Business Commons^™

‘You Have To Respect The Water’: Participant Experiences Of Appreciating And Managing The Risks Associated With Open Water Swimming – A Rapid Ethnographic Study, Mark A. Christie, David Elliott

International Journal of Aquatic Research and Education

Open water swimming (OWS) has rapidly grown in popularity, driven by the purported health benefits of cold-water immersion. A paucity of research remains specifically considering the notable risks inherent in OWS participation, and a lack of qualitative research on freshwater swimming experiences, and safety-related issues therein. This rapid ethnographic study, based at a dedicated OWS lake in the UK, conducted semi-structured interviews with OWS participants (n=17; female=11, male=6). Two core themes emerged: environmental issues impacting OWS experiences and behaviours; and knowledge and education of OWS which highlighted safe/unsafe practices, levels of education for managing risks, personal preparedness, swimming solo/with others, …

Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy Of Agrarian Transition In Developing Countries, Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir

Purdue University Press Books

Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transition in Developing Countries offers a new explanation for the decline in agricultural productivity in developing countries. Transcending the conventional approaches to understanding productivity using agricultural inputs and factors of production, this work brings in the role of formal and informal institutions that govern transactions, property rights, and accumulation. This more robust methodology leads to a comprehensive, well-balanced lens to perceive agrarian transition in developing countries. It argues that the existing process of accumulation has resulted in nonsustainable agriculture because of market failures—the result of asymmetries of power, diseconomies of scale, …

Debris Of Progress: A Political Ethnography Of Critical Infrastructure, Ethan Tupelo

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I advance a political ethnography of critical infrastructure to better understand terminal capitalism, in which the waste products of commodification and resource depletion are destroying the ecological systems that support life. My object of study is the massive disjuncture between individual knowledge and intention, and these catastrophic collective planetary outcomes. Theoretically, I develop critical infrastructure theory to diagnose these destructive structures. By “infrastructure,” I mean systems of material and discursive flows fundamental to sedentary human organization, connecting local actions with global systems. Such infrastructure is “critical” in three senses: A) denoting the most important forms of infrastructure …

Nethnography, Complementing Netnography: A Defensible Praxis For The Online Researcher, Martin Maccarthy

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

This article issues a challenge for interpretive tourism researchers to consider the trove of online data currently disavowed by aficionados of Netnography. Non-dyadic social media data is used by researchers but has been devalued as lacking legitimacy. However, by combining ‘lifeless’ non-dyadic social media with lesser-engaged ethnographic methods a lived proxy can be achieved. Nethnography is a two-part qualitative praxis of spending enough time with the phenomenon to discern meanings with confidence, which is then used to interpret non-dyadic textual discourse. Lesser-engaged ethnographic methods include participants as observers, observers as participants and complete observers. A fourth legitimizer of online interpretation …

A Case Study On Gender Inequality In A Defense Setting, Nicole L. Hicks

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Women are gaining education, skills, strength, and have adequate drive yet, gender inequality is still blocking their advancement into senior leadership especially in the United States (U.S.) Defense Industry. The purpose of this study was to explore gender inequality within organizational leadership, specifically within the Department of Defense (DoD) civilian sector, to identify potential barriers to ceasing the advancement of qualified women. The main research question driving this research is, what internal and external barriers exist in the defense department regarding the professional advancement of women and what factors contribute to advancement into leadership. Follow-up questions include how veteran status, …

Organizing And Sustainable Development Between The Local And Global: The Case Of A Tibetan Enterprise, Haitao Yu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this dissertation, I investigate how place and space guide organizations towards sustainable development. The current paradigm for business organizing seeks economic efficiency, whereas a sustainable development paradigm requires businesses to accommodate the ecological, social, and economic principles between the local and global. Yet, as organizations are increasingly globalizing and virtualizing, they are becoming increasingly placeless. The loss of local connection to place is one of the primary reasons sustainable development is so elusive.

I am motivated to understand better organizations' role between the local and global on sustainable development. To answer the question, I collected qualitative data through conducting …

The Impact Of Patient Shadowing On Service Design: Insights From A Family Medicine Clinic, Andrew S. Gallan, Bruce Perlow, Riddhi Shah, Judith Gravdal

Patient Experience Journal

A central tenet of patient-centered care is to truly and deeply understand how patients experience health care. One particular qualitative method, patient shadowing, holds the promise of seeing things through the patient’s eyes in real time. The purpose of this research is to utilize patient shadowing to capture the realities of patient experiences in an outpatient family medicine clinic and to report opportunities for improvement to clinic leadership. A total of twenty (20) patients were shadowed at a family medicine outpatient clinic over the course of eight (8) different days, providing a variety of circumstances including staffing levels, shift changes, …

The Double-Edged Sword Of Jurisdictional Entrenchment: Explaining Human Resources Professionals’ Failed Strategic Repositioning, Kurt Sandholtz, Daisy Chung, Isaac Waisberg

Faculty Publications

To protect themselves against deskilling and obsolescence, professionals must periodically revise their claims to authority and expertise. Although we understand these dynamics in the broader system of professions, we have a less complete understanding of how this process unfolds in specific organizational contexts. Yet given the ubiquity of embedded professionals, this context is where jurisdictional shifts increasingly take place.Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of human resources (HR) professionals in two engineering firms, we introduce the concept of jurisdictional entrenchment to explain the challenges embedded professionals face when they attempt to redefine their jurisdiction. Jurisdictional entrenchment describes a condition in …

Innovate Within Product Lines Or Outside Of Them? An Ethnographic Study Of Corporate Innovation In A Corporate Venture Makerspace., Cole Joseph Crider

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Organizational forms firms use for innovating include R&D departments, corporate venturing, and open innovation. This dissertation examines a new form for corporate innovation—the corporate venture makerspace. Makerspaces are “shared production facilities,” and scholars suggest they are environments in which to create; yet few firms have adopted them as a means to innovate. This dissertation is an ethnographic study in which I examine why a large corporation with active R&D centers and limited resources also has a corporate venture makerspace as a secondary innovation mechanism when both organizations serve the same overarching function: explorative learning activities intended to generate innovative …

Investigators Reflections On The Process And Experience Of A Mini-Ethnographic Case Study Research In Nigeria, Ezenwayi C. Amaechi, Patricia Fusch

College of Business Faculty Publications and Research

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the investigator's reflections, both prospective and retrospective, on the process and experience of conducting a mini-ethnographic case study research in Nigeria. The research titled “Exploring barriers to women entrepreneurs in Enugu State Nigeria” was written to add to the body of knowledge on barriers facing some small-scale women entrepreneurs in the marketplaces in Nigeria. A mini-ethnographic case study design was used for this study, this methodology is a combination of ethnography and case study research that can assist a researcher to gain an in-depth understanding of a phenomenon. The data collection methods …

Journeys Through Rough Country: An Ethnographic Study Of Blind Adults Successfully Employed In American Corporations, Kirk Adams

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Blind and visually impaired people in the United States face a dire employment situation within professional careers and corporate employment. The purpose of this research study was to gain insights into the phenomenon of employment of blind people through analyzing the lived experience of successfully employed blind adults through ethnographic interviews. Previous research has shown that seven out of ten blind adults are not in the workforce, that a large percentage of those who are employed consider themselves underemployed, and that these numbers have not improved over time. Missing from previous research were insights into the conditions leading to successful …

Come Together: Inclusive Leadership And Public Relations Education, Heather Paige Preston

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Multiple voices from educational and professional arenas have called for change in the way in which public relations undergraduates are prepared to navigate complex communication challenges in the 21st century. Some scholars have advanced leadership as a way to address this change, identifying the undergraduate public relations curriculum as the ideal place to introduce future practitioners to leadership as a way to better prepare them to initiate and participate in positive social change in complex contexts. However, scholars have neither made in-depth connections with leadership theory and practice, nor provided a framework for designing a curriculum for incorporating leadership into …

Another Space: Gleaning The Urban Littoral, Les Roberts

Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice

Another Space is a short ethnographic film about artist Antony Gormley‟s installation „Another Place‟ at Crosby Beach north of Liverpool. The visuals, shot on a visit to the beach in Easter 2009, are cut to a mosaic of voices drawn from interviews conducted with visitors to the beach. Respondents are asked what the artwork means to them and what feelings and emotions it evokes. This article, written as an accompaniment to the film, as well as to Hazel Andrew‟s study published in the edited volume Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience, and Spaces In-between (2012), provides an auto-ethnographic reflection on the installation …

”I Thought You Were One Of Those Modern Girls From Mumbai”: Gender, Reflexivity, And Encounters Of Indian-Ness In The Field, Pamila Gupta

Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice

This paper is a reflection on my experiences of doing fieldwork in Goa, India (1999-2000) from my position as a „halfie‟ anthropologist, born in India, and raised and educated in the United States. I discuss three „significant fieldwork events‟ that shaped how I was perceived by „others‟(locals and tourists) in the field in order to both illuminate and complicate the gendered, racialized, and diasporic postcolonial politics of conducting anthropological research on the topics of tourism and religion. Further, I pose these encounters as dilemmas, not to be resolved but rather to be explored as impacting and complicating the fieldwork process …

Becoming A Decolonial Feminist Ethnographer: Addressing The Complexities Of Positionality And Representation, Jennifer Manning

Articles

Abstract Organisation and management scholars are often preoccupied with developing, refining and advancing knowledge, and in so doing, the empirical process through which knowledge is advanced can be ignored together with the impact this process can have on participants and scholars. This article draws attention to how management scholars might negotiate the complexities of positionality and representation through an illustrative case: my experience of becoming a decolonial feminist ethnographer. Drawing upon my doctoral research, I share the experience of my ethnographic journey to become a decolonial feminist ethnographer. Developing a decolonial feminist approach to ethnography enabled me to identify positionality …

How To Conduct A Mini-Ethnographic Case Study: A Guide For Novice Researchers, Patricia I. Fusch Ph.D., Gene E. Fusch, Lawrence R. Ness

The Qualitative Report

The authors present how to construct a mini-ethnographic case study design with the benefit of an ethnographic approach bounded within a case study protocol that is more feasible for a student researcher with limited time and finances. The novice researcher should choose a design that enables one to best answer the research question. Secondly, one should choose the design that assists the researcher in reaching data saturation. Finally, the novice researcher must choose the design in which one can complete the study within a reasonable time frame with minimal cost. This is particularly important for student researchers. One can blend …

“Culture Shock”: An Ethnographic Account Of A Small Business In The Face Of Change, Alexia Maggos

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This ethnography follows a small business in Indianapolis that was founded on a small business philosophy that embodied family-oriented, close-knit employee relationships. Aside from the small firm finding success in its established company culture, this small business found great financial success within a niche market. However, as part of new expansion plans, management began imposing a more traditional, hierarchical management styles. While this shift is predicted by contemporary management theory, the human effects and cultural costs of this process are worthy of study. This ethnography follows employees’ perceptions and reactions to the change in business philosophy and analyzes the instability …

Compliance Police Or Business Partner? Institutional Complexity And Occupational Tensions In Human Resource Managment, Kurt Sandholtz, Tyler N. Burrows

Faculty Publications

Faced with institutional demands, organizations often create departments whose work is divorced from technical imperatives. This paper examines workers in one such department: Human Resources. Analysis of HR's recent history and evidence from an ethnographic study of HR work highlight the institutional origins of conflict between HR's established "compliance police" role and the "business partner" expectations of line managers. The paper outlines a theory of how organizational responses to institutional complexity contribute to persistent tension in HR and other heteronomous occupations.

The Ethnographic Method In Csr Research: The Role And Importance Of Methodological Fit, A. Erin Bass, Ivana Milosevec

Marketing and Management Faculty Publications

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research has burgeoned in the past several decades. Despite significant advances, our review of the literature reveals a problematic gap: We know little about how culture, practices, and interactions shape CSR. On further investigation, we discover that limited research utilizes ethnography to understand CSR, which may provide some explanation for this gap. Thus, the purpose of this article is to illustrate the utility of ethnography for advancing business and society research via a multistage framework that demonstrates how three different types of ethnography may be applied to the exploration of CSR. We specifically focus on the …

Constructing A Postcolonial Feminist Ethnography, Jennifer Manning

Articles

Purpose – The paper details the construction of a postcolonial feminist approach to ethnography; providing insight into how the researcher developed her ethnographic approach based on her theoretical framework and demonstrating how she undertook this research. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to outline how the researcher identified positionality and representation as the primary challenges of undertaking a postcolonial feminist ethnography with marginalised Maya women in Guatemala, and how she addressed these complexities in the field.

Design/methodology/approach – This postcolonial feminist ethnography was conducted over a three-month period in the rural highlands of Sololá, Guatemala. This approach bridges the …

"Intonations Of Their Own Language": An Analysis Of Leadership And Resonance In Two Progressive Young-Adult-Filled Congregations In The Pacific Northwest., D. Bethan Theunissen

Dissertations

Christendom in Canada and the United States is in decline, and young adults are leaving the church in considerable numbers. This exodus is especially noticeable in mainstream religious denominations, although evangelical groups are beginning to experience a similar waning. The fastest-growing “religious” group consists of those who identify with no religion.

Simultaneously, young adults are experiencing a far longer entry process into adulthood after adolescence than those who went before them. They also experience the world as unstable and impermanent. Their needs and the church’s needs could converge but instead seem to be antithetical to each other in ways that …

Why Culture Matters In Business Research, Gene E. Fusch Ph.D., Christina J. Fusch, Janet M. Booker Dr., Patricia I. Fusch Ph.D.

Journal of Sustainable Social Change

Organizations today are changing rapidly due to technology, globalization, and cutting-edge production, subsequently morphing into new structures and workflow processes. Organizations are becoming more diverse in terms of gender, age, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The business workplace is not the melting pot that many were taught about, but that of the ethnic salad, blended yet distinct. The core of organizational composition worldwide still remains within the human resource realm for a shared and cohesive culture is behind the success of every company. The study of workplace culture is important for business research to ascertain the construct of the successful …

The Bigman Metaphor For Entrepreneurship: A "Library Tale" With Morals On Alternatives For Further Research, Alex Stewart

Alex Stewart

Melanesian Bigmanship (a meritocratic, enacted career of political-economic leadership) is recounted as an anthropological metaphor for entrepreneurship. This “library tale” has two purposes. The first is a demonstration of conceptual uses of ethnographies for developing grounded theory. Propositions are generated on entrepreneurial orientations and opportunity structures. Opportunities are seen to arise in the creation of linkages between spheres of exchange, or fields in which an object exchanges at different values. Entrepreneurial tactics, such as converting between spheres, call for skills in informal planning, astute use of timing, and networking. These “tactical” skills coexist with “moral” skills, in persuasiveness, the manipulation …

Marketing Mutuality: Boundary Spanning Approaches To Marketing Strategy, Alexander Scott Rose

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation, arranged in three essays, is grounded firmly in the crossroads of sociology and marketing. Theories of the former inform phenomena of the latter. In particular, the sociological theory of the gift and the rich tradition of anti-utilitarian social science inform contemporary debate regarding the rise of the sharing economy and its much-heralded potential to alter the landscape of the market. Through an ethnography of brand and retail service settings in the particular context of American craft beer festivals, the concept of mutuality is used to provide a line of demarcation between effective and ineffective forms of the sharing …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Frontstage Dramaturgy, Backstage Drama: An Ethnographic Study Of The Provision Of Hotel Accommodation, Maziar Raz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The provision of service is a growing focus of scholars in the fields of management and organization studies. Yet research in this area continues to reflect the tenets of Weberian bureaucracy with the predominant conceptualization of the provision of service as a “production system” in which customers and the organization’s resources are inputs, and services are the outputs of the organization. Accordingly, the organizing work of managers is conceived as activities that protect the “production system” from input uncertainties and external influences. What is overlooked in this perspective, however, is the dynamic tension between the organizing work of managers and …

Exploring The Consequences Of Shopper-Facing Technologies: Their Effect On Shopper Experiences And Shopping Outcomes, Brian Ijams Spaid

Doctoral Dissertations

Just as technology has influenced nearly every facet of the modern consumer’s life, it is also significantly changing how those consumers shop and how it influences their purchase decisions. Understanding how technology impacts these shoppers within the retail environment is crucial for retail managers who are expected to deploy and manage these sources of continuous change.

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the phenomenon of shoppers experiencing technology in the retail environment. Specifically, our primary goal is to understand how shopper-facing technologies impact shoppers’ experiences and behaviors and subsequently affect outcome variables that matter to retailers. To that …

Buddhism In The United States: An Ethnographic Study, Jaeyeon Choe, John Mcnally

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

This paper focuses on Buddhism in America, an neglected area of inquiry in anthropological study. There is a need for modern ethnographic studies to shed light on historical issues, paradigms for comparative inquiry, and thus, explore the impact of Buddhism on modern American society (Glazier, 1997). The enormous growth of Buddhism in the last quarter century (Smith, 2002) makes this an especially pertinent topic in American anthropology. We utilize Glazier’s model to add Buddhism as a topic in the area of modernity studies.

This is a preliminary study of the nature of Buddhism in America. We conducted participant observation with …

Collaboration Between Management And Anthropology Researchers: Obstacles And Opportunities, Alex Stewart, Howard Aldrich

Alex Stewart

Management scholarship is built on a foundation imported from older disciplines, particularly economics, psychology and sociology. Anthropology also once played an important role in the history of management thought, and currently includes many “practicing” anthropologists who work in the private sector. Yet it now has a demonstrably marginal influence. Why is this so? What is the potential for greater collaboration with anthropology? Pursuing these questions, we draw upon recent writings in applied, business, and practicing anthropology. On this basis, we identify eight properties of anthropology that affect the potential for collaboration. For each property, we consider the extent to which …

Everyday Advertising Context: An Ethnography Of Advertising Response In The Family Living Room, Laknath Jayasinghe, Mark Ritson

Laknath Jayasinghe

Consumer research largely examines television advertising effects using conventional psychological accounts of message processing. Consequently, there is an emphasis on the influence of textual content at the expense of the everyday interpersonal viewing contexts surrounding advertising audiences. To help restore this theoretical imbalance an ethnographic study was conducted in eight Australian homes to explore the influence of everyday viewing contexts on advertising audiences. This article examines how the everyday advertising contexts of social interaction, viewing space, media technology use, and time impact consumer responses to television advertising texts. Advertising viewing behavior in the family living room is framed within broader …