UK Nutrition Research Partnership (NRP) workshop:Forum on advancing dietary intake assessment

The development of better and more robust measures of dietary intake in free living situations was identified as a priority for advancing nutrition research by the Office of Strategic Coordination for Health Research (OSCHR) Review of Nutrition and Human Health Research in 2017. The UK Nutrition Research Partnership (NRP) sponsored a workshop on Dietary Intake Assessment methodology alongside its series of ‘Hot Topic’ workshops designed to accelerate progress in nutrition research by bringing together people from a range of different disciplines. The workshop on Dietary Intake Assessment methodology took place via Zoom over two half‐days in January 2021 and included 50 scientists from a wide range of disciplines. The problems with current methods of dietary assessment and how emerging technologies might address them were set out in pre‐recorded presentations and explored in panel discussions. Participants then worked in breakout groups to discuss and prioritise the research questions that should be addressed to best further the field and lead to improvements in dietary assessment methodology. Five priority research questions were selected. Participants were asked to brainstorm potential approaches for addressing them and were then asked to focus on one approach and develop it further. At the end of these sessions, participants presented their project ideas to the rest of the workshop and these will be reported back to the Medical Research Council. It is hoped that potential collaborative projects arising from these discussions will be taken forward in response to future funding calls

Explaining Organizational Change through Generative Mechanisms

Our thinking and methods for understanding organizational change should uncover the multiple processes and the different actors and factors that interact to influence the development of the organization. They should account for its initiation and emergence, its decline, transformation or even termination, along with how it progresses from a lower simpler state, to a higher more complex state. Yet these issues remain largely unanswered, as much research on organisational development and change is comparative static in nature dominated by assumptions that privilege stability over dynamics, and incremental change over discontinuous change. While much progress has been made in developing process accounts of change and innovation, in this paper I discuss the concept of generative mechanisms. I suggest identifying and individuating how these deeper processes or mechanisms attain their causal power helps us better understand the process of change

Organizational Identity Evolving: Developing a Process Model

Existing research regarding organizational identity are dominated by comparative static, cross-sectional, variance based, approaches in which identity at a point-in-time outcome is the focus of explanation. But this tells us little about the development of identify because it is a process that until recently has not been studied processually. These tell us little about the ongoing process of organizational identity development and the underlying forces shaping the way it changes and develops over time. This requires the development of process theories and methods that focus on the temporal sequence of events taking place and the mechanisms and processes driving this. I discuss the nature of process theory and a research methodology for developing such theories based on the analysis of case histories. I propose a research framework to develop a process theory of evolving organizational identity based on an analysis of specific context. It involves: (a) identifying and conceptualizing the sequence of key events or critical incidents taking place in time and space and how they are interconnected; (b) and, identifying and conceptualizing the causal mechanisms connecting events and driving the process

Using Narrative Sequence Methods to Advance International Entrepreneurship Theory

Narrative sequence methods offer the potential to advance research methods and develop a common vocabulary for theory development in international entrepreneurship. While variables-focused, variance-based methods currently dominate theory development, they are atemporal, yet entrepreneurship is what entrepreneurs do over time. We examine the assumptions of variance-based approaches and compare them to those of narrative methods, which leads to a discussion of the nature of causal mechanisms. We then illustrate the use of narrative sequence methods to identify some of the mechanisms underlying the internationalisation of an intermediary in the electronic component industry, where internationalisation is interpreted as a form of innovation and entrepreneurship. We illustrate how these methods, whose value is being increasingly recognised, allow us to introduce time, timing and temporal processes into the systematic analysis of business behaviour and evolution, and to generate usable knowledge for managers and policymakers