Advancing hermeneutic research for interpreting interfirm new product development
Purpose ? The principal objective here is to describe conceptual and research tools for achieving deeper sense-making of what happened and why ithappened ?including how participants interpret outcomes of what happened and the dynamics of emic (executive) and etic (researcher) sense-making.Design/methodology/approach ? This article uses a mixed research design including decision systems analysis, cognitive mapping, computersoftware-based text analysis, and the long interview method for mapping the mental models of the participants in specific decision-making processesas well as mapping the immediate, feedback, and downstream influences of decisions-actions-outcomes.Findings ? The findings in the empirical study support the view that decision processes are prospective, introspective, and retrospective, sporadicallyrational, ultimately affective, and altogether imaginatively unbounded.Research limitations/implications ? Not using outside auditors to evaluate post-etic interpretations is recognized as a method limitation to theextended case study; such outside auditor reports represent an etic-4 level of interpretation. Incorporating such etic-4 interpretation is one suggestionfor further research.Practical implications ? Asking executives for in-depth stories about what happened and why helps them reflect and uncover very subtle nuances ofwhat went right and what went wrong.Originality/value ? A series advanced hermeneutic B2B research reports of a specific issue (e.g., new product innovation processes) provides anadvance for developing a grounded theory of what happened and why it happened. Such a large-scale research effort enables more rigorous, accurateand useful generalizations of decision making on a specific issue than is found in literature reviews of models of complex systems.
Year of publication: |
2005
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Authors: | Woodside Arch ; Pattinson Hugh ; Miller Kenneth |
Publisher: |
Emerald Group Publishing |
Saved in:
freely available
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