CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS Secrecy and Disclosure in Fieldwork - Richard Mitchell Organization Science as Social Construction: Postmodern Potentials - Kenneth Gergen and Tojo Joseph Thatchenkerry Farewell to Criteriology - Thomas Schwandt Reflexive Inquiry in Organizational Research: Questions and Possibilities - Ann Cunliffe The Action Turn: Towards a Transformational Social Science - Peter Reason and William Torbert Signing My Life Away? Researching Sex and Organization - Joanna Brewis Evaluating Qualitative Management Research: Towards a Contingent Criteriology - Phil Johnson et al. Postcolonialism and the Politics of Qualitative Research in International Business - Gavin Jack and Robert Westwood Organization Studies and Epistemic Coloniality in Latin America: Thinking Otherness from the Margins - Eduardo Ibbaro-Colado Fitting Oval Pegs into Round Holes: Tensions in Evaluating and Publishing Qualitative Research in Top-Tier North American Journals - Michael Pratt Hegemonic Academic Practices: Experiences of Publishing from the Periphery - Susan Merilainen et al., Case Study as Disciplinary Convention: Evidence from International Business Journals - Rebecca Piekkari, Catherine Welsh and Eriikka Paavilainen Managerialism and Management Research: Would Melville Dalton Get a Job Today? - Emma Bell Ways of constructing research questions: gap-spotting or problematization? - Jorgen Sandberg and Mats Alvesson

Challenges and prospects

The field of visual research in management studies is developing rapidly and has reached a point of maturity where it is useful to bring together and evaluate existing work in this area and to critically assess its current impact and future prospects. Visual research is broadly defined to encompass a variety of forms, including pictures, graphs, film, web pages and architecture. It also incorporates work from several sub-disciplines (organization studies, marketing, accounting, human resources, tourism and IT), and includes research based on pre-existing visual material and studies that use researcher-generated visual data. The authors begin by considering the growing recognition of the visual turn in management research as a counterweight to the linguistic turn, while also discussing reasons for resistance to visual approaches. Next, they review research that uses visual methods to study management and organization and suggest that visual management studies may be categorized according to whether methods used are empirically driven or theory based. This categorization highlights the philosophical, theoretical and interdisciplinary underpinnings of visual management studies. It also enables the visual to be accorded a status equivalent to linguistic meaning, through dispelling the realist assumptions that have impeded analytical development of visual management studies to date.

Emma Bell

Papers

Business Research Methods

Qualitative research in business and management

The Ethics of Management Research: An Exploratory Content Analysis

Challenges and prospects

Visual Management Studies: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches*