Search results

In this paper, the authors reflect critically on their experience as researchers on the Impacts 18 programme: a re-study concerned with the long-term effects of Liverpool European Capital of Culture (ECoC) 2008. Situating Impacts 18 at the confluence of three important debates within the cultural policy field, the paper considers the causation, nature and significance of the shortcomings of the research, with a view to advancing cultural evaluation practices and encouraging re-studies in a field where they are seldom used.

The authors draw on documentary analysis of unpublished research outputs, along with their own research notes and critical reflections. The paper focuses on two projects from the Impacts 18 programme, in particular, in order to illustrate the broader issues raised in terms of the epistemological framing, methodological design and execution of the Impacts 18 research.

The paper highlights and explores the various issues that affected Impacts 18 in terms of its epistemological framing and methodological design, as well as problems encountered in terms of data management and stakeholder relationships.

As a large-scale re-study of a cultural event, Impacts 18 represents an exceedingly rare occurrence, despite the acknowledged dearth of evidence on the longer-term impacts of such events. Similarly unusual, however, are critical and candid retrospectives from research authors themselves. The paper is thus doubly unusual, in these two respects, and should help to advance research practice in an under-researched area.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on intersectionality and ascertain its potential for application to human resources (HR) research and practice. Particular attention is paid to its methodological issues involving how best to incorporate intersectionality into research designs, and its data issues involving the “curse of dimensionality” where there are too few observations in most datasets to deal with multiple intersecting categories.

The methodology involves reviewing the literature on intersectionality in its various dimensions: its conceptual underpinnings and meanings; its evolution as a concept; its application in various areas; its relationship to gender-based analysis plus (GBA+); its methodological issues and data requirements; its relationship to theory and qualitative as well as quantitative lines of research; and its potential applicability to research and practice in HR.

Intersectionality deals with how interdependent categories such as race, gender and disability intersect to affect outcomes. It is not how each of these factors has an independent or additive effect; rather, it is how they combine together in an interlocking fashion to have an interactive effect that is different from the sum of their individual effects. This gives rise to methodological and data complications that are outlined. Ways in which these complications have been dealt with in the literature are outlined, including interaction effects, separate equations for key groups, reducing data requirements, qualitative analysis and machine learning with Big Data.

Intersectionality has not been dealt with in HR research or practice. In other fields, it tends to be dealt with only in a conceptual/theoretical fashion or qualitatively, likely reflecting the difficulties of applying it to quantitative research.

The wide gap between the theoretical concept of intersectionality and its practical application for purposes of prediction as well as causal analysis is outlined. Trade-offs are invariably involved in applying intersectionality to HR issues. Practical steps for dealing with those trade-offs in the quantitative analyses of HR issues are outlined.

Intersectionality draws attention to the intersecting nature of multiple disadvantages or vulnerability. It highlights how they interact in a multiplicative and not simply additive fashion to affect various outcomes of individual and social importance.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first analysis of the potential applicability of the concept of intersectionality to research and practice in HR. It has obvious relevance for ascertaining intersectional categories as predictors and causal determinants of important outcomes in HR, especially given the growing availability of large personnel and digital datasets.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues in studying hard-to-reach or dispersed populations, with particular focus on methodologies used to collect data and to investigate dispersed migrant entrepreneurs, illustrating shortcomings, pitfalls and potentials of accessing and disseminating research to hard-to-reach populations of migrant entrepreneurs.

A mixed methodology is proposed to access hard-to-reach or dispersed populations, and this paper explores these using a sample of Brazilian migrants settled in different countries of the world.

This paper explores empirical challenges, illustrating shortcomings, pitfalls and potentials of accessing and disseminating research to hard-to-reach populations of migrant entrepreneurs. It provides insights by reporting research experiences developed over time by this group of researchers, reflecting a “mixing” of methods for accessing respondents, contrasting to a more rigid, a-priori, mixed methods approach.

The main contribution of this paper is to showcase experiences from, and suitability of, remote data collection, especially for projects that cannot accommodate the physical participation of researchers, either because of time or cost constraints. It reports on researching migrant entrepreneurship overseas. Remote digital tools and online data collection are highly relevant due to time- and cost-efficiency, but also represent solutions for researching dispersed populations. These approaches presented allow for overcoming several barriers to data collection and present instrumental characteristics for migrant research.

Policing scholars have largely ignored the workgroup dynamics of police command staffs. These officers work closely at the top of police organizations, promoting strategic objectives and overseeing significant changes. As leaders, emotional regulation is critical to the maintenance of internal and external relationships. Only a few research studies address emotional intelligence (EI) among police leaders. The current study combines these two issues to examine whether emotionally intelligent leaders report better perceptions of workgroup fit with their respective command staffs.

Using a survey of 304 United States (US) command staff officers attending the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) National Academy (NA), the authors apply person-environment fit theory and test several hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

Command staff officers with better EI report significantly better perceptions of workgroup fit, suggesting that they may be better equipped to navigate the command staff workgroup dynamics in this complex environment that demands high emotional regulation. Workgroup fit was also significantly higher among higher ranking officers and among officers racialized as White.

Few studies have addressed perceptions of workgroup fit among command staff officers, and little attention has been given to the concept of EI. The authors add to these two important areas of research and provide evidence that emotional intelligence is an important characteristic for leaders when considering how well command staffs work together. This finding may have implications for the efficacy of agencies to facilitate change efforts or to carry out daily operations.

This study aims to examine the phenomenon of self-perceived age (SPA) identity for Generation X (GenX) women in the UK. Squeezed between the more ubiquitous “boomer” and “millennial” cohorts, and now with both gender and age stigma-related challenges, this study looks to provide insights for understanding this group for marketing.

This study adopts an existential phenomenological approach using a hybrid structured/hermeneutic research design. Data is collected using solicited diary research (SDR) that elicits autoethnographic insights into the lived experiences of GenX women, these in the context of SPA.

For this group, the authors find age a gendered phenomenon represented via seven “age frames”, collectively an “organisation of experience”. Age identity appears not to have unified meaning but is contingent upon individuals and their experiences. These frames then provide further insights into how diarists react to the stigma of gendered ageism.

SDR appeals to participants who like completing diaries and are motivated by the research topic. This limits both diversity of response and sample size, but coincidentally enhances elicitation potential – outweighing, the authors believe, these constraints. The sample comprises UK women only.

This study acknowledges GenX women as socially real, but from an SPA perspective they are heterogeneous, and consequently distributed across many segments. Here, age is a psychographic, not demographic, variable – a subjective rather than chronological condition requiring a nuanced response from marketers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first formal study into how SPA identity is manifested for GenX women. Methodologically, this study uses e-journals/diaries, an approach not yet fully exploited in marketing research.

Scholars and practitioners agree that governance practices are at the core of what differentiates family firms from other forms of business. Yet, there is a lack of consensus in the extant literature about how and the extent to which family governance affects firm performance. This study aims to address the matter by taking a more comprehensive unified systems perspective to explore the pathways through which variations in family governance mechanisms simultaneously affect both the business and the family system.

This study utilises a global dataset sourced from a survey and structural equation modelling to empirically measure several intermediate and final outcomes of family governance.

This study finds that the use of family protocols, as well as formal and informal meetings, have positive effects on the functioning of the family, whereas family involvement in the top management team diminishes the firm's competitive advantage. In turn, this study demonstrates that both family functioning and competitive advantage are positively related to firm performance.

By taking into consideration the complexity of the family and business systems, and measuring their interlinkages, this study advances knowledge by providing a more complete picture of the family governance/firm performance relationship.

This study demonstrates a practical use of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), showing methodological, predictive and unforeseen issues that emerged during the data collection and analysis phases and how they were addressed during the development of this research.

Based on the research of reapplication of a “tecnologia social” (TS) of entrepreneurial education, this article explores the author’s reflections on the adoption of ANT as a theoretical-methodological approach, highlighting the practical implications of a social material theory during fieldwork.

The adoption of ANT places the researcher in front of methodological issues not always foreseen in the research design. Four moments to a practical path through the engagement of ANT agency are highlighted: the network of actors, monitoring of actors, interpretation of data collected and writing results. These moments correspond to methodological issues that the authors faced during the practical journey of the research. At each moment, the challenge aroused is discussed and the methodological choice chosen to address the issue is presented.

The engagement with ANT has enormous potential in the study of management and organizations phenomenon, but its methodological implications in practice are still challenging. The authors seek to share this investigation and engagement in ANT so that other researchers have a reference and a starting point to employ and engage in this theoretical-methodological lens. Thus, it may be possible to anticipate certain difficulties in future research designs and to glimpse at potential developments and paths that the research may lead.

This paper aims to provide an exposition of the constructive research approach (CRA) to show the potential utility of CRA in transcending or mitigating the methodological and practical issues involved in researching organisations.

The paper is a literature review, and resulting thematic discussion of methodological and practical issues involves in action research (AR) in organisations through the lens of the CRA approach.

The paper identifies that CRA has benefits in orientation to a practical outcome grounded in a theoretical domain but with leeway to facilitate creativity, which can also potentially improve the quality of the collaborative relationships. The centrality of the construction within the method provides a “vantage point” to manage the emic (inside) and etic (outside) positionality concerns of action researchers working within organisational settings.

CRA has multiple practical benefits for action researchers and their collaborators in terms of time, risk and collaborative commitment.

The paper develops a useful tactical framework for discussing the practical and methodological issues when considering AR in organisations and highlights how CRA can be used in wider organisational scholarship outside its roots in management accounting.

Elite interviewing is a well-established area of interview research methods. Nevertheless, the actual casting of an “elite” has been generally conducted in a prima facie or broad manner. A consideration of entrepreneurs and owner-managers as “elites” has been less profiled and received less attention, therefore the paper views the entrepreneurs and owner-managers as constituting a form of “local elite” within given and varying sectorial, regional and community boundaries. The authors argue that a consideration of entrepreneurs as “local elites” and transferring knowledge from an elite interviewing perspective may strongly support scholarly research in the entrepreneurship field.

The study conducts a comprehensive narrative literature review of elite interviewing literature and transfers key methodological insights to the entrepreneurship field. The methodological contribution based on literature is complemented by experiences and observations from an extensive inductive interview study with over 30 entrepreneurs of German manufacturing Small and Medium-sized Entities (SMEs) and are used to reflect on, and refine, interview research approaches with entrepreneurs.

The reflections and discussions in this paper provide valuable insights for other researchers conducting research in entrepreneurship domains regarding the power dynamics of negotiating access, procedural issues of interviews and thereby enhancing the quality of data.

The contribution to knowledge is mainly of a methodological nature. While the paper takes a novel act of recasting elite interviewing in the SME and entrepreneurship context, the paper methodologically contributes to the entrepreneurship and elite interview literature thereby facilitating higher quality interviews.

The purpose of this study is to present a systematic methodological review of the application of field experiments in the domain of marketing research. By performing this study, the authors seek to offer necessary advice and suggestions to marketing scholars interested in the application of field experiments and to promote the adoption of field experiments as a preferred methodological choice among scholars in this domain.

A total of 315 field experiments published in the ten leading marketing journals in the past five decades were analyzed in this systematic methodological review. This study examines various aspects of field experiments, including the research profile of existing research, different trends and topics related to field experiments, choice of research questions, methods of observations, unobtrusive data collection, types of interventions and outcome variables.

This study identified various trends and topics, categories of manipulations, types of limitations and important considerations in designing field experiments and offered necessary advice on the future of field experiments in marketing research.

This study provides a complete roadmap for future marketing scholars to adopt field studies in their research plans. The systematic summary of limitations and the checklist will be helpful for the researchers to design and execute field studies more effectively and efficiently.

This review study offers a complete roadmap for marketing scholars who are interested in adopting field experiments in their research projects. The discussion of trends and topics, manipulations, limitations, design considerations and checklist items for field experiments offers relevant insights to marketing scholars and may help them design and execute field experiments more effectively and efficiently.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive methodological review of field experiments published in leading marketing journals throughout the past five decades. This study makes novel and unique contributions to both theory and literature on field experiments in the marketing discipline.