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1 – 10 of over 2000As the consumer experience literature broadens in scope – specifically, from dyads to ecosystems and from provider-centric to consumer-centric perspective – traditional data…
Abstract
Purpose
As the consumer experience literature broadens in scope – specifically, from dyads to ecosystems and from provider-centric to consumer-centric perspective – traditional data collection methods are no longer adequate. In that context, the paper aims to discuss three little-used data collection methods that can contribute to this broader view of consumer experience.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper identifies methodological requirements for exploring the broadened view of consumer experience and reviews data collection methods currently in use.
Findings
The paper elaborates tailored guidelines for the study of consumer experience through first-hand, systemic and processual perspectives for three promising and currently underused data collection methods: phenomenological interviews, event-based approaches and diary methods.
Research limitations/implications
Although the list of identified methods is not exhaustive, the methods and guidelines discussed here can be used to advance empirical investigation of consumer experience as more broadly understood.
Practical implications
Practitioners can apply these methods to gain a more complete view of consumers’ experiences and so offer value propositions compatible with those consumers’ lifeworlds.
Originality/value
The paper principally contributes to the literature in two ways: by defining the methodological requirements for investigating consumer experience from consumer-centric, systemic and processual perspectives, and by specifying a set of data collection methods that meet these requirements, along with tailored guidelines for their use.
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Marie Kerveillant and Philippe Lorino
The paper aims to investigate how far the pragmatist concept of inquiry (Dewey, 1916, 1938) makes it possible to develop a processual and relational approach to accountability…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to investigate how far the pragmatist concept of inquiry (Dewey, 1916, 1938) makes it possible to develop a processual and relational approach to accountability, moving the focus away from a representational conception of truth and subjectivist/individualist views on meaning-making, toward collective exploration and understanding of an issue by stakeholders with the aim of transforming social practices. The paper studies an accountability process in action, namely nuclear incident reporting, and its role in the construction of a community of inquiry investigating nuclear safety.
Design/methodology/approach
This research opts for a case study methodology including 36 in-depth interviews, field observation and document analyses. The data are drawn from a three-year field study of a “Local Information Commission”, a body set up to represent the public living near a nuclear site.
Findings
The object of accountability needs to be constructed through a joint exploratory inquiry by accountors and accountees into reports of incidents as originally presented, to advance their understanding and capacity for action.
Research limitations/implications
It will be important to test this processual and relational approach to accountability in other types of situation, involving different governance issues than nuclear safety.
Practical implications
To turn theoretical stakeholders such as the public into real stakeholders (e.g. in the studied case, active participants in safety inquiries), specific social and managerial conditions must be fulfilled (concerning time, resources, commitment to open, taboo-free dialogue and legitimacy).
Originality/value
The paper argues that Dewey's concept of inquiry makes a valuable contribution to the processual and dialogical view of accountability.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore how early career professionals “do gender” in their new professional context. Specifically, it explores how two groups of graduates…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore how early career professionals “do gender” in their new professional context. Specifically, it explores how two groups of graduates, psychologists and political scientists, “do gender” as early career professionals with a particular emphasis on how they acquire legitimacy in relation to their colleagues and clients.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on a qualitative research methodology, graduates from two Master's programmes in Sweden were interviewed after 30‐34 months of professional work. Analysis of the interview data is located within a “doing gender” perspective with special reference to Acker's conception of employment and organizations as gendered processes influencing individual action.
Findings
The paper identifies two different ways in which participants “do gender” in their professional practice in order to acquire legitimacy: “self‐presentation” and “strategy”. This finding suggests that female and male early career professionals acquire different kinds of legitimacy, which could, in turn, be derived from the gendered processes that exist in contemporary organizations. The paper will also report that when they “do gender” participants also produce and reproduce a gendered notion of a professional project that influences their subsequent professional practice as well as how they position themselves as knowledgeable and competent.
Originality/value
The perspective of “doing gender” contributes an alternative understanding of graduate employment and the encounter with working life. It especially enables us to capture gender as an important influence on individual action in the organizational context.
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Adopts a holistic network approach to analyse a company’s entry into a turbulent market. The entry is examined as a process. The analysis focuses on the temporal context of…
Abstract
Adopts a holistic network approach to analyse a company’s entry into a turbulent market. The entry is examined as a process. The analysis focuses on the temporal context of business interaction; it inspects how the company copes with uncertainty, and proposes that the concept of a focal net be applied for strategic analysis of the context. In the empirical part, the Estonian market exemplifies a turbulent environment, and the entry process of one Western high‐technology company is analysed. It is concluded that, while all interaction on any business market involves elements of the historic background as well as the participants’ expectations of the future, history now seems to dominate the markets of Eastern Europe.
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Kaisa Koskela-Huotari and Jaakko Siltaloppi
Only a few concepts in the service literature are as pervasive yet as undertheorized as is the concept of the actor. With a growing interest toward value creation as a systemic…
Abstract
Purpose
Only a few concepts in the service literature are as pervasive yet as undertheorized as is the concept of the actor. With a growing interest toward value creation as a systemic and institutionally guided phenomenon, there is a particular need for a more robust conceptualization of humans as actors that adopts a processual, as opposed to a static, view. The purpose of this paper is to build such processual conceptualization to advance service-dominant (S-D) logic, in particular, and service research, in general.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is conceptual and extends S-D logic's institutionally constituted account of the actor by drawing from identity theory and social constructionism.
Findings
The paper develops a processual conceptualization of the human actor that explicates four social processes explaining the dynamics between two identity concepts—social and personal identity—and institutional arrangements. The resulting framework reveals how humans are simultaneously constituted by institutions and able to perform their roles in varying, even institution-changing, ways.
Research limitations/implications
By introducing new insights from identity theory and social constructionism, this paper reconciles the dualism in S-D logic's current description of actors, as well as posits the understanding of identity dynamics and the processual nature of actors as central in many service-related phenomena.
Originality/value
This paper is among the few that explicitly theorize about the nature of human actors in S-D logic and the service literature.
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Sarah Adams, Dale Tweedie and Kristy Muir
This paper aims to investigate the extent to which accounting standards for social impact reporting are in the public interest. This study aims to explore what the public interest…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the extent to which accounting standards for social impact reporting are in the public interest. This study aims to explore what the public interest means for social impact reporting by charities; and assess the extent to which the accounting standardisation of social impact reporting supports the public interest so defined.
Design/methodology/approach
This study conducts a case study of how stakeholders in Australian charities conceptualise the public interest when discussing accounting standardisation. This paper distinguishes three concepts of the public interest from prior research, namely, aggregative, processual and common good. For each, this paper analyses the implications for accounting and how accountants serve the public interest, and how they align with stakeholder views.
Findings
Stakeholder views align with the aggregative and processual concepts of public interest, however this was contested and partial. Accounting standards for social impact reporting will only serve the public interest if they also capture and implement the common good approach.
Practical implications
Clarifying how key stakeholders interpret the public interest can help standard-setters and governments design (or withhold) accounting standards on social impact reporting. This paper also distinguishes different practical roles for accountants in this domain – information merchants, umpires or advocates, which each public interest concept implies.
Originality/value
This paper extends prior research on accounting for the public interest to social impact reporting. The paper empirically demonstrates the salience of the common good concept of public interest and demonstrates the diversity of views on the standardisation of social impact reporting by charities.
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This chapter provides a new theory for organizational leadership in which an organization's leadership, authority, management, power, and environments (LAMPE) are made coherent…
Abstract
This chapter provides a new theory for organizational leadership in which an organization's leadership, authority, management, power, and environments (LAMPE) are made coherent and integrated. Organizations work best if their LAMPE is coherent, integrated, and operational. The chapter begins by introducing basic concepts, such as structures, processes, process frameworks, task–role matrices, interdependence uncertainty, and virtual-like organizational arrangements. The LAMPE theory is then built upon this base. Leadership is defined as the processes of initiating, enabling, implementing, and sustaining change in an organization. Authority is defined as the legal right to preempt the outcome of a decision or a process. Management is defined in term of its major processes. Power is the control of interdependence uncertainty. When 29 leadership practices are introduced, it is possible to link them to all five of LAMPE's constructs. A number of conclusions are derived, in the form of 36 propositions: 5 dealing with leadership, 5 focusing on leadership requirements matching, 4 relating to leadership effectiveness, 5 dealing with leadership capacity, 4 concerning the benefits of distributed leadership, and 13 linking LAMPE to the theory of the organizational hologram.
David Knights and Darren McCabe
This article presents a research framework that understands any management innovation, such as total quality management (TQM), as discursive knowledge that can have certain power…
Abstract
This article presents a research framework that understands any management innovation, such as total quality management (TQM), as discursive knowledge that can have certain power effects. It may transform individuals into subjects that secure some sense of their own meaning and identity through participating either as managers or employees in the practices the knowledge embraces. But TQM can also have the opposite effect, resulting in subjects resisting or distancing themselves from, rather than embracing, the discourse. The paper reviews three interpretations of TQM, which are described as rational managerialist, critical control, and processual. It critiques each of these approaches so as to offer an alternative way of understanding TQM, which would also have application to a wide variety of other innovations. In short, it attempts to build upon earlier approaches in the anticipation that we might move beyond our present understanding of innovations such as TQM.
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– This paper seeks to apply a processual thinking of subjectivity in the study of “becoming entrepreneur”.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper seeks to apply a processual thinking of subjectivity in the study of “becoming entrepreneur”.
Design/methodology/approach
Through analysing Foucault's idea of subjectification, by the help of Deleuze's comments and elaborations, the paper seeks to clarify one opacity in entrepreneurship research – the “vanishing presence” of the entrepreneur in processual studies of entrepreneurship. To avoid performative contradiction, the paper seeks to contextualise this attempt in guiding principles provided by process philosophy.
Findings
Without a process view, “the subject” as entity and self-constitutive res cogitans (thinking thing or mind) will take priority over subjectification, and the paper will loose the possibility to think and study the process of becoming-subject in its own terms.
Originality/value
Understanding entrepreneurship as organisation-creation, the paper here adds a processual conceptualisation to the study of such processes by focusing on the arrangements (agancements as Deleuze called this, or dispositifs as Foucault preferred to use) in which subjectification into “entrepreneur” happens.
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Mats Alvesson and Dan Kärreman
This chapter discusses professional service firms as collectivities. Collectivity refers to the interface between the social and the cultural. It is a ‘social unit’; however, it…
Abstract
This chapter discusses professional service firms as collectivities. Collectivity refers to the interface between the social and the cultural. It is a ‘social unit’; however, it is defined through the meanings, definitions and distinctions of the people involved. This chapter addresses the cultural and processual aspects on collectivity. Eight dimensions of collectivity are highlighted. Two case studies of consultancy companies illustrate these dimensions as well as different forms of collectivities. This chapter also addresses the interplay between foci on individuality and collectivity in organizations.