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This chapter focuses on the ethnographic research approach that I employed in a service marketing study. The first part briefly describes ethnography’s key characteristics, that is, emergent research logic, prolonged fieldwork, and multiple modes of data collection, where the main method is observation. The second part discusses the data collection methods: participant observation, informal discussion, interview, and document analysis. This section describes in detail how these techniques were used in practice and highlights the key challenges I faced, especially related to the observations, and how I managed these challenges. The third part describes the case, field setting, informants, and field relationships. The development project that I studied concerned a bank’s website and project members from the bank and different consultant agencies represent the study’s informants. The fieldwork lasted for about one year and covered the entire development process from the initial stages to the launch, and some time after. The chapter ends with a thorough discussion about the research criteria of validity, reliability, and generality, and the coping tactics that I used in this study to enhance these. Prolonged fieldwork, multiple modes of data collection, reflexivity, and specification of the research are among those important tactics that this last section discusses in detail.

In this chapter, we examine the current research on how technology is applied to benefit students with emotional and/or behavioral disorders (EBD). First, we describe the iterative yet unpredictable nature of technological innovation to suggest that incremental successes are qualified by the creation of often unforeseen consequences. We then identify commonly used nonelectronic technologies in education to emphasize that the hoped-for advances in electronic technology have failed to deliver on their decades-old promise of educational revolution. We continue with our review of the literature on empirical studies examining how technology is used to support students with EBD. These findings indicate that the research design primarily employed in this field is single-subject. Examples of specific findings include web-based graphic organizers for student writing, virtual self-modeling for targeting student behaviors, and virtual coaching for teachers of students with EBD. We conclude by reviewing how leaders in the field of special education predict the field will change in the future. Overall, with an increased emphasis on research accessibility and practitioner-validated knowledge, and advances in neuroscience and artificial technologies, practitioners may hold a more central role to the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

This chapter points out that the use of a wide range of theoretical paradigms in marketing research requires researchers to use a broad range of methodologies. As an aid in doing so, the chapter argues for the use of case study research (CSR), defines CSR, and describes several CSR theories and methods that are useful for describing, explaining, and forecasting processes occurring in business-to-business (B2B) contexts. The discussion includes summaries of six B2B case studies spanning more than 60 years of research. This chapter advocates embracing the view that learning and reporting objective realities of B2B processes is possible using CSR methods. CSR methods in the chapter include using multiple interviews (2 + ) separately of multiple persons participating in B2B processes, direct research and participant observation, decision systems analysis, degrees-of-freedom analysis, ethnographic-decision-tree-modeling, content analysis, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fs/QCA.com). The discussion advocates rejecting the dominant logic of attempting to describe and explain B2B processes by arms-length fixed-point surveys that usually involve responses from one executive per firm with no data-matching of firms in specific B2B relationships – such surveys lack details and accuracy necessary for understanding, describing, and forecasting B2B processes.

Chapter 2 describes how behavioral science research methods that management and marketing scholars apply in studying processes involving decisions and organizational outcomes relate to three principal research objectives: fulfilling generality of findings, achieving accuracy of process actions and outcomes, and capturing complexity of nuances and conditions. The chapter's unique contribution is in advocating and describing the possibilities of researchers replacing Thorngate's (1976) “postulate of commensurate complexity” — it is impossible for a theory of social behavior to be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple and as a result organizational theorists inevitably have to make tradeoffs in their theory development — with a new postulate of disproportionate achievement. This new postulate proposes the possibilities and advocates the building and testing of useful process models that achieve all three principal research objectives. Rather than assuming the stance that a researcher must make tradeoffs that permit achieving any two, but not all three, principal research objectives as, Weick (1979) clock analogy shows, this chapter advocates embracing a property space (a three-dimensional box rather than a clock) view of research objectives and research methods. Tradeoffs need not be made; having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is possible. The chapter includes a brief review of principal criticisms that case study researchers often express of surveys of respondents using fixed-point surveys. Likewise, the chapter reviews principal criticisms of case study research studies that researchers who favor the use of fixed-point surveys express.

This chapter documents the contributions in the business-to-business (B2B) marketing–buying literature that focus on implemented strategies in specific contexts. Research on implemented strategies often includes thick descriptions of how things actually get done over a period of weeks, months, or years including how decision makers make sense of situations, go about processing information, make choices, interact with other decision makers, participate in specific actions, and interpret events and outcomes. Research on implemented strategies favors “direct research” (Mintzberg, 1979) that includes multiple face-to-face interviews of the same and different participants in B2B processes over the course of days, week, months, or years. Direct research is inherently inductive theory-building and case-based data driven in its theory-empirical approach. Direct research includes applying a number of possible research methods and results in a number of advances in B2B implemented-strategy-in-context theory.

As there is inclusive evidence on relationship between board characteristics and firm performance in the Thai context, and mixed findings of this relationship are usually reported from previous studies, this study tries to clarify a reason for the mixed finding by determining the impact of board structures on different quantile levels of firm performance. Building on extant literature and using a developed econometric technique, the Quantile Analysis, on a sample of 446 listed firms in Thailand for a 15-year period ranging from 2000 to 2014, empirical evidence is provided which is consistent with prior studies that some characteristics of the board as the core mechanisms of corporate governance, i.e., board independence, board size, board meeting frequency, and dual role leadership on board, have significant influence on performance of Thai firms. In particular, when considering different quantile levels of firm performance, board structures are found to have different effects across quantile of performance distribution. Board independence and dual role leadership on board are found to have a significant influence on only moderate-performing firms, while board size and board meeting frequency are revealed as having significant impact on only firms with high-performance which need more effectiveness of the board in overseeing and supervising decision-making of the executives. Thus, these findings indicate that considering different quantile levels of firm performance for the board structures and performance relationship should be a reason of previous mixed findings. Moreover, the findings should be important information in encouraging better understanding an optimal governance system in Thailand for related stakeholders such as policymakers, corporate firms, and investors.

In this chapter, we use the concepts of emotional labor or emotion work to examine the experiences of transracial families – white families rearing Black adoptees. We focus on the emotion work done by the parents to inculcate and develop positive racial identities for their adoptive children as their adoptees experience racial mistreatment. We also use the concept of white racial framing to examine strategies for effectively coping with racial mistreatment. African Americans have more emotion work than the members of dominant group because of their status as stigmatized minorities in American society. African Americans adopted by white families have even greater emotion work because they tend to have the extra burden of living in predominately white communities where there are fewer people of color to serve as positive role models in the socialization process.

The question of how to address copyright's insufficiencies with respect to Native American creative production is at the center of an ongoing legal debate; however, more important is whether Native American oral forms should be protected by copyright. Although some late twentieth-century court decisions have opened the door for courts to consider including intangibles within intellectual property law, copyright is not the answer to the problem of protecting Native American oral traditions from appropriation. Expanding the scope of copyright to envelop Native American oral traditions is antithetical to the creation and function of these forms within their host communities and would do more harm than good.

In their articles on “Innovation in Organizations: A Multi-Level Perspective on Creativity,” Robert Sternberg, along with Jane Howell and Kathleen Boies, broach a critical question bearing on the nature of creativity in organizational settings. Why is creativity in organizations so difficult even though organizations say they want creativity? In the present chapter, we examine some likely sources of this paradox and the ways one might go about resolving this paradox. Subsequently, we discuss directions for future research.