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8 METHODS IN LANGUAGE AND ACTION

This chapter offers brief examples of what typical reasoning might sound like when parts of studies and other activities that create knowledge are done – in other words, what language and action in methodical procedures might look like in our three methodological views. The examples are from the real world and they are intended to give the reader an extended and improved living background for the theory that has been presented so far.

THE THREE WORLDS OF KNOWLEDGE

The chapter leads the reader (just as did the end of Chapter 2) into three different worlds of creating knowledge (ANAlytical; SYStems; ACTors) at a practical level, relating language and action to one world at a time. These worlds will look different from each other in this comparison. The examples are deliberately chosen so that – in their individualities – they will create the contrasts necessary for learning and will offer an extended kind of intellectual feeling for language and action within each of the three knowledge-creating worlds. The examples are not intended to present complete methodical procedures but only to illustrate the actual ways of thinking within the different contexts of the methodological views.

ANALYTICAL PROCEDURES

ANA 1: Professor Peterson on good research

Professor Peterson is an experienced researcher. She has been employed by her university for more than thirty years and has taught business research methodology for a long time. She has three years to go until retirement and wants to leave something for her successors. She has just compiled a compendium that she titled “Business Research Methods”. In the first section, she lays out eight criteria for what she believes represents good research:

1. The purpose of the research – the problem involved – should be clearly and sharply defined in terms as unambiguous as possible.

2. The concepts used should be operationalized as much as possible. 3. The methodical procedures used should be described in such detail that it permits other

researchers to repeat it. Arbnor, I., & Bjerke, B. (2008). Methodology for creating business knowledge. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from indwes on 2021-04-13 14:04:13.

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4. The methodics of the research should be carefully planned to yield results that are as objective as possible.

5. The researcher should, as frankly as possible, report flaws in procedural design and estimate their effects on the findings.

6. Analyses of the data should be sufficient to reveal its significance; the analysis techniques used should be appropriate.

7. Conclusions should be confined to those justified by the research data and limited to those for which the data provide an adequate basis.

8. Confidence in the research is warranted if the researcher is a person of integrity.

ANA 2: The Service Bank questions

Consultant George Carter is asked to assist the new senior management team of Service Bank, the oldest and largest of three banks in a rural district with about 50,000 inhabitants. Its CEO is worried about the slump in the bank’s profits and wants to reverse the trend quickly. George thinks that a good start to an ambitious study is to formulate the problem as a hierarchy of questions; he has tried this before and found it useful. The first methodical procedure is to formulate the management question. In this case, George and the CEO agree that this question could be simply formulated as: How can we improve the profits of Service Bank?

Admittedly, this question does not specify what kind of knowledge is to be created. First, it is very broad; second, it is oriented only toward the symptom of an existing problem, namely, the lack of profitability. But it does provide a start. What George wants to do is to reformulate the management question into one or more

research questions, that is, into a problem of information collecting. Further discussions between the CEO and George indicate that two of the questions have to be answered simultaneously. One problem is a low growth rate in deposits, which seemed related to the competitive situation. Another part of the deteriorating profitability seems to be associated with negative factors within the organization itself. As the client and the consultant discuss the management question with each other, it gradually evolves into two research questions. Both parties finally accept the following formulations:

1. What are the major factors contributing to the lack of a stronger growth rate in deposits? 2. How well is the bank doing with regard to:

a. Quality of its work climate? b. Efficiency of operations compared to industry norms? c. Financial condition compared to industry norms?

George knows, however, that he must go further in his formulation of questions. The next step is to develop the investigative questions with high validity. After much thinking (and

Arbnor, I., & Bjerke, B. (2008). Methodology for creating business knowledge. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from indwes on 2021-04-13 14:04:13.

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discussion with the bank’s senior management) he arrives at the following investigative questions regarding the deposit problem:

1. What is the public’s opinion of the bank’s financial services and how are these services used? a. What specific financial services are used? b. How attractive are the various services? c. What factors influence a person’s use of a particular service?

2. What is the bank’s competitive position? a. What are the geographic patterns of Service Bank’s customers and those of its competitors?

b. What conclusions can be drawn from the demographic differences between Service Bank’s customers and those of its competitors?

c. How aware is the public of Service Bank’s promotional efforts? d. What general opinion does the public hold of Service Bank and its competitors? e. How does Service Bank’s growth compare with that of its competitors?

George starts then to break the organizational problem down in a similar fashion, even though he knows that this does not get to the bottom of the hierarchy of questions. He knows that he eventually must formulate several measurement questions, that is, questions that will represent parts of questionnaires and will guide direct observations and studies of various source materials. But that has to come later.

ANA 3: A causal experiment

Eve Bacon works in a welfare organization. The organization is short of funds and wants to send out a written appeal to drum up contributions. The organization has approximately 50,000 members; a letter sent to each one should elicit the help required. The only question is whether the appeal should be based on emotion or on logic. In order to resolve this question of methodical procedure before the letters are sent, Eve presents a proposal for an experiment that she thinks will give a good indication of which will be the more successful appeal, emotional or logical. The proposal suggests choosing a sample of 300 names from the membership list and

dividing these into two groups of 150. One group will be designated the experimental group (it does not matter which one of the two it is) and will receive the emotion-based letter. The other group will be the control group and will receive the logic-based letter. Eve knows there are three requirements before a relation can be called causal: (a)

Covariation, which in this case can be expressed by the percentage of responses. Suppose, for instance, that 50 per cent of those receiving the emotional letter respond, whereas only 35 per cent of those receiving the logical letter respond. It will then be possible to conclude that using the emotional version will increase the probability of getting an answer.

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In this case, the (b) temporal order between dependent and independent variable does not present a problem. Obviously, nobody answers before they get a letter, so there is no chance that the number of letters with contributions will influence the number of letters being distributed. The main problem, however, is to ensure that (c) no other variable biases the result, that is,

that no factor other than the type of appeal will be at work here. For instance, Eve thinks that honorary life members may feel more reason to answer the appeal. One way of preventing this factor from exerting influence will be to exclude this specific category from the experiment. A second way will be to match the two groups against each other. For example, there may be reason to believe that age will make a difference. In order to control for this factor, the age distribution has to be the same in the two groups. The third way, and the one Eve thinks is best, will be to randomize, to let chance determine who receives what type of letter. This means that both groups contain a similar proportion of different possibly influential factors. Every deviation shall be completely random.

ANA 4: How to improve response rates

John Parson, who teaches marketing at university, has a feeling that a piece of the course covering marketing research is missing. He has always warned that a non-response error is to be expected when conducting interviews. He knows that the largest rate of non-response is usually obtained for mailed questionnaires, but he has never in his methodical procedures really thought about how to improve this rate. He therefore decides to find out what the literature suggests as possible steps to take. After only a few hours’ search he is able to put together a list of steps (reproduced below), but is uncertain about what it means for his future work. Reminders. Reminders, or a second follow-up, seem generally accepted as a way of increasing response rates. Because every successive follow-up leads to more answers, the very persistent (and well-financed) researcher can potentially achieve an extremely high response rate. However, the value of gaining more information has to be traded off against the cost resulting from further contacts.

Advance Notices. It seems that advance notices, especially by telephone, are effective in increasing response rates. They also lead to quicker responses. However, reminders are probably better investments than advance notices.

Questionnaire Length. Common sense suggests that shorter questionnaires should lead to higher response rates, but studies do not support this opinion.

Sponsorship. There is little research on the importance of who is behind a questionnaire. A few cases, however, suggest that the response rate is higher for official or “respected” sponsors.

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Return Envelopes. The few studies that exist concerning the importance of a stamped return envelope point at increased response rates, because the envelopes facilitate the return.

Postage. There is nothing to show that the response rate will increase because stamps are used instead of a postage machine, or because first-day or other commemorative stamps are used instead of “ordinary” stamps.

Personalization. Empirical studies do not usually indicate a significantly higher response rate if personal introductions or individually signed letters are used. A few studies, however, have shown this to be the case.

Cover Letters. It seems logical that questionnaires with cover letters will have a higher response rate, but very few studies have been able to show that this is so.

Anonymity. Experimental studies indicate that promised anonymity does not have a major impact on the response rate.

Size, Typeface and Colour. Here, also, experimental studies have shown no significant differences.

Money Incentives. A number of studies suggest that attaching monetary rewards can be very effective in increasing response rates. However, costs have to be measured against the increase in information.

Deadlines. The few studies available do not indicate a higher response rate if a deadline is given for return; however, deadlines do serve to accelerate returns.

ANA 5: Know and “Don’t know”

Bert Lazon wants his research to find an explanation of people’s appreciation of their jobs. He has done several studies on the topic, and in this latest survey he tried, among other things, to find a connection between the length of time a person has held a job and whether the person appreciated the job or not. One question used was: “Do you like your present job?” The alternative answers were

“Yes,” “No” and “Don’t know”. What now makes him worried is the high rate of “Don’t know” answers. Are these answers from people who really did not know, or is it that many people were not interested in taking a position or giving their opinion? It seems that there is a correlation between the number of years in service and the degree of well-being felt. Because more respondents with shorter service answered, “Don’t know”, this pointed at many “Don’t know” answers really being “No”. Bert can, in his methodical procedures, see three ways of handling these “Don’t know”

answers in his tabulation:

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1. keeping them as a separate category in the table 2. excluding the category from the table 3. distributing them among the other answers in the same ratio that the other answers

occurred.

Bert chooses the third alternative. He is aware that this means he has to assume that the “Don’t know” answers consist of the same proportion of “Yes” and “No” answers as that already found in the distribution of these two answers, but he feels that this is the way failure rates in returned questionnaires – missing responses – are generally handled. Researchers usually assume that those who have not answered would have answered according to the pattern established by those who have answered. Furthermore, Bert needs all 950 units in the sample for various calculations (correlations with the answers to other questions that are part of the study, etc.).

ANA 6: Dr Stone’s test

This is the eleventh year in a row that Dr Ruth Stone has taught the same course. This year there are twenty-five students in the class, and the average examination result is 64 per cent, with a standard deviation of 9 per cent. The average result for the previous ten years is 61 per cent. Ruth asks herself whether this year’s batch of students is better than their predecessors and decides to answer the question by using a statistical test. She does not need much time in her methodical procedure to decide what test she will use. The prerequisites for applying a t- test seem to be present:

1. The observations must be mutually independent. 2. The observations have to be made in normally distributed populations (Ruth had diagrams

of the examination results for each of the past years; they looked like normal distributions).

3. Populations shall have the same variance (these variations had not been large over the years, according to Ruth).

4. The measurement scales shall be of at least an interval type (Dr Stone’s school used an interval scale for examination results).

SYSTEMS PROCEDURES

SYS 1: Professor Anholts’s introductory lecture

Professor Anholts has a keen interest in research methodology. He is also a devoted user of the systems view in his research and has written several books and a number of scientific articles on this topic. He has, on several occasions, been a member of public investigations

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commissioned by the government in his country. Professor Anholts has for a number of years been teaching a course of systems view

research for doctoral candidates in his faculty. Below follows some excerpts from the latest introductory lecture to this course: The fact that the world is full of systems is known to all of us. Some well-known examples are computer systems, information systems and transportation systems. We are all aware of their existence and most of us use them daily. And I can assure you students that we have a well established and thoroughly tested system in place in this school for measuring and grading your study efforts…

Why has this word “system” become so popular? The answer is, of course, that we can no longer afford to, and also should not, solve the problems in our society in a one- dimensional and piecemeal fashion. We must provide more holistic solutions in order to be able to sustain our welfare system and have our economy grow stronger…

We have come quite far in our attempt to explain and to understand how systems are functioning and how we should regard them as researchers. First of all we see them in our methodical procedures as complex and comprehensive. Every system out there in reality should therefore be searched for facts from many different perspectives and in many different dimensions. Nevertheless, a systems study can never be complete; there is always room for unpredictability and every systems study at least partly depends on who is doing it. And because systems can be so complex, we normally have to restrict our studies to look only at a few cases at a time and we often have to dig into the history of systems to understand their present…

But I think systems research is thrilling and hope you will too. To dress a situation in terms of components and relations, structures and processes, synergy and variety can be very rewarding…

As part of this course you are to write papers. You are to do it in groups and the objective of the work will be to provide analyses of real problems and to come up with realistic solutions in at least some of the cases. Some examples of topics that have already been suggested to me are:

An assessment of the system for recruiting new staff to the laboratory of New Bridge Chemicals. Clusters in operation in the southwest part of our country – identification and possibilities. A survey of opinion among our students on the business incubator system at our university…

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I can proudly tell you that the latest doctor who graduated at our school received a Best Thesis of the Year Award for her study “Know-Who Networks in Technology Innovation Systems”.

SYS 2: The bank as a system

Vice President Julia Linden has just read a report from a consulting company engaged by her bank two months earlier. Their mission was to make a diagnosis of the corporate culture of the bank. The conclusions from the consultant are, by and large, as follows:

1. The bank contains a mix of different corporate styles. This is partly a result of often recurring changes in the market orientation of the bank and partly because of a large turnover of personnel at the top.

2. The bank’s strategic planning encourages brainstorming and creativity, but, on the other hand, there are no suitable profitability criteria for this. Numerical skills in combination with conservatism tend to put strategic tasks off until tomorrow and foster only marginal improvements. Personnel policies isolate people, reward good news but punish bad, and lead to people both seeking out personal friends and striving for independence. The marketing philosophy is simultaneously to satisfy every customer, to serve all markets, and to observe competitors’ moves.

3. The bank’s decision pattern is reactive and internally focused. Formal decisions are very centralized, and none of the decision processes have a particularly broad support in senior management. Every person watches his or her turf, and appointed committees can rarely reach constructive solutions. This leads to information and decision requirements flowing down the organization without being followed by any decision criteria.

4. Three subcultures can be identified: Central administration

short-term investment criteria risk avoidance partial assessments make easy decisions first

Individual banks

oriented toward reaching agreements with customers on a case-by-case basis guarding one’s own turf “fire prevention”

Operative areas (the bank has four operative areas)

follow the competition send decisions to the top function “satisfactorily”

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Julia reads the report with concern. Interested as she is in the systems view and in methodological issues, she is disappointed that the consulting firm has very little to say about how the bank functions as a system. She is absolutely convinced that to study the bank as a system and make improvements along systems criteria is the only way to move forward. Had she done the study herself, she would have had a holistic orientation in her methodical procedures, tried to find a suitable magnifying level, stressed processual aspects more than structural ones and interviewed everyone of importance face-to-face. The consulting firm seems to have relied on questionnaires. She knows that a common saying in her bank is to look at it as a “constructive culture of giving and taking in the name of progress”, and she would have had all respondents comment on their feeling for, and understanding of, this. Somewhat distressed, she thinks about tomorrow’s senior management meeting at which the consulting group is to present its findings.

SYS 3: Calmex Co. as an amusement park

Jon Craig is on vacation. He has brought his whole family on a two-week trip to California. But he cannot completely stop thinking about his research study back home in Sweden, which looks at the connection between how companies are constructed and the degree to which they are successful. He has just been in contact with an interesting case: Calmex Co. The company is obviously very successful and has grown from practically nothing into a dominant force in the special market where it operates. What surprises Jon to some extent (after having visited the company a few times) is that

Calmex Co. seems so disorganized, almost chaotic. It has several special characteristics that he has so far seen only in recent theoretical literature:

Every department works quite independently. Nobody seems to take orders from headquarters. On a few occasions, however, Jon has experienced that the central management (if “central management” is the right term) has been contacted for advice or ideas. Several functions have been contracted out to other, smaller companies. What surprises Jon the most is that sorting and distributing the post is run by an independent service firm! Employees always seem engaged in something having to do with customers or suppliers. But that is not all. Customers and suppliers always seem to be present (physically) in one way or another in meetings, at lunches in the company’s cafeteria (which is run by one of the restaurants in town), and even in the laboratory. Calmex Co. seems to have no secrets!

Jon is looking in his methodical procedures for an analogy, a descriptive and developing metaphor by which he can place his image of Calmex Co. He feels that such a picture can “put into place seemingly independent phenomena occurring in the company”. He feels that an apt simile will give him a “framework” for developing a more “total” understanding of Calmex Co.’s behaviour and its success. After spending an entire day with his family at Disneyland near Los Angeles, Jon gets such a

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picture. Calmex Co. can be compared to an amusement park! There are several aspects that “fit”:

One can say that Calmex Co. works in “the entertainment industry,” even if the company is not in showbusiness. Rather like the different attractions at Disneyland, the several departments of Calmex Co. operate independently and are attractive to their customers in their own right. They are also held together by a common concept and a common theme. “Irrelevant” activities are contracted out to other companies. The customers (or “the guests”, as they are called at Disneyland) are constantly present on Calmex Co.’s premises. In fact, the company depends on their active participation.

Jon is very satisfied with his analogy and looks forward to continuing the work on his study. He has already a number of new questions on his mind triggered by his metaphor!

SYS 4: Rose’s final term paper

Rose Campdon has chosen finance as her undergraduate specialization in business, because her father worked in that area. The more she immerses herself in the subject, the more it seems to contain. Her final term paper is to be about financial planning and control in multinational companies. Rose has just drawn a diagram of what can, in principle, be the content of financial flows

between a mother company and two subsidiaries. Rose’s first impression of her own illustration is that there are many more capital flows between companies in an international concern than is at first apparent. But this variety is not the only thing that influences the direction of her work. There also seems to be an endless variety of innovative contracts, terms, options, bonds, stock issues and participants in the international financial world in general. She wants get a picture of what is going on, as she has written in her research proposal, a

proposal that has been discussed in a seminar just a few weeks ago in her academic department. She is not, in her methodical procedures, looking for “an average picture” (which she thinks would be quite useless, partly because reality is so complex and partly because participants probably behave so financially differently on the international market compared to at home), but for “a guide to where the international financial world is heading”. In other words, Rose wants to study the contexts of these companies that point to the future. Where should she begin? Words like models, components, synergy, variety, fit, totality,

complexity, relativity and mutuality of producers and products are rolling around in her head. Finally, she comes to the conclusion to go deeper into the literature to find inspiration for an adequate first systems model to start from.

SYS 5: Technical cooperation

Cooperation is not too good among the H-companies, Alice Coontz soon realizes. She is a Arbnor, I., & Bjerke, B. (2008). Methodology for creating business knowledge. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from indwes on 2021-04-13 14:04:13.

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member of The Consulting Group and, at the request of the H-companies, has concentrated for the past three weeks on a study to discover “how the different functions relate to each other from a technical point of departure, and to suggest improvements”. Alice has proceeded conscientiously in her methodical procedures and used every possible

source of information. She has read minutes from meetings and has discovered decisions that contradict each other. She has visited several factories and has studied how they function. In discussions with representatives from all levels of management, she has listened repeatedly to complaints about low morale and lack of information out in the field, about carelessly constructed budgets and about alienation at the middle management level. She envisions the systems diagram in Figure 8.1 (see overleaf) as a starting point for

planning the rest of the study. She thinks it is a good model for her to choose which components to approach and which relations to discuss. She thinks she has found a proper magnifying level, that is, a good balance between coverage and content.

SYS 6: The answer is written in history

Mary Leech has been working in a company for seven months. She finds the place very conservative, dull and, frankly speaking, rather unfriendly. She wants to try to explain why she has that feeling to her employer. She believes that such an explanation of the company, which has existed for over eighty years, can be traced, at least partly, to its history. By reading all kinds of reports and internal documents, she comes up with the following chronology:

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Figure 8.1 A Systems Diagram

1922: Johnson (the father) founds Johnson Distribution Ltd, with his wife as accountant. One store- man and one driver (part-time) are also present at the start.

1936: Still in the same industry and with, by and large, the same line of goods, Johnson Distribution Ltd has thirty-seven employees.

1940: Johnson Distribution Ltd is engaged for military transport and storage activities, which remain as a smaller branch of the company.

1948: The company introduces job descriptions for all its employees.

1964:

Johnson (the son, who has been employed in the company since 1938) takes over as general manager. He uses major portions of his first year as general manager to put together on paper the company’s established routines. This becomes a written manual, which Johnson (the son) gives to every employee. Johnson updates this manual annually.

1968: Johnson Distribution Ltd has forty-three employees.

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1982: Johnson Distribution Ltd has forty-four employees (thirty-seven of whom have been with the company since 1968).

1989: The company buys its first computer system; it includes one standard package for inventory management and one for accounting.

1993: Johnson (the grandson) takes over as general manager.

When reading this list, Mary says to herself: “Nothing has really happened for the past fifty years here!” However, she is still not satisfied with this alone as a credible explanation. In her methodical procedures she thinks that she also has to talk to a number of her colleagues on an informal basis about how the effect of this picture of history can be seen in the daily life of the company today, and in this way she might come up with a modified history of the company. But she has to be careful and tread warily in order not to offend anyone. She has, on the other hand, a rather determined opinion about which people she would like to speak with first.

ACTORS PROCEDURES

ACT 1: Professor Wild on research as an innovative idea

Professor Wild, who always tries to encourage young researchers to develop their creative talents when doing their methodical procedures for their master’s or doctoral degrees, delivers the following appeal to new graduate students: “Before you started school you had 100 languages. By the time you arrived here your schooling had done away with ninety of them. If you aren’t careful, your further studies will take away a few more.” What he means by this is that the graduate students ought to find their own directions, search the backyards of science, and not let themselves be enticed by narrow-minded supervisors who, out of a fear of philosophy and all new thinking, point out only the established main roads of research. Professor Wild, therefore, unlike several of his colleagues, always recommends to his

graduate students that they do not start by studying previous research. “They say”, Wild points out, that if you don’t, you run the risk of re-inventing the wheel. But I claim that the real danger lies in the established wheels. You see, the risk is just the opposite; that when you start your discovering process by reading what others have researched, your thoughts will probably follow the same tracks, and those tracks may be so firmly established in your head it is almost impossible to leave them. Therefore, I prefer philosophy and free reflection in the very beginning of a research process.

For this reason, Wild always encourages his graduate students to reflect first on their own inner drive for doing research, place this in relation to their inner vision, and then start right out to create knowledge by interactive development of understanding in the study area. As part of this process, Wild recommends that his graduate students use every means they can –

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film, sound, pictures, art, even other “languages” – to poke holes in their own perspectives, to discover the potential in what is factual, and to relate this to the various metatheories of the construction of social reality. The professor says that when this phase has reached a stage that can be articulated with the help of the written word, it will be time for his graduate students to find out what other researchers have written about the phenomena they have found, that is, it will be time to study the research field they have entered as it was expressed by others. In other words, Wild sees the study of earlier research as the final phase in his students’ research, whereas his colleagues assert that it ought to be the platform from which research is launched. To Professor Wild, research is mainly a question of breaking away from established patterns and not, as he says, “pouring more concrete into already established forms”.

ACT 2: Jones and Jones on uniforming methods

Jones and Jones, both researchers, are asked to help the top management of the major daily newspaper, The News. The problem, as the managers tell them, consists of an increasingly diminishing circulation over the past two years, while at the same time questionnaires and interviews in several statistical studies cannot give a clear explanation of readers’ lack of confidence in the newspaper. The researchers ask now to be allowed to take an unbiased walk around the newspaper’s headquarters and then to come back to the managers. At the next meeting with these managers, the researchers raise two important starting points for their methodical procedures, which they describe as follows:

1. Methods chosen to study the problem so far are, by and large, the same as those used by the competitors. Because of this, everybody competing in the field runs the risk of constructing an objectified “newspaper reality” that will converge. Unique profiles are wiped out. Knowledge about their own problems will, by means of self-reference in these statistically uniforming methods, lead toward business decline. Methodologically, this can be described by the metaphor: “if your only tool is a hammer, everything you see in your surroundings will look like nails”. The real problem is, so to say, a problem of methods. If we only look for similarities in what is different and regularities in the irregular and not the other way round, we will surely get a business problem.

2. Furthermore, if the study is not also combined with internal development, the most important questions about the market cannot be posed, at the same time that answers coming from the market cannot be fully used as development tools. This is a dialectical process of pressure and counterpressure that can free (emancipate) the potential in what is factual. And the potential – the business venture – is situated in the tension between creation/production and market.

After presenting their two standpoints, researchers Jones and Jones describe to the management group how they intend to start internally as well as externally. Externally, they want to conduct repeated dialogues with what they call eight “ideal-

typified readers”, several of whom will not be said to represent the majority of the Arbnor, I., & Bjerke, B. (2008). Methodology for creating business knowledge. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from indwes on 2021-04-13 14:04:13.

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newspaper’s present readers – what could be called a problem/opportunity-oriented selection. Internally, the researchers want first to develop a historical diagnosis using longer

dialogues with three retired journalists and two former editors-in-chief. Through a recommended selection of other employees, the researchers intend next to continue to get an understanding of the structure of company jokes combined with each of the employees being allowed to select photos, drawings and works of art that, in their opinion, describe the present situation and what they personally want to achieve in the future, both for themselves and in their work at the newspaper. The researchers justify the last part by wanting journalists, editors and others to express

themselves in a language other than the written one; that, according to the researchers, is where most of the present problems are stuck: in the actual, well-established language game of problem solving. Jones and Jones claim that the structure of jokes is important because “in this objectified language of description, which is supposed to entertain, many problem pictures are hidden for which there is no legitimate company language”. The management team, not being used to actors research, fears its own inability to understand what the researchers are really aiming for with their somewhat different methods, but at the same time management is curious and full of expectations.

ACT 3: The number of rejects must decrease

The senior management of Fix Production Ltd has asked consultant Sara O’Brien whether she wants to conduct a survey of job satisfaction among those who are directly related to production. Sara, however, immediately expressed her hesitation about the project as framed by senior management. They want a conventional attitudinal survey in order, as they said, “to be able to derive the steps to take to increase the motivation among personnel to decrease the seemingly ever-increasing costs of the number of rejects”. Consultant O’Brien raises in her methodical procedures, as an antithesis to the senior

managers’ opinion, that they should probably first make themselves understand the totality, develop a vision, and look for the metatheories on which their opinion is based. The senior management team thinks that Sara’s discussion sounds a bit too loose. But Sara asserts that an alternative to the law of causality does not have to be either “loose” or random. Instead, Sara says, humbly, it can signify meaningfulness. After this first dialogue, a question arose about whether the problem is embedded in a tension field. Consultant O’Brien draws a model (adapted from our book) for the senior management team to consider (see Figure 8.2 and compare with Figure 6.3). Out of the quantitative accumulation created in the field of dialectics – meaning – between

work and everyday life, the quality that this accumulation becomes seems to be rejects as externalization and gloominess as internalization.

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Figure 8.2 O’Brien’s Model for Senior Management

Starting with this construction of an image of everyday reality, and together with the senior managers, Sara is assigned to interact with the people concerned to develop something that will transform the situation, something that can show how the potential exists in what is factual. Everything contains its own contradiction, according to O’Brien, who is a devoted user of the actors view in her consulting work. Therefore, the opposite of the rejects shall exist within the frame of the rejects themselves. Dialogue is Sara’s “weapon” and action her “strategy”. By working with the people concerned to develop a creation that will be run by meaning, like a seed that creates its own flowers, this should in its quantitative accumulation turn into another quality: meaningfulness and fewer rejects. In the creative activities of the emancipatory interaction, Sara, again with the people

concerned, develops an interesting plan in which – among other things – a major portion of the profit resulting from the reduced number of rejects is transferred to children’s and young people’s organizations that directly benefit the children of Fix Production’s employees. After this interactive study those who participated feel a dramatically higher meaning in what they now are doing – to the extent that both the number of rejects and the gloominess have virtually disappeared, and at the same time the quality of the products has improved and discussions about ideas and visions have gone sky-high. According to Sara O’Brien, the company has received a vital injection in the form of tangible proof that the alternative to causality questionnaires and motivational steps is understanding and meaning structures.

ACT 4: An experiment in organization and leadership Arbnor, I., & Bjerke, B. (2008). Methodology for creating business knowledge. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from indwes on 2021-04-13 14:04:13.

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Patrick Nelson is a researcher. His interest is in how medical service is managed and organized. He has for several years conducted different variations of interactive development of understanding in the study area. He has presented his results as descriptive language (process models) and ideal-typified language (models of typified cases) in procreative reports as well as in direct acts. At the moment he is conducting a knowledge-creating experiment in which around 100

persons are participating. All of them have some kind of leadership position. They are representing everything from care centres, small, medium-sized and large hospitals and university hospitals, to central administrations in different county councils. A broad spectrum of experience and different life-worlds are represented, in other words. Patrick lets all of them, individually as well as in groups, bring up issues of, for them, important organization and leadership themes. These issues are then mixed and spread among the participants and this allows them to use the issues themselves as the basis of interviews/conversations with specially invited guests, everything from actors and authors to senior business managers. The idea behind this methodical reasoning is that the participants are to have their urgent

issues reflected as the complex phenomena they are, from several different perspectives and language areas, beyond their own operative service. The interviews/conversations are filmed and the actors are then to edit the material, in other words decide what they feel is more or less meaningful. This way every “interview” is “cut down” from about 40 minutes reasoning to about 15 minutes, which is the target Patrick has set up. In these 15 minutes, problems and answers are now condensed/qualificated as first hand expressions by the actors, where the editing criteria are the study area’s own measure of the degree of urgency. In other words, the participants in these kinds of experiments are themselves to decide how

the material is to be condensed and what they feel to be the urgent issues and meaningful reflections of the same. When editing, the participants are also asked to reflect on their reasoning with the guest in question and write down their reflections. Using these edited films and written materials and his own interactive development of

understanding in the experiment, Patrick then presents a procreative report where the experiment is described using different kinds of descriptive languages. The different sections, where the experiment is treated in the actors’ own words, Patrick usually introduces with a procreative description. In this description he often uses language poetring as a principle to make language intelligible and developable (see Knowledge creating interface of language development in Chapter 7).

ACT 5: Graduate paper on the concept of quality

When Mary, Philip and Mike (all students) meet for the third time to work on the methodical procedures of their graduate paper, they decide that it will deal with questions of quality in industry in the context of quality itself. The paper will not merely take into consideration product quality but will focus on different meanings of the concept of quality in business in general. After a pilot phase of interactive development of understanding and of searching for meaning, the students come up with an idea about how to structure their work, in which

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different kinds of actor selections will be made in the course of the study. Mary, Philip and Mike (for quality reasons) decide to limit their study to two cases; these

are seen as the basis of a number of ideal-typified descriptions of the concept. From the introductory interactive stage they hope to be able to “strike” a few areas of typified phenomena that can be related to different levels of structural meaning. The students feel this is important because in the course of the study it will enable them to formulate more precise questions as antitheses to the everyday denotation of the quality concept that at the time control the language games in the two company cases. The hope, then, is based on this so-called counter pressure to generate the background of the descriptive language and the ideal types they intend to create, starting from the denotations of conceptual meaning in the study.

ACT 6: Knowledge creating and examination

Lecturers Cathy and Bryan are in the process of constructing an examination after teaching a course on entrepreneurship and business ventures. They intend, in their methodical procedures, to give the exam the highest possible content validity. Among other things, they want the arrangement of the exam itself to conjure up a picture of the content of the course. Cathy and Bryan are absolutely convinced that there is no neutral way of examining students; instead, all exams, one way or another, reflect a certain outlook on people as well as a conception of reality and a vision of knowledge. What Cathy and Bryan want to achieve is an exam that, through its very structure, not only openly articulates the ultimate presumptions upon which it is built, but also condenses the learning and the content portions of the course. Finally they come up with a 24-hour-long exam that is divided into four-hour sessions in

which the students themselves, in six different groups, are given the responsibility of achieving high content validity in every session of the course. After assigning the sessions among the students by lottery, part of the time allocated to the

course is used for the groups to plan their exam exercises. Each of the six groups, then, in its four-hour session at the time of the examination, is supposed to assess other students on the basis of their exam activities, and at the same time will be assessed on the merit of whether they can achieve a format and content that reflect the content of the course. All points are then to be weighted together into a traditional exam result. Under the motto “Put your courage and theories on the line”, this 24-hour exam is carried out

as a bus trip. Altogether, 300 miles are covered in the 24 hours, and the allocated four-hour intervals and sections of road are very creatively used to present various situations to test the course content. It was very much an entrepreneurial and venturing project and it succeeded so well that the students later claimed that they had never before studied and been examined on a course with such joy and with such a learning effect. Cathy and Bryan were very satisfied and felt that through their efforts they had been able to

show partly that examination and teaching are not value neutral, and partly that the learning effect is very high if education is based on creating meaning and if it is able to reveal the potential in what is trapped in the factual.

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In this chapter, 3 x 6 different examples have been provided of how argumentation, thinking and application of different investigative efforts and consulting assignments, etc. may look in our three methodological views. Here, everything from the criteria for good research in the analytical view, non-response to questionnaires, introductory professorial lectures and experiences from a visit to Disneyland, to how to treat the number of rejects and the construction of a final student test in order to reach high validity according to the actors view, has been presented. By different examples it has been possible to follow how thinking and language is growing depending on which view we start from. Alongside this, illustrations have also been provided of how the ultimate presumptions in the different views will be expressed in different everyday behaviour and action within the domains of creating knowledge.

POINTS OF REFLECTION

1. Take any of the examples provided in this chapter and discuss in another methodological view than the one used originally.

2. Many of the above examples are methodological stories which provide sections of some study for creating knowledge, often the beginning of that study. Choose your favourite example from some of the views and continue to tell the story as you think it might go on.

3. One of the professors gives the advice that a creator of knowledge, as much as possible, should describe in detail his/her methodical procedures in order for other creators of knowledge to be able to repeat as exactly as possible that research which has been done in the light of these procedures. What types of ultimate presumptions are contained here and what is this advice based on?

4. Another professor asserts that research is mainly a question of breaking away from established patterns and not, as he says, “pouring more concrete into already established forms”. What separates these two professors (in points 3 and 4) more than that they obviously start from different methodological views? We ask you to have a bit of imagination to answer this question, because there are no immediately obvious answers here.

5. When it is about “exactness” in presenting results (the report) two of the views are on a direct path of colliding with each other as far as the value of quantifying is concerned. You know already which these two views are. We want you now, using what has been brought up in Chapter 7 and what has been described in this chapter as a background, to try to clarify to yourself what “exactness” can mean in the two contexts of creating knowledge.

6. What is meant by causal experiments? Try to come up with such an experiment of your own where you are careful about considering possible intervening and background variables. By the way, what does “intervening and background” mean in this context?

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7. A metaphor is a linguistic picture that tries to describe something by using something else – using some kind of an ideal case. In one of the examples Disneyland is mentioned as a possible business metaphor. If you associate this picture of Disneyland with business, what possible perspectives seem to come up in your opinion?

8. To envision a systems diagram, as Alice Coontz is doing in one of the examples, as a starting point for planning a study, might be a good idea in a systems oriented study. To create one metaphor might be another good idea. Try to bring up some positive aspects that might arise if these two good ideas were combined.

9. In one of the examples there are two researchers who claim that when competitors use similar knowledge-creating methods, there is an obvious risk that competitive advantages are diminished. Since these methods, according to the researchers, are indirectly aligning the companies to each other they will also increasingly perceive the market in a similar fashion. What is your own opinion on this issue after having, by now, taken part of a number of worlds of creating knowledge?

10. Sara asserts in one of the examples that an alternative to the law of causality does not have to be either “loose” or random. Instead, Sara says, it can signify …? What?