Organizational Ethnography and the Art of Judgment in-the-Moment

This paper responds to the conveners’ call on exploring and advancing Organizational Ethnography (OE) as a paradigm for the organizational sciences. This sub-theme is linked through my empirical study of senior managers in international development organizations and how they make sense of using their judgment ‘in-the-moment’ in the context of their leadership roles and work environments. I adopt an “ethnographic orientation” (Watson, 2011, p.216) and emphasize the need for a highly reflexive approach in an ethnographer’s role as making judgments throughout the challenging processes of doing “fieldwork, headwork and textwork” (Van Maanen, 2011, p.218). Theoretically, this study contributes to the existing judgment and decision making literature from a social constructionist perspective by drawing linkages to judgment as a co-constructed phenomenon. How senior managers understand their judgment-making in situations ‘in-the-moment’ is an understudied area thus far and even scarcer in the context of international development organizations. Methodologically, the ethnographic and radically reflexive approach taken addresses a gap in the literature, builds awareness and raises in importance examining the ‘multiple selves’ (Reinharz, 1997) of the ethnographer. How I influenced my research and was influenced by it as both subject and object were key to my findings. In addition to the sub-theme call, this paper also links to the overarching Colloquium theme, ‘Bridging Continents, Cultures and Worldviews’, by connecting the cultures and co- constructed views of the researcher and practitioners. The collaborative, ethnographic approach taken was a unique way to get ‘up close and personal’ in understanding what judgment meant to senior leaders in the two participating UK-headquartered organizations. With international development missions in African nations, the senior leaders continuously constructed their own bridges across borders in their financing, operations and communications between their team members and external stakeholders located in multiple countries, reliant on virtual offices and mobile and Internet technology to stay connected. My judgment as an ethnographer was necessary to determine how to best embrace this way of ‘working’ during fieldwork and become another type of stakeholder to them. I will begin with a brief theoretical and methodological background of my exploratory study, identifying the gap in the literature and how my study fills it. Then I will outline the methodology, methods, data collection and analysis and findings. Finally, I will conclude with the challenges of ‘doing organizational ethnography’ inside small international development organizations and the contributions made to advance OE as a unique way to study the social phenomenon of judgment ‘in-the moment’

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

A new trend for knowledge-based decision support systems design

Knowledge-based decision support systems (KBDSS) have evolved greatly over the last few decades. The key technologies underpinning the development of KBDSS can be classified into three categories: technologies for knowledge modelling and representation, technologies for reasoning and inference and web-based technologies. In the meantime, service systems have emerged and become increasingly important to value adding activities in the current knowledge economy. This paper provides a review on the recent advances in the three types of technologies, as well as the main application domains of KBDSS as service systems. Based on the examination of literature, future research directions are recommended for the development of KBDSS in general and in particular to support decision-making in service industry

RAMESES publication standards: meta-narrative reviews

PMCID: PMC3558334This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Lines-of-inquiry and sources of evidence in work-based research

There is synergy between the investigative practices of police detectives and social scientists, including work-based researchers. They both develop lines-of-inquiry and draw on multiple sources of evidence in order to make inferences about people, trends and phenomena. However, the principles associated with lines-of-inquiry and sources of evidence have not so far been examined in relation to work-based research methods, which are often unexplored or ill-defined in the published literature. We explore this gap by examining the various direct and indirect lines-of-inquiry and the main sources of primary and secondary evidence used in work-based research, which is especially relevant because some work-based researchers are also police detectives. Clearer understanding of these intersections will be useful in emerging professional contexts where the work-based researcher, the detective, and the social scientist cohere in the one person and their research project. The case we examined was a Professional Studies programme at a university in Australia, which has many police detectives doing work-based research, and from their experience we conclude there is synergy between work-based research and lines of enquiry. Specifically, in the context of research methods, we identify seven sources of evidence: 1) creative, unstructured, and semi-structured interviews; 2) structured interviews; 3) consensus group methods; 4) surveys; 5) documentation and archives; 6) direct observations and participant observations; and 7) physical or cultural artefacts, and show their methodological features related to data and method type, reliability, validity, and types of analysis, along with their respective advantages and disadvantages. This study thereby unpacks and isolates those characteristics of work-based research which are relevant to a growing body of literature related to the messy, co-produced and wicked problems of private companies, government agencies, and non-government organisations and the research methods used to investigate them