Search results

The acceleration of globalized commerce and economic activities has meant that conventional and Shariah (Islamic law) compliant organizations transact and negotiate among themselves. Therefore, this study aims to explore the concept of corporate negotiation and the communicative principles that guide the negotiation process among Shariah-compliant organizations.

The study uses a qualitative method through an inductive interpretative approach by conducting 20 in-depth interviews among four groups of experts. These consist of three muftis, ten academicians in Islamic assets, finance and asset jurisprudence; three practitioners in charge of inter-organizational negotiation and decision-making; and four shariah board members of selected Islamic banks.

The findings reported that business negotiation is used by Islamic organizations for reconciliation, consultation, resolving disagreements and as a means of achieving spiritual satisfaction. Furthermore, the key communicative principles of the negotiation process consist of the credibility of informational exchange, flexible interactions and the openness and truthful disclosure of information.

The empirical data discussed in this study supports the claim that macro-environmental factors and social and cultural values should be considered when examining business negotiating behaviors. However, this study focuses only on the banking/service organization negotiation. Therefore, future research should focus on the Islamic negotiation process in the context of diplomatic and international relations.

The findings reported in this study offer insight for negotiators operating among Islamic organizations to understand the principles and process of negotiation in the purview of Shariah standards and principles.

In terms of theoretical implications, this study reveals a clear conceptual difference between the conventional concept and the Islamic perspective of corporate negotiation. Also, this study highlights the impact of organizational culture, specifically Islamic management strategies, on the business negotiation process and business communication principles.

In this chapter we compare and contrast our relationships with clients in our roles as expert witnesses, consultants, and specialists with the relationships we have with our subjects and informants as research anthropologists and as we collect ethnographic data. While there are qualities that differentiate the relationships we have as expert witnesses, consultants, and specialists with our clients from the relationships that we develop as anthropologists working with informants in the field, there are also important similarities. We build upon our experiences as anthropologists and our roles serving as expert witnesses, specialists, and consultants to argue that the similarities and differences must be considered. Specifically, we examine the concept of guilt and innocence for informants and clients, the place of the individual in the group, and the larger cultural framework that defines our clients and informants as individuals worthy of our interest.

In this paper, we provide a practical example of how ethnographic insight is obtained in the field. In so doing, we demonstrate multiple ways in which ethnographic approaches can be adapted during on-going research processes to develop rich and multiple emic/etic perspectives.

This paper is based upon the first author’s reflective experience of undertaking ethnographic field work. The discussion draws from a multi-method, longitudinal and adaptive ethnographic research design, which aimed to capture the process of new family identity formation in Sri Lanka.

Existing research gives us excellent insight into various methods used in contemporary ethnographic research and the kinds of insight generated by these methods. With few exceptions, these studies do not give significant insight into the specifics of the ethnographic research process and the adaption practice. Thus, we provide a practical example of how ethnographic insight is obtained in the research field.

Our discussion elaborates the ways in which we integrated multiple research methods such as participant observations, semi-structured in-depth interviews, informal sessions, Facebook interactions, adaptations of performative exercises and elicitation methods to overcome complexities in cultural, mundane and personal consumption meanings. We also discuss how closer friendships with informants emerged as a consequence of the ethnographic research adaption practice and how this influenced trust and confidence in researcher-informant relationship, presenting us with a privileged access to their everyday and personal lives.

Citizens are substantial stakeholders in every e-government system, thus their willingness to use and ability to access the system are critical. Unequal access and information and communication technology usage, which is known as digital divide, however has been identified as one of the major obstacles to the implementation of e-government system. As digital divide inhibits citizen’s acceptance to e-government, it should be overcome despite the lack of deep theoretical understanding on this issue. This research aimed to investigate the digital divide and its direct impact on e-government system success of local governments in Indonesia as well as indirect impact through the mediation role of trust. In order to get a comprehensive understanding of digital divide, this study introduced a new type of digital divide, the innovativeness divide.

The research problems were approached by applying two-stage sequential mixed method research approach comprising of both qualitative and quantitative studies. In the first phase, an initial research model was proposed based on a literature review. Semi-structured interview with 12 users of e-government systems was then conducted to explore and enhance this initial research model. Data collected in this phase were analyzed with a two-stage content analysis approach and the initial model was then amended based on the findings. As a result, a comprehensive research model with 16 hypotheses was proposed for examination in the second phase.

In the second phase, quantitative method was applied. A questionnaire was developed based on findings in the first phase. A pilot study was conducted to refine the questionnaire, which was then distributed in a national survey resulting in 237 useable responses. Data collected in this phase were analyzed using Partial Least Square based Structural Equation Modeling.

The results of quantitative analysis confirmed 13 hypotheses. All direct influences of the variables of digital divide on e-government system success were supported. The mediating effects of trust in e-government in the relationship between capability divide and e-government system success as well as in the relationship between innovativeness divide and e-government system success were supported, but was rejected in the relationship between access divide and e-government system success. Furthermore, the results supported the moderating effects of demographic variables of age, residential place, and education.

This research has both theoretical and practical contributions. The study contributes to the developments of literature on digital divide and e-government by providing a more comprehensive framework, and also to the implementation of e-government by local governments and the improvement of e-government Readiness Index of Indonesia.

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.

Relationships are a critical success factor for business operations across markets with dominant Chinese culture, like Taiwan. The intersection of a high-quality institutional environment and a traditional Chinese cultural background in Taiwan provides a unique setting for exploring different types of relational mechanisms and ensuing renqing practices (i.e. reciprocal exchange of favors with empathy). The purpose of this paper is to examine when, where and how Taiwanese high-performance organizations manage and deploy interorganizational renqing across their business relationship portfolios. Answering these questions can help build a theory of interorganizational renqing and advance interorganizational reciprocity theorization more generally.

This research is motivated by two key research questions. First is related to how renqing givers understand renqing in the context of their organizations and their interorganizational business relationship portfolios. Second, whether organizations prefer a neutral renqing balance, a renqing debt or a renqing surplus is another point of interest. The study is based on interviews with upper echelon elite informants at six high-performing Taiwanese organizations with business relationship portfolios worldwide.

It is found that interorganizational renqing is deployed as a hybrid resource, taking on the functions of both an investment and a type of insurance against risk. Two notable differences between interorganizational and interpersonal renqing are also noted. First, the social exchange norm aspect of renqing points to salient social exchange norms also in interorganizational exchanges. This confirms the importance of understanding not only the regulative and normative dimensions of business relationships, as a type of institution, but also the cognitive dimensions and underlying institutional logics. Second, this study shows that unlike at the interpersonal level, the notion of renqing debt is not common at the interorganizational level – at least not within high-performance organizations with market leader positions.

This study explores interorganizational renqing practices and their strategic deployment through the use of “accessing” and “embedding” relational mechanisms. The study also adds to the poorly understood nature of interorganizational reciprocity and provides support for developing a theory of interorganizational renqing, as a form of interorganizational reciprocity within a Chinese cultural context.

This study explores the critical success factors (CSFs) for Security Education, Training and Awareness (SETA) program effectiveness. The questionable effectiveness of SETA programs at changing employee behavior and an absence of empirical studies on the CSFs for SETA program effectiveness is the key motivation for this study.

This exploratory study follows a systematic inductive approach to concept development. The methodology adopts the “key informant” approach to give voice to practitioners with SETA program expertise. Data are gathered using semi-structured interviews with 20 key informants from various geographic locations including the Gulf nations, Middle East, USA, UK and Ireland.

In this study, the analysis of these key informant interviews, following an inductive open, axial and selective coding approach, produces 11 CSFs for SETA program effectiveness. These CSFs are mapped along the phases of a SETA program lifecycle (design, development, implementation and evaluation) and nine relationships identified between the CSFs (within and across the lifecycle phases) are highlighted. The CSFs and CSFs' relationships are visualized in a Lifecycle Model of CSFs for SETA program effectiveness.

This research advances the first comprehensive conceptualization of the CSFs for SETA program effectiveness. The Lifecycle Model of CSFs for SETA program effectiveness provides valuable insights into the process of introducing and sustaining an effective SETA program in practice. The Lifecycle Model contributes to both theory and practice and lays the foundation for future studies.

In recent years, there has been a growing desire to more fully integrate informants into the overall research process. In response to this trend, the purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the usage and outcomes of the member checking technique for enabling more participatory interpretive research practices. Information systems (IS) research has utilized this technique, but it has not yet undergone a thorough analysis in this context. Additionally, interpretive IS research is in need of means and tools for engaging with informants during the data analysis and interpretation process.

The data for this study originated from an inquiry into the position of usability work within its cultural context, and this study has adopted a hermeneutic lens to make sense of the member checking technique, which positions informants as co-analysts and co-interpreters to make sense of both their organizational realities and researchers’ interpretations of those realities.

The analysis shows that during the research process, the informants reproduced, questioned, and cultivated the researcher-crafted texts that they were given to interpret, both individually and collaboratively. The study shows that member checking contributes to fulfilling the criteria set for interpretive IS research in a variety of ways.

The study contributes to interpretive IS research method practice by offering IS researchers insights into and guidelines on the usage and potential outcomes of the member checking technique.

The examination of the member checking technique through a hermeneutic lens is a novel approach. For IS research, the study explicates the usages and outcomes of member checking in more participatory interpretive research practice. Also novel in this study is that member checking is examined as a collective endeavor.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a value‐based framework for the consumer e‐trust building process.

The data collection procedure consisted of two steps. The first was a brief questionnaire measuring potential informants' personal values. From this pool of potential informants, 30 were recruited for the interviews: five security‐ and five excitement‐minded consumers from three fields of electronic commerce; electronic newspapers, electronic grocery shopping, and electronic healthcare services.

The findings of the study reveal two value‐based external factors in e‐trust building that consumers perceive as risks in e‐commerce, and three value‐based behavioral patterns in e‐trust building that informants adopt to reduce perceived risks and build trust in e‐commerce. Furthermore, findings of the current study suggest that e‐trust building process is different based on individuals' personal values.

This study takes into account only two consumers' personal values, security and excitement, and ignores others. However, it identifies the role of the consumers' personal values in e‐trust building, and thus opens new perspectives for further e‐trust research. The study also identifies different strategies that consumers can use to build trust in e‐commerce.

This study opens new perspectives in e‐trust research by exploring the role of consumers' personal values in e‐trust building process. The study also provides new insights for other researchers to develop understanding on mechanisms that consumers use to build e‐trust.

The primary purpose of this paper is to compare time availability and its allocation amongst Arts students. In addition it aims to match time availability and use with informants' resource preferences and the variables of language background and residential status.

A sample of 109 students completed quantitatively‐based electronic and paper‐copy surveys. Empirical data from primary informants form the basis of analysis.

The paper finds that over 90 per cent of informants have non‐study commitments and over half have commitments of six or more hours per week. The largest single group (35 per cent) has obligations of six to 14 hours per week. There is only a weak correlation between a higher number of commitments a lower amount of “out‐of‐class” time to engage with study obligations. Conversely, fewer extra‐curricular obligations does not automatically lead to a higher number of hours devoted to study. Differences in resource use are small: paper copy resources are universally popular, regardless of time commitments and allocations. Non‐English‐speaking background and international students tend to have fewer non‐study commitments and devote more time to study in general than English‐speaking background and local informants.

Research covers one of full‐time student informants' four units and does not elicit responses from all units studied by informants.

While employment has been examined as a factor affecting student performance and time availability, few studies have matched time availability and declared time allocations to study. Further, time availability as a key feature of academic study is matched against variables highly relevant to today's student populations: resource mode use; language background; and residential status.