Fundamental concepts in management research and ensuring research quality : focusing on case study method

This paper discusses fundamental concepts in management research and ensuring research quality. It was presented at the European Academy of Management annual conference in 2008

A Holistic Social Constructionist perspective to Enterprise Education

Purpose – Drawing on the Gestalt approach this article proposes a holistic framework for enterprise education (EE) research based on Social Constructionism, illustrating how the latter supports research into experiential learning in EE in 7 UK Higher Education (HE) pharmacy schools. Design/ Methodology/ Approach – This paper is based on a qualitative empirical study involving educators in UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) pharmacy schools in semi-structured interviews, and investigates the delivery of EE through experiential learning approaches. Social Constructionism is proposed as a suitable underlying philosophical paradigm. Findings – A Social Constructionism paradigm, which adopts relative realism ontology, transactional epistemology, and Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology, offers a relevant, multi-perspectival philosophical foundation for EE research, supporting transactional relationships within contexts of multiple possibilities. Research limitations/implications – Social Constructionism does not necessarily support the individualistic paradigm, as advocated by Constructivists; and the values associated with the former encourage a more collaborative and cooperative approach different from the latter. Practical implications –The paper supports the understanding that applying experiential learning through inter-disciplinary and inter-professional learning is regarded as an approach beneficial for educators, institutions and learners, within the context of EE. Originality/ value – This paper offers a holistic conceptual framework of Social Constructionism that draws on the ‘Gestalt Approach’, and highlights the harmony between the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of Social Constructionism. The paper demonstrates the relevance of the proposed framework in EE research within the context of an empirical study, which is different in that it focuses on the delivery aspect of EE by considering the views of the providers (educators), an hitherto under-researched area. Paper type – Research paper Key words: Enterprise education, research philosophy, Social Constructionism, relative realism ontology, transactional epistemology, Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Gestalt approach

On explanation of housing policy

This paper is concerned with making sense of current ways of explaining housing policy. Four different types of explanation are identified and analysed in detail: explanations in terms of systems of actors, hypothetico‐deductive explanations, realist explanations, and culturalist explanations. The characteristic ontology and epistemology of each type of explanation is made explicit. The four types of explanation are then evaluated, partly in their own terms, and partly in relation to each other. It is argued that explanations in terms of systems of actors are inherently superficial, so it is essential to go beyond and below them in order to achieve an acceptable level of explanatory adequacy. Hypothetico‐deductive explanations are rescued from realist and culturalist criticisms which tend to dismiss them altogether, but they are recognised as having serious limitations in terms of conceptual vagueness/ambiguity and contextual fragmentation. Realist explanations are considered in greater depth through an examination of regulation theory. This examination amounts to a critique of the theory as regards its application to housing policy. Finally, culturalist explanations are assessed by using Kemeny's theory as an illustration, with both ontological and epistemological problems being identified. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the logical relations and differences between explanations of the four different types

Declaring the Self and the Social

The epistemological problem is traditionally expressed in the question “How do we know that we know?” The emphasis is on the relationship between the claim that we know and what it is that we know. We notice, only belatedly, that the agent who knows does not really matter in the question. The knower is but an abstracted entity whose only qualification is that s/he claims to know. Virtue epistemology’s virtue lies in the centering of the knower: What is it about the knower that enables her to claim that she knows or that enables us to agree that she indeed knows? The concept of intellectual responsibility in virtue epistemology does not only brings us into the realm of the normative but also implicates, necessarily, the social and the political. Invoking the openness of alternative virtue epistemology to unconventional sources and methods, this essay turns to metaphysics and social ontology in order to explore the problems of intellectual responsibility, society, and politics in humankind’s disposition and striving to know

Concrete utopianism in integrated assessment models: Discovering the philosophy of the shared socioeconomic pathways

The Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) are at the forefront of climate change science today. As an influential methodology and method, the SSPs guide the framing of numerous climate change research questions and how these are investigated. Although the SSPs were developed by an interdisciplinary group of scientists in a well-documented process, there is no apparent consensus in the literature that answers the question, "What is the philosophy of science behind the SSPs?" To investigate, the paper applies a systematic thematic qualitative content analysis to the dataset of published papers that establish the rules and expectations for using the SSPs. The research determines that there is no obvious and concise statement on the epistemological and ontological foundation of the SSPs. However, based on the evidence identified in the dataset, SSPs are implicitly, though not explicitly, consistent with a critical realist and concrete utopian philosophy as coined by Roy Bhaskar. This is the first paper to discuss the philosophical underpinning of the SSPs

Developing Ontological Theories for Conceptual Models using Qualitative Research

Conceptual modelling is believed to be at the core of the IS discipline. There have been attempts to develop theoretical foundations for conceptual models, in particular ontological models as axiomatic reference systems. Although the notion of ontology has become popular in modelling theories, criticism has risen as to its philosophical presuppositions. Taking on this criticism, we discuss the task of developing socially constructed ontologies for modelling domains and outline how to enhance the expressiveness of ontological modelling theories by developing them via qualitative research methods such as Grounded Theory

The Epistemology of scheduling problems

Scheduling is a knowledge-intensive task spanning over many activities in day-to-day life. It deals with the temporally-bound assignment of jobs to resources. Although scheduling has been extensively researched in the AI community for the past 30 years, efforts have primarily focused on specific applications, algorithms, or 'scheduling shells' and no comprehensive analysis exists on the nature of scheduling problems, which provides a formal account of what scheduling is, independently of the way scheduling problems can be approached. Research on KBS development by reuse makes use of ontologies, to provide knowledge-level specifications of reusable KBS components. In this paper we describe a task ontology, which formally characterises the nature of scheduling problems, independently of particular application domains and in-dependently of how the problems can be solved. Our results provide a comprehensive, domain-independent and formally specified refer-ence model for scheduling applications. This can be used as the ba-sis for further analyses of the class of scheduling problems and also as a concrete reusable resource to support knowledge acquisition and system development in scheduling applications

Topic Map Generation Using Text Mining

Starting from text corpus analysis with linguistic and statistical analysis algorithms, an infrastructure for text mining is described which uses collocation analysis as a central tool. This text mining method may be applied to different domains as well as languages. Some examples taken form large reference databases motivate the applicability to knowledge management using declarative standards of information structuring and description. The ISO/IEC Topic Map standard is introduced as a candidate for rich metadata description of information resources and it is shown how text mining can be used for automatic topic map generation