การวจยเชงคณภาพ เปนเครองมอสำคญอยางหนงสำหรบทำความเขาใจสงคมและพฤตกรรมมนษย การวจยแบบการสรางทฤษฎจากขอมล กเปนหนงในหลายระเบยบวธการวจยเชงคณภาพทกำลงไดรบความสนใจ และเปนทนยมเพมสงขนเรอยๆ จากนกวชาการ และนกวจยในสาขาสงคมศาสตร และศาสตรอนๆ เชน พฤตกรรมศาสตร สงคมวทยา สาธารณสขศาสตร พยาบาลศาสตร จตวทยาสงคม ศกษาศาสตร รฐศาสตร และสารสนเทศศกษา ดงนน หนงสอเรอง “ConstructingGrounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis” หรอ “การสรางทฤษฎจากขอมล:แนวทางการปฏบตผานการวเคราะหเชงคณภาพ” จะชวยใหผอานมความรความเขาใจถงพฒนาการของปฏบตการวจยแบบสรางทฤษฎจากขอมล ตลอดจนแนวทาง และกระบวนการปฏบตการวจยอยางเปนระบบ จงเปนหนงสอทควรคาแกการอานโดยเฉพาะนกวจยรนใหม เพอเปนแนวทางในการนำความรความเขาใจไประยกตในงานวจยของตน อกทงนกวจยผเชยวชาญสามารถอานเพอขยายมโนทศนดานวจยใหกวางขวางขน

Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

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

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)

Mobile games are one of the largest mobile application areas and one where users are often willing to pay for services. Furthermore, the market for mobile games is expected to grow dramatically as most phones sold now are capable of running games. Despite this, there is surprisingly little research concerning user expectations from mobile games. In this exploratory study, we examine the consumers' values, needs, and objectives related to mobile games. Based on earlier literature on mobile services, we developed a preliminary set of issues and did an exploratory survey of mobile game users to find the key needs and values of mobile gamers. The results of the study are especially interesting for mobile game developers and mobile phone operators, as they shed light on the demographics and choices of mobile gamers. We argue that if mobile games are ever to be diffused in greater extent to the market, then a deeper understanding of the values and needs of the potential mobile game users must be obtained. This understanding can then be used to guide the development of new game offerings. Keywords: mobile games, values, objectives, consumers, principal component analysis, cluster analysis INTRODUCTION During the last two decades, mobile phones have diffused all over the planet, and the core services provided by the telecom operators (e.g., voice and text messaging) have become commodities. Markets for commodities are typically efficient and quickly respond to changes in supply and demand, driving down prices and making the basis of competition on price. Therefore, in order to remain competitive, many mobile operators have sought cost efficiencies through economies of scale. This has led to a high level of consolidation in the mobile phone operator market. To deviate from competition, companies usually explore ways to provide value-added services for their customers. Operators have considered mobile games1 as a good value-added service for a long time. According to several market research firms (e.g., Juniper, Gartner) the Asian mobile gaming market is growing very fast and the total number of mobile gamers is estimated at 400 million people. The value of the global mobile games market is expected to rise from $5.4 billion in 2008 to more than $10 billion in 2013 (RCR 2008). It is notable that these estimates are based only on OTA downloads through cellular networks. The logic behind these bold estimates is the expansion in the smart phone markets. The shipments of smart phones have grown rapidly during the last few years. According to Canalys.com (2008), 35.5 million smart phone devices were sold in the fourth quarter of 2007, displaying growth rates of over 50 percent during the last two years. The growth of the smart phone market creates a more fruitful basis for the diffusion of mobile games as the games played on smart phones are more sophisticated and more interesting. The recent introduction of Apple AppStore, together with iPhone3G, highlights the importance of games, as almost a third of available titles are games-over 1,700 games as of January 2009 (Rybicki 2009). Previous research on mobile games has dealt with the new possibilities of mobility, e.g., location-based games (Han et al. 2005) and support for combining dimensions of the physical world and our social surroundings into games (Peltola and Karsten 2006). Most mobile game research to date has dealt with technical aspects of the games (see, e.g., Bell et al. 2006; Fritsch et al. 2006). In addition, there is some emerging research into the business models of the software companies producing mobile games (Rajala et al. 2007). Despite the potential of mobile games for different stakeholders, the extant literature provides little empirical research on the actual consumer values regarding mobile games (Anckar and D'Incau 2002; Barnes 2002; MGAIN 2003). Therefore, in this paper, our objective is to explore the values, needs, and objectives related to the purchasing process of mobile games. …

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Mobile Games: Analyzing the Needs and Values of the Consumers

Improving firm positioning through enhanced offerings and buyer–seller relationships

OpusCapita Group is a Finnish company offering financial processes and outsourcing services to medium-sized companies and large corporations. OpusCapita particularly focuses on comprehensive Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash processes. In hopes to stay ahead of the curve in financial process automation, OpusCapita is betting on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This teaching case presents challenges faced by Mr. Petri Karjalainen, Senior Vice President at OpusCapita Group, who is looking for ways to introduce RPA to the market, and provide added value to new and existing customers.

Turning robotic process automation into commercial success – Case OpusCapita

Organizations facing high risks and operating in purely digital domains, such as computer security and many financial services, must meet two, contradictory goals: they need to identify digital threats at scale and speed while also avoiding errors that result from automated processing. Research on high-reliability organizations has identified multiple challenges in reaching these goals simultaneously, because automation often renders organizations’ operations “mindless” and unable to cope gracefully with changing, complex situations characteristic of high-risk domains. In digital operations, a special challenge arises from the “frame problem” connected with the inability of algorithms to adapt to environments not identified within their developers’ initial cognitive frames. An exploratory, theory-generating case study was conducted within a computer security company (F-Secure) to examine how organizations acting in digital domains may achieve high reliability by mitigating the frame problem. This article examines digital organizing of the epistemic and pragmatic features of operations, along with arrangements of these features that respond to the frame problem. Collective mindfulness is identified as emerging in such a sociotechnical setting via a carefully layered, systemic constellation of (human) mindful and (digital) mindless operations while the organization’s core operations remain digital and algorithmic. The findings point to heretofore unexplored reliability challenges associated with digital organizing, alongside several relevant ways to overcome and/or mitigate them.

High Reliability in Digital Organizing: Mindlessness, the Frame Problem, and Digital Operations

Recent literature has identified two main types of IT-enabled innovation and labelled them as lightweight IT and heavyweight IT. In this study, we look into robotic process automation (RPA) as lightweight IT and traditional back-end system automation as heavyweight IT and study how a case company Telco makes the choice between these two alternative ways of implementing automation. Drawing on an empirical study conducted at Telco examining two automation projects, we find support for earlier studies addressing specifically the choice problem of RPA. Our main contribution lies in uncovering the role of the two-dimensional feature stability on the choice. While heavyweight IT is preferred when system architecture is stable, lightweight IT, operating on the presentation layer, holds a prerequisite of stable system interfaces.

Esko Penttinen

Papers

Mobile Games: Analyzing the Needs and Values of the Consumers

Improving firm positioning through enhanced offerings and buyer–seller relationships

Turning robotic process automation into commercial success – Case OpusCapita

High Reliability in Digital Organizing: Mindlessness, the Frame Problem, and Digital Operations

How to Choose Between Robotic Process Automation and Back-End System Automation?