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The psychological analysis of strategic management issues has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Much can be learned by entering the black box of strategic thinking of senior executives and bring new insights on how they see, make sense of, and interpret their everyday strategic experiences. This chapter will focus on a powerful cognitive mapping tool called the Repertory Grid Technique and demonstrate how it has been used in the strategy literature along with how a new and more refined application of the technique can enhance the elicitation of complex strategic cognitions for strategy and Board of Directors research.

Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

The resource-based view of information was central to the development of an “information economy.” It was economists such as Machlup (1962) and Porat (1977) who pioneered the idea of an “information economy.” Cooper (1983, p. 12) identified Machlup as the first proponent of an “information economy,” a new sector of the economy made up of: …a group of establishments – firms, institutions, organisations, and departments, or teams within them, but also in some instances, individuals and households that produce knowledge, information services or information goods, either for their own use or for use by others (Machlup, 1962, p. 228).Porat (1977) took an alternate approach to that of Machlup (1962) in focusing, not on the producers of knowledge, information services or goods, but on the information activities themselves. Porat’s (1977) fundamental unit of analysis were information activities and these comprised the building blocks of an “information economy.” These information activities included: …all the resources consumed in producing, processing, and distributing information goods or services (Porat, 1977, p. 2).The “information economy” itself has been characterised by a flexibility and dynamism which has raised awareness of the importance of information. However, these two approaches to the “information economy” have resulted in development of a wide and often contradictory range of attributes of information. In particular, the value of information has been extremely difficult to identify or to quantify. As a result, the role of information in improving business performance has been largely unrecognised. Too often senior managers have focused on the costs of information rather than the benefits.

Many approaches to understanding organization change approach “the organization” as a relatively static entity. Punctuated equilibrium models have also become popular, but here too the notion of unfreeze–change–refreeze suggests change as an exception — a break with the more normal stability upon which organizational control is predicated (Taplikis, 2005). By contrast, Tsoukas and Chia (2002, p. 570) have argued that “Change must not be thought of as a property of organization. Rather, organization must be understood as an emergent property of change. Change is ontologically prior to organization — it is the condition of possibility for organization.” Intuitively we agree with their position. However, it raises some significant questions for practitioners, principal among them: If change is constitutive of the organization rather than something which managers can control, then to what extent can change be subject to strategic influence?

Our preoccupation with the Repertory Grid Technique has left little time and attention to the core ideas articulated in Kelly’s (1955) Theory of Personal Constructs. After more than 20 years engaging with the method, I have (re)discovered his theorizing about man’s quest for knowing, to be the most insightful. This chapter shares my reflections/reflexions about the crucial role he placed on the notion of “anticipation.” I position this importance within the context of the challenges of our times and advocate that his “psychology of the unknown” is just as important today as it was 62 years ago.

All good social science researchers recognise that each investigative paradigm and their respective research tools (e.g. experiments, surveys, interviews, observations, questionnaires) is limited in its exploratory power but especially by its dependence on the interests, perspectives and skills of the researchers employing it. They determine the research questions pursued and the questions asked of the respondents. Constructivist researchers however, though they too focus on an area they deem deserving of research and carry their own biases, seek to explore the respondents' perspectives of those domains, what they consider important and construe from their knowledge and life experiences and why they act as they do. Participants in research also bring to the task their own orientations, including their suspicions about researchers' motives, their willingness to take part in the investigation and their personal gains from doing so. When the aim of the research is agentic change, these are critical considerations for research design, data analysis and interpretation. This chapter, after summarising the main tenets of personal and social constructivist theory, explores and evaluates constructivist methodology, illustrating benefits and limitations through examples from research practice of its tools and analytical procedures from research conducted by the authors and their doctoral researchers across and between disciplines and levels in higher education. Techniques used include repertory grids, narrative and pictorial methods used to study, inter alia, staff development issues and transformative doctoral learning. Caveats emerging from practice will be included that limit and focus appropriately the collection, analysis and interpretation of results. Finally, arguments are presented for why, when and how to adopt, or indeed to avoid, these approaches and methods within such research.

E-learning has the potential to engage learners in ways that is not possible in a conventional classroom environment. Nevertheless, for this unique capability of e-learning to be optimised, a good understanding of learners’ need as to what motivate them to be engaged in activities is paramount. This chapter suggests strategies for engaging learners in e-learning based on past empirical studies on computer games characteristics and an exploratory study on values influencing learners’ decisions to engage in activities. The exploratory study in this chapter adopted qualitative research methods of Kelly Repertory grid and laddering interview based on the means-end chain (MEC) theory. Based on the exploratory study, value dimension was added to the existing literature. The value dimension of excitement, warm relationship with others and sense of accomplishment were revealed as important to learners in their decision whether to engage in activities. Strategies for e-learning instructions that promote the revealed values were suggested with the aim of integrating the value dimension with the existing literature as well as proven teaching approaches.

This book comprises the second volume in the recently launched New Horizons in Managerial and Organizational Cognition book series. Volume 1 (Sund, Galavan, & Huff, 2016), addressed the topic of strategic uncertainty. This second volume comprises a collection of contributions that variously report new methodological developments in managerial and organizational cognition, reflect critically on those developments, and consider the challenges that have yet to be confronted in order to further advance this exciting and dynamic interdisciplinary field. Contextualizing within an overarching framework the various contributions selected for inclusion in the present volume, in this opening chapter we reflect more broadly on what we consider the most significant developments that have occurred over recent years and the most significant challenges that lie ahead.

This paper presents the major findings of recently completed research in the UK concerning the attributes of information as an asset and its impact on organisational performance. The research study employed an automated information asset- and attribute-scoring grid exercise and semi-structured open-ended interviews with 45 senior UK managers in four case study organisations. The information asset-scoring grid was developed to provide a simple visual representation of information assets and attributes using Excel charts. The semi-structured open-ended interviews aimed to identify the attributes of information assets considered significant by 45 senior UK managers and to explore relevant issues such as the value of information and organisational effectiveness.