Teaching research methods: Introducing a psychogeographical approach

This paper explores teaching business students research methods using a psychogeographical approach, specifically the technique of dérive. It responds to calls for new ways of teaching in higher education and addresses the dearth of literature on teaching undergraduate business students qualitative research methods. Psychogeography challenges the dominance of questionnaires and interviews, introduces students to data variety, problematizes notions of success and illuminates the importance of observation and location. Using two studies with undergraduate students, the authors emphasize place and setting, the perception of purpose, the choice of data, criteria of success and the value of guided reflection and self-reflection in students’ learning. Additionally the data reflect on the way students perceive research about management and the nature of management itself. The paper concludes that the deployment of psychogeography to teach business research methods although complex and fraught with difficulty is nevertheless viable, educationally productive and worthy of further research

Political football

Much has been written in recent years about governance in the areas of political science, public policy, local government and international relations. However, little research effort has been devoted to examining the term in relation to the organisation, administration and management of sports bodies. This paper is concerned with the way sport is governed, and in particular evaluating the utility of the concept of governance in understanding aspects of the management and policy process in English professional football. The research finds that governance broadens our conceptual repertoire, introduces greater sensitivity and subtlety into policy analysis, and highlights problems of coordination across sports' governing bodies, interest groups and policy actors

Crisis as a plague on organisation: Defoe and A Journal of the Plague Year

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to enrich the understanding of current models of organisational response to crises and offer additional perspectives on some of these models. It is also intended to confirm the value of fiction as a truth-seeking and hermeneutic device for enriching the imagination. Design/methodology/approach – The study uses Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel A Journal of the Plague Year to draw parallels between his portrayal of the London Great Plague of 1665 and the management of modern-day crises. Defoe uses London’s ordeal of the Great Plague to advise those subjected to future crises. Through his representation of plague-ridden streets, Defoe shows stakeholders acting in ways described in current crisis management literature. Findings – The authors note how the management of the Plague crisis was unsuccessful and they challenge the very idea of managing a true crisis. The authors are able to illustrate and offer refinements to the Pearson and Clair (1998) and Janes (2010) models of crisis management as well as confirming the value of their constructs across a lapse of centuries. Research limitations/implications – Although it is an examination of a single novel, the findings suggest value in conceptualising organisational crises in innovative and more imaginative ways. Originality/value – It confirms the heuristic value of using fiction to understand organisational change and adds value to current model

What Practical use is Made of Student Evaluations of Teaching?

Student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are an accepted method of investigating the impact of lecturers’ work with students. Although research generally shows that student evaluations are a positive development, conflicting research on the reliability and validity of the methods used leads to our overall research objective of discovering what practical use is made of the evaluation data by lecturers. Particular focus is placed on the lecturers’ attitude to the use of quantitative and qualitative questions and the reliability of the evaluations as an effective tool. Considerations include the halo effect, students’ ability to accurately assess course content, the influence of assessment grading, and fundamentally the fitness of this instrument for the purpose of acquiring useful, objective data. In a global context SETs may be used by institutions for recruitment or promotion purposes. However, in Europe they tend to be regarded as confidential documents seen only by individual course leaders and senior management at faculty level. They are therefore more commonly expected to be used by the lecturers themselves as evidence of particular necessary steps that would improve course quality and student satisfaction. With regard to the use to which the evaluation results may be put, a certain cynicism is evident among lecturers who perhaps shrink from a perceived obligation to cater to the demands of the student in the role of consumer. Such evaluations include both quantitative and qualitative measurements, generally concentrating on the quantitative as a useful tool to produce statistically comparable data. This initial study uses interviews with lecturers and senior faculty staff at a German private business school and examines their perceptions of the procedures, including their assessment of the effectiveness and use of the results of SETs of their undergraduate students. The data analysis shows a diverse attitude to the evaluations and the call for more open debate and agreement on the format, reliability and use of these evaluations

Psychogeography in a Time of Calamity: Dériving with Defoe

This paper responds to the ECRM Call for Papers by discussing and assessing the value of a co-articulation of two research approaches, that of psychogeography and the use of fictional writing, particularly novels, as a basis for business and management research. It examines Daniel Defoe’s novel A Journal of the Plague Year as the prototypical psychogeographical text and a model of the dérive. In doing so it explores the opportunities and problems of using fiction to understand complex current phenomena. This enables us to further the case for psychogeographical exploration or the dérive as a research method which is well established as a literary genre and which contributes to new understandings of the limits of management and organization theory. We draw parallels between the London Great Plague of 1665 which exposed the contrasting mobility of the rich and poor when calamity strikes, the problems of balancing the private and public good, the challenge of providing employment when businesses have closed and other consequences of urban disaster and how these can help us analyse the impact of such modern day disasters as 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, climate change, and the world-wide refugee crisis. Through repeated forays (dérives) into the plague-ridden streets of London, the narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year illustrates the limits of ‘management thinking’. In the light of current claims that we have reached ecological limits in the ‘global village’ and the apparent widespread breakdown of social order in many parts of the world, the research approach adopted here has the potential to illuminate our current condition. Given this condition, the need to transcend current frames of reference and the necessity to innovate according to the situation includes innovation in research approaches. To the best of our knowledge the co-articulation of psychogeography and fiction has not yet been tested. Treating A Journal of the Plague Year as our ‘case study’ we are able to argue for the dérive as a useful and productive research method that illuminates different aspects of organizational life, as well as the larger context of our organizations. We also contribute to the growing body of work that uses fiction to extend management theory

‘Yay! Not another academic essay!’ Blogging as an alternative academic genre

Academic writing is a staple university practice required across disciplines to determine student success. Despite its ubiquity, however, literacy scholars have long argued that academic writing is both exclusionary and prohibitive. Drawing on the work of literacy scholars we make the case for the use of blogs in higher education as a way of providing a type of inclusive writing or ‘regenring’ that such scholars advocate. To achieve this, we trial the use of a blog in a final-year undergraduate module, employing a mixed-methods approach to explore student perceptions on whether blogging affords them a means to engage with and take ownership of their writing and learning. In keeping with the task we have set our students, we have presented this article using blog-like features

Psychogeography for Student Researchers: a case for the dérive

This paper explores the value of using the dérive and psychogeography as a means of teaching research methods to business students. It draws on the experience and reflections of undergraduate students who carried out a derive in a research methods course. It makes a novel contribution to qualitative research practices in business by applying a methodology established in literary circles and sociology to business. Using the dérive illuminates the importance of several issues such as the dominance of the visual and the importance of location. The paper also considers whether certain people are more open to dérives, whether first-year undergraduates are mature enough for such an activity, and whether undergraduates are able to deal with such an informal practice. It considers how early in their education and to what effect students should be exposed to fundamental issues of epistemology and the challenges to orthodoxy. The findings suggest that the setting of the project is consequential and that reflection is an important element in students’ learning from the experience. We may conclude that the deployment of dérive related to psychogeography in teaching research methods in business is viable and productive

The use of Fiction in Management Research: The Journey of Ulysses

An influential account of the use of fiction in management studies was published 20 years ago (Phillips, 1995). Since then the field has burgeoned with studies on particular writers (e.g. McCabe, 2014; De Cock, 2000), particular sites (e.g., McCabe, 2014), and particular phenomena (e.g., Patient, Lawrence and Maitlis, 2003) and particular forms (Holt and Zundel, 2014). With this paper we extend De Cock and Land’s (2005) inquiry into how organization and literature are co-articulating and interdependent concepts using Joyce’s Ulysses to advance the claim that “literary fiction can reveal important truths about organizational life without recourse to the representation of factual events” (Munro, and Huber, 2012:525). Specifically, we compare and contrast Joyce’s work with the myth and its inherent properties of ambiguity, identity and power. Myths are accepted as containing some truth but existing in many forms: one definitive version is not to be found. Joyce does not offer a finished story, a ‘how to’ handbook of takeaways, but an incomplete journey that requires our own interpretations. In Ulysses, Joyce confronts the reader with the everyday world of Dublin and its array of relationships and organizations. Joyce’s use of the everyday and ordinary provide an insight into the ‘lived’ world and the ‘management’ of real, lived experiences. At the time of publication Ulysses shocked people by what Kiberd (1992) refers to as its ‘ordinariness’. Too often management knowledge is presented as stable information which fails to impart management as difficult-to-interpret, lived experience. Joyce documents a major shift in our understanding of time and place, and management research is catching up. We are beginning to understand that the coherence of organizational life is something we make up as we go along. We are sense-making as we organize. Our organizations are sense-making devices. They are rhetorical acts. Literature helps to restore what the professional-scientific literature necessarily omits or slights: the concrete, the sensual, the emotional, the subjective, the valuational’ (Waldo, 1968). We interpret Ulysses as a critique of the modernist understanding of management and organization and show how it offers an alternative to traditional forms of research

A Formalization of the Theorem of Existence of First-Order Most General Unifiers

This work presents a formalization of the theorem of existence of most general unifiers in first-order signatures in the higher-order proof assistant PVS. The distinguishing feature of this formalization is that it remains close to the textbook proofs that are based on proving the correctness of the well-known Robinson's first-order unification algorithm. The formalization was applied inside a PVS development for term rewriting systems that provides a complete formalization of the Knuth-Bendix Critical Pair theorem, among other relevant theorems of the theory of rewriting. In addition, the formalization methodology has been proved of practical use in order to verify the correctness of unification algorithms in the style of the original Robinson's unification algorithm.Comment: In Proceedings LSFA 2011, arXiv:1203.542