Adjusting my data analysis strategy

Posted on 25/05/2017 by yellowbag

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:

code in NVivo against the notes I took during and after the interviews
review the contract summary forms to determine themes
query the codes and memos from the text coding and memo writing
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

Posted on 03/04/2017 by yellowbag

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.

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

Reflections on the interviews

Posted on 15/02/2017 by yellowbag

Convergent interviewing as a process is very effective for getting participants to provide a lot of detailed information in a reasonably short period of time. In my experience the participants found the process interesting because the majority of them thought that they would be asked a series of structured questions and when I told them that I only had one main question they found this slightly perplexing.

For the majority of cases the participants did not find it difficult staying on topic or talking for long periods of time without prompting. There was no issue with any participant about the recording of the interviews. Everyone was happy to sign off on the confidentiality form.

All of the interviews lasted a minimum of 50 minutes and it would have been possible to have continued with the interviews for longer in some cases.

The interviews needed a lot of pre-planning, listening to the last recording, designing the next question, preparing the location, contacting the next candidate to confirm that they are happy to participate. I arranged for each participant to select the location, the date and time.

The snowballing technique worked well. Every participant was able to provide the details of someone who would be useful for me to speak to next or at some point in future. I also put together a list of possible participants.

At the start of the process I intended sticking as closely as possible to the way that Dick had described but I found out quite quickly that I had to compromise the approach. I had intended putting together a reference group, as described by Dick and did recruit a small representative group who agreed to work with me. Very quickly I encountered a problem, the reference group could not agree when to meet as a group mainly due to time constraints and work responsibilities.

Eventually I realised that I needed to get on with the interviews as time was running out. I spoke to each of the people in the representative group and asked them to recommend a group of participants individually rather than meeting as a group. In the end the compromise worked well.

As the interview process has carried on I have not referred to the reference group. I have interviewed three members of the reference group because they line manage several of the subsequent interviewees.

The main thing that has worked is the open-ended unstructured interview and the note taking during the interviews. I have not compromised the process that much only in so far as it makes practical sense. So far the experience of convergent interviewing has confirmed to me the usefulness of semi-or unstructured questions for eliciting answers that are broad based but also contain enough specificity to get enough data to make the outputs useful.

Starting to draft my thesis

Posted on 03/10/2016 by yellowbag

It’s time to start drafting my thesis. I have decided to start with the literature review and to focus on developing a review of the history of change theories in organisations. The reason for this is that my research is focused on the process of change and the impact of change on the identity of teams. It is important to understand where and why change theories came about and how these relate to the research component of the project. Also Actor-Network Theory is centred on change in terms of networks and their associations and how these come into being, stabilise, become durable or destabilise and fall apart.

The main aspect of the project is centred on the restructuring of the faculty administration teams and this is based in some core change theory.

Reflections on Convergent Interviewing

Posted on 14/08/2016 by yellowbag

Using convergent interviewing was an interesting experience. I had not used the technique before except as part of a short pilot of the project. The technique was selected because it was determined to be sympathetic to the principle of Actor-Network Theory whereby the researcher should have no a priori views of the situation in question, the technique starts with one very open ended question with following questions being directly derived from the answers that the participants provide. There is very little in the way of interviention on the part of the researcher.

The other reason is the technique was sympathetic to the organisation that the research was carried out in. Staff were selected on the basis of their role with subsequent participants selected by other participants which was seen as a democratic way of selecting participants.

The process as described by Dick recommends that Convergent Interviewing is carried out by two viewers, one who asks the question and the other takes notes. Obviously I was not able to work in collaboration so had to ask the question and take notes myself.

Dick also recommends taking hand written notes and no more than a side of paper. Subsequent researchers have used voice recording though and to be thorough I decide do to use voice recording and then transcribe the interviews. I did take notes during the interviews.

At the beginning of the interview process I found it quite difficult to decide when to change the initial question because it seemed to generate a lot of interesting data.

It was pretty difficult to decide when to change the question but I managed to do so. After this is was easier to decide when to change the question. Basically, I changed the question whenever there was a significant change in the type of role a participant was in.

Participants found Convergent Interviewing interesting. Most people we a little confused by there being only one main question and were skeptical when I told them that they should speak of up to an hour without any other major questions or prompts.

What was interesting was that once the participants got going they all found it easy to keep talking without the need for further questions and only minimal prompts.

For the interviews I had typed and printed the main question on a piece of paper and included four or five issues that the participant might want to talk about although they did not have to and some didn’t.

For the majority of participants I found that I did not need to provide any prompts because after some initial thoughts people found it easy to talk about their job role and the history of the organisation as far as they knew it.

I asked each participant whether they agreed to have the interview recorded and they all did.

After each interview I reviewed my notes and the questions and made some decisions about the next question. I asked each participant to recommend the next participant, so the process was built around snowballing in terms of participant selection.

The main issue with Convergent Interviewing seems to be the amount of time that it takes to analyse the data and the open ended nature of the questions can lead to a lot of divergent data.

I would like to use the technique again and with more inteviewers, as described by Dick. The technique seems to be often used where there is feeling that something interesting is happening but there is no clarity. The process can be used to clarify issues and help focus attention on critical issues for later follow up.

Last interview

Posted on 10/07/2016 by yellowbag

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.

Continuing with the interviews

Posted on 17/06/2016 by yellowbag

I have been working on completing the research interviews. My supervisor is concerned that I do not carry on interviewing too many people due to the time that it will take to do the analaysis. The problem is the more people I interview the more interesting the project becomes and the more I want to carry on with the interviews.

In some respects this issue is at the core of the research process, how much data is enough. With the interviews I am getting to the point where saturation has been reached.

In order to provide as comprehensive overview as possible I am planning to carry out a couple of observations of meetings and some observations of staff using the SID system. I have also managed to gather a large number of documents that describe the SID development process, implementation and a series of emails regarding the use of the system by staff.

The fifth interview

Posted on 12/03/2016 by yellowbag

The fifth interview was very interesting. The participant was a team member with a very different perspective on the question.

The participant currently works in a customer facing role and has had a lot of student interaction. This has changed though over the past three to four years as a result of the introduction of technologies particularly web based services that allow students to upload their work electronically which previously had to be submitted on paper. The paper had to be processed, catalogued passed on to markers, returned to the administration team and returned to students.

This process was very labour intensive and made the participant feel underappreciated especially when it came to how they felt they were viewed by other staff – particuallary academic staff.

The impact of technology on the team has been to free up time for the participant to spend more time with students and they felt that this allowed them to provide a much better and more personalised service than before,

The number of students coming in person has significantly reduced and this has meant that those coming in have more complex issues to deal with. This has allowed the participant to develop better customer service skills. The participant mentioned that they felt that the team had developed a better skill set and was more appreciated by academic staff as a group that had real expertise – rather than just being paper pushers.

The participant said that the SID system is a success but it is early days and there is a need to constantly reinforce the message – with staff and students – that it should be used.

This was a very interesting interview because the participant is a direct user of the SID system and had some useful insights. Once again I felt the interview went well and there were some very useful convergent points raised.

The fourth interview

Posted on 12/03/2016 by yellowbag

The fourth interview was with a person was quite different from the three earlier ones. The main difference was the three earlier interviews were with managers the fourth was with a team member who had quite a different perspective on the question.

The interviewee was much more focused on operational issues and talked about team structure issues. The issue of staff changes was raised and how these have had an impact on the team and its work. The participant mentioned that over the years the institution has discussed many organizational level changes but many have not been implemented and many others have been only partially implemented.

On one occasion a merger between two teams was stopped due to teams objecting to job changes and the need to develop common practices. This resulted in some conflicts developing due to a lack of openness to new ways of working.

Over time jobs have changed though mainly due to the impact of new technologies being introduced. Technologies that have reduced the need to handle paper. The technologies have increased the skill level of the team and this has in turn built the confidence level of team members who now have more time to provide better customer support.

The use of the student information desk (networked communication system) was raised and the difficulty of building a supportive network of users and how difficult it is to get user buy in. It is felt by the participant that the SID system creates an impersonal service – unlike direct email communication – even though the SID system is seen as a better system than email.

I found that this interview worked well probably because I’ve done a few now and am getting more confident about the process. The data collected is becoming very relevant to the project and ties in very well with relevant theories.

The first interview

Posted on 02/03/2016 by yellowbag

I finally managed to carry out my first interview. After about two months of trying to get people to engage with the project I decided to change my research design slightly. Originally I had planned to set up a Convergent Interview reference group but it was not possible to gather the group together. The people selected were interested but did not have the time to come together as a group due to work loads.

The slight change I made was to interview the people who had agreed to be on the reference panel. I reasoned that as they were interested in being on the reference panel they would be interested in being interviewed. I was correct. I now have three interview participants and have completed two interviews and have a third lined up for Friday this week.

The first interview went very well. The participant was asked to answer one question and a few supplemental questions. I typed the questions and printed them on a landscape piece of paper and left it on the table so that the interviewee could keep the question in mind so that they stayed focused.

I was slightly concerned that my interviewee would not remember to come or would just not bother. The participant was about five minutes late but did arrive. I was both happy and disappointed. I asked the participant to sign the release form and then started the interview.

I explained the purpose of the research and then asked the participant to read the question. The participant spent nearly 50 minutes talking about his team. The answers given aligned really well with the three theories underpinning the research. Completing the interview I realised that the readings I have been doing for the literature review made complete sense. I now believe the project will actually provide some interesting insights into teams, technology and identity.

Permission to proceed

Posted on 30/01/2016 by yellowbag

Yesterday I met with one of the managers I want to be part of my reference group. I explained the project to him and what I wanted him to help me with – allowing me to interview some of his staff and recommending some people in his team for me to interview.

I started off by saying that I had been given ethical permission by the organization and from the institution where I am registered for the award.

I was not sure at the start of my introduction whether he would be sympathetic to my request to help me but as I went on he said the project sounded interesting and he would be happy to provide some names of staff for me to interview. I said that I needed to keep the project narrow in scope and that I had identified four teams including his as the population to study but he said that he thought that the Finance manager would also be interested in the project and would probably be willing to include her staff as well.

I will contact her shortly and see if this is a possibility although I don’t want the project to get too unmanageable and of course time is tight.

I’m going to get back to the other managers I spoke to about a month ago on Monday next week to see if they will give me some staff names so I can get started.

Access to Data

Posted on 23/01/2016 by yellowbag

Now that I’ve been granted ethical approval to start the research project I’m beginning to find that the process of collecting data for the project is a lot more difficult than I imagined.

The main issue I’ve realised is that I might be interested in my project and the theories and reading journal papers but there’s no reason why anyone else should or will be. Getting people to agree to be interviewed is not easy. People know that they do not have to be involved that they are giving their time and information for free. Why should they do this?

I have sent a PowerPoint presentation and the participant information sheet and email to three managers who I would like to be part of my Convergent Interview Reference Panel.

The email I sent to the managers asks if I can attend a team meeting so that I can explain to their staff what I would like to do and that all data will be anonymised. I have been told that some people have concerns about me doing this project at a time when there is a lot of change in the organization and a high degree of uncertainty.

If I don’t get a reply I will have to reconsider my strategy, maybe by sending an email to individuals requesting that they attend an interview.

Thinking about Quantitative Research

Posted on 16/03/2014 by yellowbag

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:

Making sure the computer macro’s work and generate the random numbers.
That the selection of staff from the randomly generated list are available to complete the survey.
That enough people will respond to the request to complete the survey.
That I am clear in my own head what the outcome of the survey is going to be.
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.

Consultation begins turbulence increases

Posted on 05/12/2013 by yellowbag

The university has begun a consultation process to gather the views of staff with respect of the change proposal that has been drawn up by the new VC. A series of staff forums where staff can raise issues, concerns and suggestions have begun. These are being chaired by senior managers some of whom have been given notice that their jobs are at risk of redundancy. The response of staff to the proposals at these meetings has varied between resignation and an acceptance that the Schools structure is a done deal and anger at the way that the process has been implemented. The anger at the implementation seems to fit very well with views on Organisational Justice specifically the aspect Procedural Justice and Informational Justice.

I have noticed that in the last few days formal meetings seem to always start with a discussion about the restructuring. There does not seem to be any part of the organization that has been left untouched by an element of uncertainty. I have found that asking people simple questions about the restructuring elicits long answers with strong views on the situation. This leads me to an assurance that using Convergent Interviewing is a sound method of gathering data.

An interesting point to note is in the literature on interview techniques much is made of the interview process whereby the interviewer should make an introductory statement at the beginning of the interview e.g.

Identify the auspices under which the research is being conducted.
Purposes of the research, funded or for a thesis.
Indication of what the research is about.
Indicate why the subject has been chosen.
Make it clear participation is voluntary.
Assure the respondent that their identity will not be revealed and all information will be confidential.
Provide opportunity for respondent to ask questions or raise concerns.
Ask some simple opening questions and lead to the main substance of the interview.

(Bryman, 2012)

The interesting point is that when interviewing strangers the lead in to the main interview is probably essential in order to gain the confidence of the interviewee and to put them at ease. I have found that asking people I know and work with at work a question the usual response is for the colleague to open up with their views expansively and almost immediately. My view is that there is a strong possibility that I am going to be able to gather a lot of interview data for the assignment and the thesis project with little problem.

I have attached notes that I took at a consultation meeting that took place on Wed, Dec 04, 2013.

Consultation Meeting Notes Wed Dec 04 2013

Invitation to part time staff to consultation meetings received Thu, Dec 05, 2013.

Part time staff invitation to consultation meetings December 2014

Restructuring FAQ #1 posted Dec 05, 2013.

Restructuring FAQ 05122013

Bryman, A, (2012), Social research Methods, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK.

Turbulence continues

Posted on 30/11/2013 by yellowbag

The new VC has held a senior management group meeting where the change strategy was presented. A number of breakout groups were formed to discuss the changes. Feedback from the groups was essentially supportive of the strategy to move from faculties to schools. The main concerns were with the process, the perception that the institution had been thrust into a state of uncertainty and concerns about how staff will respond to this. It was agreed that staff should provide their thoughts either in teams or as individuals and feed these back to a generic email address so that the VC can start to gather view. The other main area of concern was the lack of detail in the current proposal and the fact that several senior managers have been given notice that their posts are at risk of redundancy. This was seen by many as potentially destabilising for the whole organization as there is now the possibility that some of these staff will leave before replacements have been recruited leaving the institution without leadership at a critical and turbulent time.

I am now very keen to start interviewing for the assignment as there is a lot of rich data in circulation. I would really like to interview about ten people but at the moment this is not possible. I will however record any useful data and views here.

The issues raised at the meeting have clear resonance with the three core theories that I am considering using:

Sensemaking
Institutional theory
Organizational Justice theory (OJ)

Issues relating to Organizational Justice are already coming to the surface, specifically issues around how the proposals for change have been developed and how these have been communicated. Staff are generally accepting of the need for the organization to change.

In terms of OJ there are some real connections between what is going on and the theory.

The study of people’s perceptions of fairness in organizations:

Distributive Justice: The form of organizational justice that focuses on people’s beliefs that they have received fair amounts of valued work-related outcomes
Procedural Justice: People’s perceptions of the fairness of the procedures used to determine the outcomes they receive
Interpersonal Justice: People’s perceptions of the fairness of the manner in which they are treated by other people
Informational Justice: People’s perceptions of the fairness of the information used as the basis for making a decision

The issue at the moment relates most strongly to Procedural Justice, Interpersonal Justice and Informational Justice. People do not understand the process that has brought about the changes, people do not consider the process to be fair and there is a deficit of information.

OJ also relates strongly to individual and team performance and has been shown to have an impact on customer service. These issues are clearly of concern to the organization. My question for the assignment research project is:

What are the key issues that employees attend to during organizational change?
How do these issues differ across the hierarchical levels of non-supervisors, supervisors and executives?

The interview question is:

Tell me what you think is good and what is bad about the change that is occurring.

I am planning on using Convergent Interviewing which is a form of semi-structured interviewing. The structure is supplied by the initial question and then the interviewer leaves the interviewee to speak for as long as they like. This can be up to 90 minutes. The interviewer can use small prompts to keep the interviewer talking such as asking ‘what else’, ‘how do you fell about that’, nodding but mainly being very attentive.

In some ways the change is happening about a year too soon. By the time I get to asking the question for the main project the change situation will be about a year into the change. It’ is likely that some of the staff in the institution will no longer be working there in a year. This is a little frustrating.

Turbulence in action

Posted on 28/11/2013 by yellowbag

The university where I am planning on carrying out my research project has appointed a new Vice Chancellor (CEO). The VC designate will be starting work officially on the 1st January 2014. He has though started to attend some meetings on a weekly basis with the current senior management team and individual members of staff and students. The aim of these meetings seems to be for the new VC to gain an early understanding of the institution and some of the key challenges facing it.

On Monday this week the senior management teams of the Faculties were called to meetings with Executive Deans where changes to the existing structure were outlined and a number of posts were identified as being at risk of redundancy. These included the Executive Dean and Pro-Deans of Faculty.

The main message from the Executive Dean was that although there is going to be a lot of turbulence over the coming months it is essential that business as usual continues as there are still students to recruit and the business to deal with.

I have spoken to a small number of staff in a variety of positions about the proposed changes and it seems that there is a common thread of uncertainty but for some people resignation and the view that change is absolutely necessary even if it results in their own positions being made redundant.

The trades unions today issued an email to members saying that they have not confidence in the new VC and asking the Board of Governors to cancel his contract prior to his January 1st start date.

The VC has stated that the changes are not financially driven or a post reduction process but a way of ensuring the long term sustainability and success of the institution.

According to Scott (1995) the dominant sociological view (of an institution) focused on the effects of cultural belief systems operating in the environment of the organization. There is a possibility that people feel a high degree of uncertainty because they see a threat to the culture of the current organization.

Scott, W.R, (1995), Institutions and Organizations, Sage Publications Inc., California, USA.

More thoughts on sensemaking, organizational justice and turbulence »

Posted on 24/11/2013 by yellowbag

The situation where I would like to carry out the research for my assignment is changing rapidly. The new CEO has presented the plan for changing the organizational structure to the board of governors and there is a meeting on Monday 25th November with senior managers. At the meeting it is expected that information will be presented outlining the new structure.

I will need to identify some key participants to interview soon as I want to make sure that I speak to people who are currently in existing posts and roles and who may be or will be affected by changes. This will allow me the potential to go back at a later point to review their opinions on the changes after they have been implemented.

The feeling of organizational turbulence has definitely increased over the past week due to the build up to the meeting this week. There is an increasing feeling of uncertainty and apprehension. This is very rich material for carrying out the interviews. I would expect to find that people are attempting to make sense of the situation and would also expect to find that people discuss issues relating to justice and how decisions have been decided on by the executive.

Since my last post I have been looking at various papers investigating large scale change in organizations. I have also been looking at methods for organizing my assignment literature review. In doing this I came across two related and very interesting papers. One Introducing the Literature Grid: Helping Undergraduates Consistently Produce Quality Literature Reviews by Peter Yacobucci (2012). I have created a spreadsheet for the purpose from the specification in the paper and this seems to work very well and I think it will be very helpful. I looked at using NVivo 10 for the literature review but I found the application crashed several times.

I found I had wasted a lot of time setting things up in NVivo 10 so at the moment I am sticking with the spreadsheet. During the search for a method of organizing my literature I started to search for papers in Emerald on interview techniques. In one, Employee perceptions of organizational change: impact of hierarchical level by Jones. L, Watson. B, Hobman. E, Bordia. P, Gallios. C, Callan. V (2008).

The abstract describes the paper as, The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of organizational level on employees’ perceptions and reactions to a complex organizational change involving proposed work force redesign, downsizing and a physical move to a new hospital. I found this paper to have several similarities to the situation that I am intending to investigate in my assignment.

I realised that as the situation is similar but separated by time and being a different field (a hospital) I noted that the authors specify two research questions that I could re-use in my own research. In my view it is perfectly acceptable to re-use these questions because the situations are different and it would be interesting to see how the outcomes of my assignment study differ or are similar to this study.

What I found to be very interesting in the paper is a reference to Convergent Interviewing. When I first read the paper I did not pick up that this is in fact a specific interviewing technique. I re-read the paper and found that the interviewers asked their participants only one question. I found this confusing at first. After looking up references to Convergent Interviewing I found that the technique is based on asking just one question. The question has to be very well crafted in order to illicit a significant response from interviewees.

In the paper there is a question that chimes with my own research so in the same way that I am going to use the research questions I will use the same interview question. According to the papers on Convergent Interviewing the interviewer should ask the question and then use deep listening in order to focus on the answer and use some small prompts if necessary. The aim is to allow the participant about an hour to 90 minutes to talk about their thoughts and views. The interviewer records the main points of the interview in their notebook.

I think it is going to be a challenging getting my participants to respond adequately to one question. On the other hand I believe that people who are struggling to make sense of a turbulent situation will be willing to talk about their feelings and opinions because they will have strong views on the situation – either positive or negative.

I will be approaching some interview candidates this week.

SSME Some initial notes

Posted on 22/09/2013 by yellowbag

Services Science Management and Engineering. SSME at IBM.

Baumol’s cost disease. From Wikipedia.

Invention of Service Science at IBM.

University Relations Worldwide Community. Explanation, learning and overview.

IBM Service Science Wiki. IBM Global University Programmes.

International Society of Service Innovation Professionals. ISSIP.

Service Science. Standards.

Modelling Service Relationships for Service Networks

Modeling Service Relationships for Service Networks from Jorge Cardoso

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

Posted on 19/09/2013 by yellowbag

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/

Re-thinking the title

Posted on 27/08/2013 by yellowbag

I have been reading the book: The Research Journey, Introduction to Inquiry by Sharon E Rallis and Gretchen B Rossman (ISBN: 978-1-4625-0512-8 (pbk)).

Reading the book has encouraged me to re-think my project title. I decided to review some of the earlier reading and thinking I have done and some of the original concepts that I looked into. I remembered that I was initially interested in organisational behavior, organisational theory, organisational change, Sensemaking, Action Research, Grounded Theory, innovation, service, business systems, information technology, and Actor-Network Theory.

I need to refine and narrow my project scope but I do not want to throw out everything I wanted to use previously. So I have decided to start the conceptual plan with an overarching statement routed in the organisation and then move on to a statement that includes the word innovation and integrate this with the word service.

The combination – organisation – change – innovation – service seem to capture all of the concepts above and more.

Last night I came to the following:

An Actor-Network Theory and Sensemaking inquiry into organisational change: exploring service innovation in relation to postgraduate student enrolment in post 1992 higher education institutions.

Some possible research questions:

How do postgraduate course recruits make decisions whether or not to enrol?
What are the critical factors leading to successful enrolment?
What are service innovations?
What innovations contribute to successful achievement of enrolment targets?
What impact do service innovations have on the organisation, the staff, the curriculum and other services and systems?
When should innovations be implemented?
Who determines the effectiveness of service innovations?
How are service innovations developed and implemented?

A couple of possible research propositions:

P1: postgraduate applicants are more likely to enrol is they have continuing dialogue with academic staff.
P2: services supporting postgraduate recruits (ICT, documents, interviews etc. etc.) need to be clearly defined and transparent.
P3: to be successful service innovations need to include: fees and finance, academic teams, support teams, academic policy, curriculum development, marketing, PR and ICT and other organisational areas.

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