1,720,952 research outputs found
Growth strategies and small business owners: a Structurationist investigation of Strategy-as-Practice in small enterprises
No full textThe purpose of this research study is to investigate how the strategising of growth-oriented Small Business Owners (SBOs) influences the strategy in their businesses.
This thesis describes a ‘Strategy-as-Practice’ (S-as-P) investigation of ten Small Business Owners (SBOs) in Northeast England. Each SBO participated in a confidential ‘one-to-one’ strategy workshop with the author. The workshop format required each SBO to create a strategy map during the videoed session. The research design was intended to be minimally intrusive for members of the small businesses community.
The theoretical underpinning in this interpretive study was informed by Structuration Theory (ST). The video data were analysed with CAQDAS software. A template analysis approach was used based upon the symbiotic relationship of agency and structure proposed by ST. Cross-cutting themes were sought across the case companies.
The author found that the methodology attracted participation by growth-oriented SBOs. At the meso-level growth-oriented SBOs can be characterised as “strategically aware”, even if their strategy has remained unchanged for a considerable time. This strategic awareness is a manifestation of strategising praxes within the business. SBOs that are not actively changing strategy tend to articulate aspects of their business model which are visible in the firm, the others find difficulty in expressing their strategy in words. The “one-to-one” strategy workshop format used in this study facilitates the articulation of tacit knowledge and hence aids such discussion.
This research was focused upon SBOs that had a history of organic-growth, and had been relatively unscathed by the 2008 Banking Crisis aftermath. The participation group were all based in the North East of England.
This study contributes to existing S-as-P knowledge by extending the contextual boundary beyond large organisations into the small business domain. The author contrasts, and compares, the S-as-P findings in this study with the extant field that has almost exclusively been devoted to larger scale enterprise. The videoed “one-to-one” strategy workshop design is a methodological contribution that has proven efficacious in both recruiting and studying SBOs with the minimum of intervention disruption for these busy people. The author creates a synthesised model of small business strategising based on findings from this study that may assist future researchers to better engage and understand the strategising of SBOs
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Building growth on core competences — a practical approach
No full textToday competitive pressures are increasing and managers are expected to adopt strategies that will sustain their business. Proponents of the Resource-Based View (RBV) and the Core Competence Concept are advocating strategies which stress the importance of intangible features of the firm in achieving a robust platform for sustained competitive advantage. However, the take-up of these concepts in British Industry is slow and spasmodic. Many firms are still concentrating on efficiency measures with little regard to the damage being done to business effectiveness. Most articles in this subject area concentrate on large multi-national corporations, but the majority of businesses can be categorized as small to medium sized enterprises. This article addresses a particular problem for consultants operating in the medium sized enterprise sector: how to describe the confusing plethora of articles on the Resource-Based View as an easily remembered framework for clients.
The author recommends that practising senior managers regularly review their strategic decisions from the perspective of the Core Competence Engine. There is an urgent need to span the chasm between academic debate and business effectiveness; this framework is offered as one possible bridge.
This article introduces, the ‘Core Competence Engine’ as a conceptual framework for managers. This encompasses the major themes seen in the core competence debate and serves to answer some of the criticisms of the RBV and to eradicate some of the confusion arising out of the jargon that is being used
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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