Academic Writing for Method Part

This is a blog for myself to keep track the method for academic writing. It will be updated over time The function of a method section: 

1. Data sources: Primacy or secondary data sources 

2. Where the data is accessed 

3. Limitation and gaps in the data, how the limitation is dealt with 

4. Analytical lens used to interpret the data: consistent with the research question and the theoretical framework. 

5. Potential bias on objectivity that my occur as a result of using this particular analytic frame and not another 

6. Paper section: 

• a. Outline research question 
• b. Motivation for the research question
• c. Prior literature or research on the question 
• d. Method section

Summary for research design in social research

 First, we give a short overview of qualitative and quantitative method and their main differences. Qualitative and quantitative methods are two big camps in social research. The main methods of qualitative studies include case study, mapping, etc. Qualitative methods are used to explore facts and ask open-ended questions.  

Quantitative methods are statistical methods  and experimental methods which focus on testing established hypotheses. Quantitative methods are used to test hypotheses and ask close-ended questions.

When designing a research, there are three key questions to consider: Who are the main audiences? What are the major hurdles we need to overcome? What are the key hypotheses that we need to make?

 The first question mainly focuses on the audiences’ background and the second question requires the understanding of these audiences’ basic assumptions. Researchers from different disciplines hold different assumptions. The third question can be answered differently regarding to whether you are choosing qualitative or quantitative methods.

Sample question:

Generation Y Americans are increasingly attracted to urban living and renting over suburban homes and owning. Design a study to test the statement.

Framing the main research question:

The statement touches three levels of the society: individual, group and environmental level. Therefore the research question can be framed into three ways regarding to three different kinds of audiences. As different audiences have their own assumptions, we would state clearly the general assumption before presenting our research questions.

If the audiences are social psychologists, they will focus more on individuals' personality, perception, motivation and affection. There are two basic general assumptions. First, they mainly focus on individuals and shed away from social environment factors. Second, there are situationist in psychology, but the mainly mechanisms still focus on how the situation factors stimulate individuals' different perception or biases in judgments. 

The research questions they care about may be framed as 1) compared to other generation of Americans, what are the special personalities, perceptions, motivations or attitudes of generation Y that  make them prefer living in urban and renting over suburban homes and owning?

If the audiences care more about group processes, they have background in sociology and social psychology, they care more about how generation Y as a newly emerged group change their choices and what contextual factors influencing their decisions. The research question can be do all the social groups that are related to generation Y have changed their choices?

If the audiences care more about environmental and historical change, their background probably be  history , sociology and economics. Therefore, they care more about how the new phenomena is caused by social, historical, or economic factors.

Framing the hypotheses:

Regarding the three level analysis, we frame our hypotheses in three different ways.

At individual level, the dominate method can be experiment and individual survey.

At the group level, the dominate method can be experiment and case study.

At the general environment level, the dominate methods are statistical inferences, ethnography, survey.

The hypotheses should be framed around the methods you use. 

By Kate Jue Wang

Summary for organizational cognition

Distributed cognition research focuses on how context shapes individuals' cognition (Brown and Duguid, 1991). The contexts consist of social practices that individuals have repeatedly use, such as artifacts, concepts and procedures. Different contexts present different practices, which in turn shape cognition differently. Organizations reduces the information process. 

organizational cognition is defined as the pattern of interconnections that employees establish among organizational resources, which focuses analytic attention on interactions rather than on "within-group similarity of attitudes, understanding or languages" (Weick and Roberts,1993).

Organization cognition is assumed to be a scattered phenomenon, scholars are trying to understand how individuals develop their expertise when they are recruited by the organizations. The main idea is that people try to develop attunement to cognitive resources. That is people notice the information provided by special resources and then use the new contextualized information. members can develop adaptive attunement, when they pay attention to the information cues. Or they can develop maladaptive attunement, when they ignore and get distracted by the new information.

One research area for distributed cognition research focus on the self. One can construct self ont he stable internal traits. One can also construct self on their history. How individuals construct themselves will influence their cognition.

References:

Michel, A. (2007). A distributed cognition perspective on newcomers’ change processes: The management of cognitive uncertainty in two investment banks. Administrative Science Quarterly.

Five different model of behaviors

Economic model: self-interest (Williamson, 1995)

Social model: network influence and institution influence (Granovetter, 1985;Scott, 1995)

Retrospectively rational model: dissonance theory, people make decision out of their preferences and try to come up with reasonable explanation (Weick, 1964); trade-off between interest and commitment

Moral model: Decision is made on the basis of morality and preferences

Interpretive, cognitive model: decision is made on the basis of how people perceive and interpret the phenomena. Cognitive map (Weick and Bougon, 1977)

Industrial Organization Economics

Industry economics suggests that supernormal returns are a function of a firms’ membership in an industry with favorable structural characteristics (e.g. relative bargaining power, barriers to entry, and so on). The unit of analysis is industry.
The major proposition is the SCP model (Industry structure-conduct (strategy)-performance), also called the Bain/Mason paradigm. The essence of this paradigm is that a firm’s performance in the market place depends critically on the characteristics of the industry environment in which it competes. Conduct was the firm’s choice of key decision variables. Industry structure is defined as the relatively stable economic and technical dimensions of an industry that provided the context in which competition occurred, including barriers to entry, product differentiation, overall elasticity of demand (Porter, 1997).

Assumption:    In traditional economics, we assume a perfect market, perfect information flow and equilibrium (MR=MC=P), but in industrial organization, markets are not perfect in that the monopoly, oligopoly or duopoly is the real situation. This situation is not good and we need public policies to constrain the monopoly.

The unit of analysis is: business level or one specific industry, not the entire firm. Work of IO has shifted the unit of analysis to both group of firms and the industry, such as the concept of strategic groups, mobility barriers.

Major critiques: 1) It is too static, views the firm as a free-standing entity competing in a single business. 2) IO is too limited, only including a few critical aspects of structure (concentration and entry barriers). 3) The determinism (ignore the power of management) view firm as a black box.

References:

McGAHAN, A. M., & Porter, M. E. 1997. How Much Does Industry Matter, Really? Strategic Management Journal, 18(S1): 15–30.

Summary of resource-based view

Resource-based view of the firms argue that firms have heterogeneous performances because they have different resources and firms will expand their boundaries if they can find complementary resources.


Short history of resource-based view

RBV started from Penrose's (1959) theory about how firms' resources influence their growth. The term RBV was later coined by Wernerfelt (1984), where he emphasized the idea that resources are of special value of the firms. Barney (1991) developed the core tenets of RBV by presenting a detailed definition of resources and presented a set of factors that make resources potential sources of competitive advantages, such as valuable, rare, inimitable and nonsubstitutable. From 1992 to 1999, large amount of research emerged and developed RBV in a more thorough way by decomposing the constructs and combining with other theories. Amit and Schoemaker (1993) split the construct resources into resources and capability. Oliver (1997) combines RBV and institutional theory to better explain competitive advantage. KBV and Dynamic capability are also derived from RBV. After 2000, resource-based view has been applied to different fields, such as entrepreneurship research, human resources research, etc..


Current research streams

There are two main research streams of RBV. The first one focusing on explain how special resources of the firms can serve as the competitive advantage of the firms. RBV argues that differential firm performance is fundamentally due to firm heterogeneity rather than industry structure (Barney, 1991;Wernerfelt,1984). Firms that are able to accumulate resources and capabilities that are rare, valuable, non-substitutable, and difficult to imitate will achieve a competitive advantage. (Barney, 1991).

The second one focuses on explaining firms' diversification. A firm’s entry into new product markets results from excess capacity in valuable resources that may be transferable across firms but subject to market imperfections (Penrose, 1959).


Main tensions for the theory

Three main tensions are identified in the literature. First,  from a dynamic view, Wernerfelt (2011) argue that current resources of the firms will create asymmetries in competition for new resources, because firms will expand their resource portfolio by building on their current resources. Therefore, small initial differences can lead to huge differences over time. The relationship between resources acquisition and strategic resources stock still asks for future research.

Second, the micro foundation for RBT still requires more exploration, because currently we know relatively little about how the managers manage the resources. For example, integrating with the theories of management of human capital, Coff and Kryscynski (2011) argue that up-and-coming stars would require lower wages to work with other stars. At the same time, the competitors may use higher wages to attract these stars away. In addition, Garbuio et al. (2011) discuss how decision heuristics and biases influence the decision making in diversification and acquisition.

Third, recently, scholars have start to consider RBT and sustainability. Hart and Dowell (2011) examine how firms can achieve both environmental sustainability and competitive advantages. They also point out that there is still few research that investigates the organizations in the base-of-the-pyramid markets, where individuals lives on one dollar per day or even less. McWilliams and Siegel (2011) discuss how managers can achieve strategic CSR by combining RBT framework with economic models, such as hedonic pricing,  contingent valuation, etc.. Taking CSR as a critical resource of the firms, future research could look at what firms can do to prevent negative CSR behaviors and develop sustainable capability of the firms. 


Main critics

The major critic of RBV comes from Priem and Butler (2001). They argued that RBV is not useful for strategic management research because 1) it is tautological in the sense that the outlined relationship between resources and competitive advantage is true by logic, since the concepts used for defining both terms are the same, 2) it is not a theory of the firm because it does not answer the question “why firm exists” directly and it contributes little to the research of firm boundary, 3) it does not open the “black-box” of process that firms function and operate, and 4) it is static.

References:
Penrose, E. T. (1995). The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. Oxford university press.

Wernerfelt, B. (1984). A resource‐based view of the firm. Strategic management journal, 5(2), 171-180.

Barney, J. 1991. Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1): 99–120.

Amit, R., & Schoemaker, P. J. (1993). Strategic assets and organizational rent. Strategic management journal, 14(1), 33-46.

Oliver, R. L., Rust, R. T., & Varki, S. (1997). Customer delight: foundations, findings, and managerial insight. Journal of Retailing, 73(3), 311-336.


Wernerfelt, B. (2010). The use of resources in resource acquisition. Journal of Management.

Coff, R., & Kryscynski, D. (2011). Drilling for micro-foundations of human capital–based competitive advantages. Journal of Management, 0149206310397772.

Garbuio, M., King, A. W., & Lovallo, D. (2011). Looking Inside Psychological Influences on Structuring a Firm’s Portfolio of Resources. Journal of Management, 37(5), 1444-1463.

Hart, S. L., & Dowell, G. (2010). A natural-resource-based view of the firm: Fifteen years after. Journal of Management, 0149206310390219.

McWilliams, A., & Siegel, D. S. (2010). Creating and capturing value: strategic corporate social responsibility, resource-based theory, and sustainable competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 0149206310385696.

Summary of Workplace gossip

Definitions and types of workplace gossip

Gossip is defined as "informal and evaluative talk in an organization, usually among no more than a few individuals, about another member of that organization who is not present" (Kurland and Pelled, 2000)

Gossip is a ubiquitous phenomenon which accounts for approximately 65% of people's speaking time (Dunbar, 2004). Gossip is important for organizations because it counts as an important form of informal control of the organizations, which mainly refers to the informal relationships among employees. Gossip is argued to be the main mechanisms used by employees to strengthen informal relationships.

Workplace gossip is defined as “informal and evaluative talk in an organization about another member of that organization who is not present” (Kurland and Pelled, 2000). Gossips have two features. First, gossips can be evaluated as positive or negative. Second the gossip object is not presented. Previous studies have mostly focus on who is likely to be a gossiper or who will gossip with whom and whom these people choose to gossip about (Ellwardt et al.,2012). However, few of them try to look at what will happen if the gossip object happens to know the gossip. Whether the gossip object will still be cooperative with the gossiper?

Gossip is classified through three dimensions: sign, credibility and work-relatedness. Gossip can be positive or negative. Credibility refers to the degree to which gossips are viewed as accurate or not. Gossip is also categorized by whether the context is related to work (professional) or not (social).


References:

Dunbar, R. I. (2004). Gossip in evolutionary perspective. Review of general psychology, 8(2), 100.

Kurland, N. B., & Pelled, L. H. (2000). Passing the word: Toward a model of gossip and power in the workplace. Academy of Management Review, 25(2), 428-438.

Ellwardt, L., Labianca, G. J., & Wittek, R. (2012). Who are the objects of positive and negative gossip at work?: A social network perspective on workplace gossip. Social Networks, 34(2), 193-205.