Category Archives: Ideas

Some ideas

Adjusting my data analysis strategy

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I have been reviewing and rethinking my data analysis approach. I have been coding in NVivo directly to the audio track. This has been revealing in terms of coding and memo writing but is extremely time consuming. After thinking through the process from my original strategy of using Convergent Interviewing and keeping short notes rather than transcribing the whole interview, I realised that I need to revisit this and code against my typed notes rather than the whole audio track.

According to Dick the original Convergent Interviewing process relied on note taking without transcription where the notes are linked to the under pinning theoretical framework.

I am now going to:

  1. code in NVivo against the notes I took during and after the interviews
  2. review the contract summary forms to determine themes
  3. query the codes and memos from the text coding and memo writing
  4. combine with coding from the interview recordings

This will return me to my original plan and speed up the data analysis process.

 

Data analysis – is hard

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I’ve had to stop writing my thesis for the time being, I’ve come to the end of the first draft of the literature review but I have been told by my supervisor to concentrate on the data analysis otherwise I’m going to run out of time. I was going to start with In Vivo coding but this felt too loose and unstructured. I prefer to use more structured methods. So, I’ve gone back to basics and reviewed some of the literature on qualitative data analysis.

I’ve been reading The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Jonny Saldana and Qualitative Data Analysis by Miles and Huberman and have decided to avoid In Vivo coding and start again by creating a conceptual framework based on research questions, hypothesis, problem areas, and / or key variables that the researcher brings to the study

I’m going to create a set of codes based on:

Bogden and Biklen’s (1992) coding accounting scheme.

  1. Settings/Context: general information on surroundings that allows you to put the study in a larger context.
  2. Definition of the situation: how people understand, define, or perceive the setting or the topics on which the study bears.
  3. Perspectives: ways of thinking about their setting shared by informants (“how things are done here”).
  4. Ways of thinking about people and objects: understandings of each other, of outsiders, of objects in their world (more detailed than above).
  5. Process: regularly occurring kinds of behaviour.
  6. Activities: regularly occurring kinds of behaviour.
  7. Events: specific activities, especially ones occurring infrequently.
  8. Strategies: ways of accomplishing things; people’s tactics, methods, techniques for meeting their needs.
  9. Relationships and social structure: unofficially defined patterns such as cliques, coalitions, romances, friendships and betrayals.
  10. Methods: problems, joys, dilemmas of the research process – often in relation to comments by observers.

Last interview

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I carried out my last interview on the 3 July. The interviewee was the Academic Services manager who talked about the SID system and the new student HUB that will be opening in September.

The interview was interesting because it was a summary of the situation now and acts as an end point to the start of the interview process that looked back to times before the current organisation structure, over a period of about thirteen years.

The early interviews described long periods of pre-tchnology use where staff self identified as ‘paper pushers’ up to the present day where staff now self identify as having expertise and knowledge that is valuable to academic staff and students.

The next steps will be to tie all the interview strands together and create a chronology of actions or a set of chronotopes.

 

 

Thinking about Quantitative Research

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I have started working on my next assignment  for the quantitative research methods module. I’m using an online Likert scale questionnaire to collect the data. The population from whom the sample is being selected consists of 180 staff. The sample will be randomly selected and will consist of a 10% sample.

The each member of the population will be randomly allocated by a computer macro a number between 1 and 180. The selection of the sample will be made from another macro that will generate 18 random numbers between 1 and 180. The output numbers will be matched to the main population list.

People selected will be sent an email by email mail merge. The email will contain a link to the online survey. The aim is to gather a minimum of 9 – 10 responses for the analysis part of the assignment.

The main challenges at the present time (AKA the beginning) are:

  1. Making sure the computer macro’s work and generate the random numbers.
  2. That the selection of staff from the randomly generated list are available to complete the survey.
  3. That enough people will respond to the request to complete the survey.
  4. That I am clear in my own head what the outcome of the survey is going to be.
  5. I am looking at Factor analysis as a possible analysis technique – (Field, 2013).

I am planning on getting the survey completed and out to recipients the week beginning 17th March.

 

Field. A, (2013) Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics, Sage, Los Angeles, USA. 

Things fall into place

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After spending the last few months investigating Actor-Network Theory, Organisational Justice Theory, Institutional Theory, socio-technical systems, service systems, sensemaking, service science and team change I have FINALLY had an epiphany that has led me to a much more concrete and plausible research topic.

I found a PhD thesis Managing Organizational Change during Institutional Upheaval, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Higher Education in Transition by Dijana Tiplic. After reading through the thesis I realised that where I am working is an organization in upheaval. A new Vice Chancellor will be starting in January and this change at the top is already causing uncertainty throughout the organization.

I felt that the word upheaval seemed a bit loose so decided on turbulence. I have found that this is a good choice as turbulence is actually a technical term relating to large scale organizational change either as an external influence or an internal one. Some external turbulences include the outbreak of the First and Second World Wars, the 1929 Stock Market crash, the 2008 financial crisis, changes in legislation affecting businesses such as tax changes, interest rate changes etc.

Internal turbulence can be produced by a change in the Chief Executive Officer, a major IT infrastructure implementation either one that succeeds – look at the introduction of ICT’s into the newspaper industry by News International, or one that fails and almost or completely destroys the company.

I have realized that there is a good link between sensemaking in organizations, institutions, turbulence and change. These concepts are all active where I work and as the organization and it’s institutions are on the verge of a turbulent change (new CEO) this is an opportunity too good to pass up.

I am going to use the situation to investigate how an organization controls change in turbulent times and make the transition from one leader and associated ideas to another. Staff in the organization are concerned and apprehensive about the future and are anticipating significant changes. There is a view that the university will be transformed from a faculty based structure to a schools based one. This view tends to be based on the fact that the new VC’s ex-university is a schools based organization.

Speaking to various people in the organization there is a strong view that the whole place is going to be transformed into a new structure. People I speak to about the new VC tend to speak as though they are justifying their positions. I have noticed that there has been an increase recently in a focus on managing performance. This seems to be related to people / managers in the organization justifying their position or the position of their team. There is also a feeling of uncertainty amongst some staff that this change might be an opportunity to remove them.

The challenge for the organization is to manage the turbulence so that it successfully emerges stronger and better positioned in the market i.e. profitable.

So the title of my thesis is going to be: Making sense of the organization in turbulent times. I’ve Googled this title and it does not seem to exist!

Unified Services Theory

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I have been looking at service systems and service science and have bought the book Service Science by Henry Katzan, Jr. (Available from Amazon)

Service Science

The book explains service science theory as the underpinning concept of service systems as described by IBM as SSME. I have decided that to undertake a piece of research on the development of a customer service team into a service systems team I am going to use Unified Service Theory as my main underlying theory. The theory is summed up in the following diagram:

Unified Service Theory

Unified Service Theory

UST in full: With services, the customer provides significant inputs into the production process. With manufacturing, groups of customers may contribute ideas to the design of the product, however, individual customers’ only part in the actual process is to select and consume the output. Nearly all other managerial themes unique to services are founded in this distinction. (From Understanding Services Businesses)

Defining by Customer Content:

With services, an effective means of understanding, analyzing, and comparing processes is on the basis of customer content. There are three general types of customer inputs into service processes: the customer’s self, the customer’s belongings, and/or the customer’s information. This principle occurs because customer inputs are present in all services, in accordance with the Unified Services Theory.

Identifying the Customer:

With services, “the customer” is sometimes not clearly defined. Generally, the customer is the individual or entity who directly or indirectly decides whether or not the firm shall be compensated for production. The actual paying customer may desire a non-paying “critical audience” to be satisfied with production, qualifying the critical audience as an indirect customer. This principle occurs because companies can have many stakeholders, some providing inputs and some merely consuming outputs. Since the Unified Services Theory is based on the idea of customerinputs, it is necessary to clearly define who the customer is.

Identifying the Production Process:

With services, the company’s Uproduction process is defined as company effort to add value to customer inputs. Company effort in preparation for production is the pre-production process. When the production process concludes, and the customer may use the production outcome to continue to add value. This post-production process is primarily based on customer action. Often, well-designed service outcomes will enable the customer to create value in the post-production process. This principle occurs because the only ways companies can add value is through efforts and through outputs. Efforts can add value directly to customer inputs (given by the Unified Services Theory). Outputs, or outcomes, can allow customers to add value after the company’s production efforts are complete.

The Unit of Analysis:

With services, the unit of analysis is a process segment. A process segment is a sequence of steps of production. When processes are dissected into smaller segments, the presence or absence of service principles becomes more pronounced. This principle occurs because customer inputs are present in some parts of a production process, but not present in others. By the Unified Services Theory, the parts that involve customer inputs identifies the process segment as a service process.

Weighting the Mixture:

With services, different process segments have different degrees of customer input, and some may have none (acting as manufacturing). The weight, or significance, of specific process segments is most often determined by the amount of value in the overall service contributed by specific segments. This can be approximated by contribution to “willingness to pay.” Some other segments are important for accounting, regulatory, or risk-control reasons. This principle occurs because value of a service process or of individual process segments is judged by how well it adds value to customer inputs. The noted exception is process steps that protect the company’s ability to remain in business by meeting regulatory or risk-control requirements, or by keeping an accurate accounting of production, revenues, and costs.

As seen from the diagram the main idea behind UST is that the customer is a key part of the service system. This is the underlying concept for service value co-creation where the service provider and the service client both gain value from the service operation. For the research project (assignment and probably main project) I intend to use UST as the main theory for developing the service (within an Action Research project) Actor-Network Theory for investigating the background and the various human and non-human actors and Sensemaking theory for reflecting on what has happened.

 

 

Re-thinking the title (2) Themes (1)

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I have been looking into the field of service innovation recently and reading some papers on this. Here is a definition of Service Innovation from Finland’s research agency, TEKES.

Service innovation is a new or significantly improved service concept that is taken into practice. It can be for example a new customer interaction channel, a distribution system or a technological concept or a combination of them. A service innovation always includes replicable elements that can be identified and systematically reproduced in other cases or environments. The replicable element can be the service outcome or the service process as such or a part of them. A service innovation benefits both the service producer and customers and it improves its developer’s competitive edge. A service innovation is a service product or service process that is based on some technology or systematic method. In services however, the innovation does not necessarily relate to the novelty of the technology itself but the innovation often lies in the non-technological areas. Service innovations can for instance be new solutions in the customer interface, new distribution methods, novel application of technology in the service process, new forms of operation with the supply chain or new ways to organize and manage services.

After reading the paper Innovation, Network Services and the Restructuring of Work Organisation in Customer Services by Matias Ramirez (2004) I have changed the title of my thesis to:

An investigation into the impact of customer support teams on the diffusion of service innovations: An Actor-Network Approach.

The central themes of the thesis being:

The impact of:

  • methods of diffusion of service innovations in an organisation;
  • organizational culture on the adoption of service innovations;
  • job description design (Enforceability Criteria: Task Centered or Function Centered) and service re-organisations on the diffusion of service innovations;
  • communication methods on the how well service innovations are adopted and accepted;
  • management techniques and philosophy on how well service innovations are implemented;

There are also themes around:

  • employee discretion to take decisions, try new work methods and to introduce innovations (Function Centered);
  • re-structuring and the effect on staff, customers, services and service innovation within the organization.

Possible useful resource http://www.service-innovation.org/

 

 

A change of direction – sort of

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I was reading a paper Actors, Networks and Assessment, An Actor-Network Critique of Quality Assurance in Higher Education in England by Jonathan Tummons, University of Teeside (2011). The paper is a very clear exposition of using ANT to analyse a domain of interest and of how to make practical use of ANT. The main point that came across to me after reading the paper was that it is essential to be able to clearly identify an area that is worth researching but more importantly something that you have a strong interest in and that will keep you interested over a protracted period of time. The idea needs to be able to generate crisp and achievable aims, objectives and propositions. The idea needs to be something that relates to your work and is something that generates passion and energy.

At the moment I am working on a work project aimed at converting higher education course applicants to courses to full enrolment. After reading the paper above, I realised that there is a lot of scope in this project to become a research project. The work encompasses marketing, advertising, public relations, business development, market intelligence, international, EU and UK recruitment, national and international laws and regulations, web sites, letters, emails. telephone communications, working in teams, working with academic and support staff, working with external agencies, short and long term strategy including the global market, information technology and reporting systems, data management, customer service techniques, international agencies and reporting to senior management.

The current systems and processes work reasonably well but there is a lot of scope for system, process and team improvement. The main areas of interest include:

  1. What are the critical factors that lead to conversion from applicant to enrolment?
  2. When should the recruitment season begin and why?
  3. What are the barriers to communication within the various teams?
  4. What impact do the non-human actors have on candidates – websites, web pages, emails, paper pamphlets etc.
  5. Can the process be streamlined and improved?
  6. What innovations can be implemented and how can these be implemented?

The theoretical underpinnings would be Sensemaking and Actor-Network Theory. Possible research methods are Grounded Theory and Action Research. The recruitment of students is a service oriented process and the current processes and networks (teams) could benefit from service innovation.

The paper Service Innovation using Actor-Network Theory by Lorna Unden and Janet Francis (Staffordshire University, 2011) is a good source of information for using ANT to lead to service innovation. Using ANT it would be possible to ‘follow the actor’ through the current processes and identify where power resides.

A possible starting point is:

Determining the factors leading to successful conversion of applicants through to enrolment in higher education: Actor-Network Theory, organizational Sensemaking and service innovation.

The aim would be to determine how the sociology of associations – the networks of humans and non-humans influence the decision making of course applicants.

Bounded Rationality

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Herbert A Simon has been credited as the first person to propose the concept of Bounded Rationality. Bounded Rationality describes the process of decision making in organisations. Here’s an excerpt from a Wikipedia article…

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision. It was proposed by Herbert A. Simon as an alternative basis for the mathematical modeling of decision making, as used in economics and related disciplines; it complements rationality as optimization, which views decision-making as a fully rational process of finding an optimal choice given the information available.
[1] Another way to look at bounded rationality is that, because decision-makers lack the ability and resources to arrive at the optimal solution, they instead apply their rationality only after having greatly simplified the choices available.Thus the decision-maker is a satisficer, one seeking a satisfactory solution rather than the optimal one.
[2] Simon used the analogy of a pair of scissors, where one blade is the “cognitive limitations” of actual humans and the other the “structures of the environment”; minds with limited cognitive resources can thus be successful by exploiting pre-existing structure and regularity in the environment.[1]
Some models of human behavior in the social sciences assume that humans can be reasonably approximated or described as “rational” entities (see for example rational choice theory). Manyeconomics models assume that people are on average rational, and can in large enough quantities be approximated to act according to their preferences. The concept of bounded rationality revises this assumption to account for the fact that perfectly rational decisions are often not feasible in practice because of the finite computational resources available for making them.