Don\u27t Argue with the Members

Mel Pollner regularly cautioned researchers not to argue with the members of settings under consideration. He warned against substituting the researcher’s meaning for the meanings of those being studied. This article discusses facets of the caution as they relate to the research process. Seemingly simple, the tenet is nuanced in application. The article adds to the nuance by distinguishing what is called the “replacement” of meaning with the “displacement” of meaning, providing a way of understanding what members could mean if the contexts and settings of their accounts were taken into consideration

Theoretical Validity and Empirical Utility of a Constructionist Analytics

Wing-Chung Ho offers an extensive critique of what he calls our “radical constructionist approach to family experience,” questioning the theoretical validity and empirical utility of the research program. This article responds to the charges in the broader context of the program\u27s constructionist analytics, discussing family\u27s experiential location, organizational embeddedness, and the importance of ethnographic sensibility. A brief extract of situated talk and interaction is presented to illustrate the discursive complexity and institutional bearings of family as a category of experience. The conclusion takes up the issue of whether the program is radical in conceptualization and empirical realization

Animating Interview Narratives

This chapter discusses the implications of viewing the interview as an actively constructed conversation through which narrative data are produced. It explores the ramifications of framing the interview and resulting data as by-products of interpretive practice - the whats and hows of an animated process involving active subjects behind interview participants. Matters of reliability, validity, bias, and rigor are considered

Organisational adoption of CRM in Jordan

The primary question addressed in this research is: what are the factors affecting organisations‘ adoption of CRM? The customer relationship management system (CRM) is an information technology system that effectively manages interaction and long-term relationship with customers. The number of organisations in the world adopting CRM has been rapidly increasing and the concept of CRM has resonated considerably in recent years with both academics and practitioners. While literature often cites CRM projects as failing to deliver promised improvement in business performance, our empirical knowledge about what constitutes a successful adoption of CRM remains inherently narrow. The potential for substantially improved customer relationships and the tremendous amount of confusion regarding what constitutes successful CRM adoption, calls for a critical investigation into the adoption process, and its key success factors. To do this, the research aims to develop effective guidelines to assist in the adoption of CRM in organisations, by showing that the concept of CRM is a joint development between marketing, management and IT disciplines. The methodology in this study is based on mixed methods by combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. There were two phases of data collection for this research. The qualitative exploratory study with varied stakeholders dealing with CRM was conducted to assess and explore the relevance of factors identified from the literature, and to contextualise the research question in relation to organisations in Jordan. The question led to the design of a survey instrument completed by 321 practitioners from ten organisations across four sectors (banking and finance, telecommunication, hospitality, and automotive) in Jordan. The data was then analysed using a variety of appropriate statistical techniques such as Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). In the light of the EFA, the hypotheses of the study were modified to accommodate the underlying structure of identified factors. In order to test the conceptual model with relevant hypotheses, structured equation modelling (SEM) was performed. This study provides insight into the complexity of CRM through a new multi-disciplinarily approach, which alters the view of CRM amongst academics and practitioners and brings about a new understanding of what constitutes CRM. This approach serves the study purpose of developing a holistic picture of the impetus of CRM adoption in organisations. Moreover, two different perspectives are investigated, at individual (employee) and at organisational level. By doing so, this study unravels the complexity of CRM adoption process. Analysis results revealed that employees‘ perception of CRM benefits serves as reasonable proxy for actual organisational implementation. In this study, there were four factors found to influence and explain employee perception of CRM: i) having a clear objective of CRM influences, ii) strategically measuring CRM performance, iii) X traditional segmentation analysis, and iv) knowledge management. Moreover, there were three factors which were found to have direct impact on the implementation stage: i) clear direction of CRM, ii) rewarding usage, and iii) managing project changes. Theoretical and practical implications based on the current study results and their meanings emerged to shed new light on the potential processes and practices which managers can use to address the complexity of CRM, enabling them to exploit the potential of CRM. Moreover, this study has considered a holistic approach to CRM and its adoption, and has highlighted key areas of poorly implemented practices. It represents one of the rare attempts to thoroughly incorporate different elements of CRM into the adoption process and illuminating reasons that explain the adoption process hierarchy

Performance Modelling and Evaluation of Active Queue Management Techniques in Communication Networks. The development and performance evaluation of some new active queue management methods for internet congestion control based on fuzzy logic and random early detection using discrete-time queueing analysis and simulation.

Since the field of computer networks has rapidly grown in the last two decades, congestion control of traffic loads within networks has become a high priority. Congestion occurs in network routers when the number of incoming packets exceeds the available network resources, such as buffer space and bandwidth allocation. This may result in a poor network performance with reference to average packet queueing delay, packet loss rate and throughput. To enhance the performance when the network becomes congested, several different active queue management (AQM) methods have been proposed and some of these are discussed in this thesis. Specifically, these AQM methods are surveyed in detail and their strengths and limitations are highlighted. A comparison is conducted between five known AQM methods, Random Early Detection (RED), Gentle Random Early Detection (GRED), Adaptive Random Early Detection (ARED), Dynamic Random Early Drop (DRED) and BLUE, based on several performance measures, including mean queue length, throughput, average queueing delay, overflow packet loss probability, packet dropping probability and the total of overflow loss and dropping probabilities for packets, with the aim of identifying which AQM method gives the most satisfactory results of the performance measures. This thesis presents a new AQM approach based on the RED algorithm that determines and controls the congested router buffers in an early stage. This approach is called Dynamic RED (REDD), which stabilises the average queue length between minimum and maximum threshold positions at a certain level called the target level to prevent building up the queues in the router buffers. A comparison is made between the proposed REDD, RED and ARED approaches regarding the above performance measures. Moreover, three methods based on RED and fuzzy logic are proposed to control the congested router buffers incipiently. These methods are named REDD1, REDD2, and REDD3 and their performances are also compared with RED using the above performance measures to identify which method achieves the most satisfactory results. Furthermore, a set of discrete-time queue analytical models are developed based on the following approaches: RED, GRED, DRED and BLUE, to detect the congestion at router buffers in an early stage. The proposed analytical models use the instantaneous queue length as a congestion measure to capture short term changes in the input and prevent packet loss due to overflow. The proposed analytical models are experimentally compared with their corresponding AQM simulations with reference to the above performance measures to identify which approach gives the most satisfactory results. The simulations for RED, GRED, ARED, DRED, BLUE, REDD, REDD1, REDD2 and REDD3 are run ten times, each time with a change of seed and the results of each run are used to obtain mean values, variance, standard deviation and 95% confidence intervals. The performance measures are calculated based on data collected only after the system has reached a steady state. After extensive experimentation, the results show that the proposed REDD, REDD1, REDD2 and REDD3 algorithms and some of the proposed analytical models such as DRED-Alpha, RED and GRED models offer somewhat better results of mean queue length and average queueing delay than these achieved by RED and its variants when the values of packet arrival probability are greater than the value of packet departure probability, i.e. in a congestion situation. This suggests that when traffic is largely of a non bursty nature, instantaneous queue length might be a better congestion measure to use rather than the average queue length as in the more traditional models

Investigation of the changes in the amino acids content of shrimps and the suitability of such a change as a method for the routine assessment of their quality

The present work was undertaken to find a suitable objective quality control method for use in the crustacean markets and in similar situations. Two main types of objective methods used for fish are Available—these are the chemical methods measuring either the trimethylamine-nitrogen (TMA-N) or the hypoxanthine (Hy) concentrations. However, the "K value" is a more simple method for evaluating the nucleotide degradation than the measurement of (Hy) alone, hence the "K value" was preferred in this work. The "Ornithine Equivalent", the separated ornithine and proline, pH, TMA-N and "K value" of pink (Pandalus montagui) and brown (Crangon crangon) shrimps were investigated. These different measurements were assessed as possible methods for the routine quality control of shrimps