Key Tensions Research Articles

Templates in Qualitative Research Methods: Origins, Limitations, and New Directions

In this feature topic, we explore the burgeoning trend to employ templates in qualitative research. To understand authors’ motivations to use templates and perceptions regarding template use in the scholarly community, we conducted an interview study with 21 interviewees who had published qualitative research in one of nine premier management journals between 2014 and 2018. Our analysis identified four key tensions in template use: structure versus restriction, convention versus innovativeness, legitimization versus obscuration, and instrumentality versus craft. We discuss these tensions and their implications for the practice and evaluation of qualitative research. We then introduce the eight papers included in this feature topic. Each of them addresses and explores specific aspects of the origins and limitations of template use, whilst providing insights and guidance for future qualitative research. We envisage this feature topic to be a catalyst for discourse amongst scholars, engaging with contemporary trends and tensions to pave new pathways that embrace the diversity and plurality of qualitative approaches.

SMEs and exogenous shocks: A conceptual literature review and forward research agenda

Economic crises, natural disasters, armed conflict and infectious disease outbreaks, amongst others, present interlinked challenges for small businesses and have generated a recent wealth of research across varied fields. Therefore, this article outlines an analytical lens suggesting how SMEs experience shocks and crises that focuses on the interlinked nature of (i) the business, (ii) the shock and (iii) the response within a given context. We thematically draw out key trends, knowledge gaps and tensions and highlight promising research and engagement avenues for future scholarship and practice. We contextualise (i) how small businesses are distinct from large firms in how they experience shock and crisis events; (ii) how different types of crises impact small business; (iii) how shocks and crises shape SME-specific responses and (iv) how the COVID-19 pandemic as a ‘novel exogenous shock’ influences all of the above. We conclude by emphasising emerging knowledge avenues for future small business, shock and crisis research.

Scanning for Cultural Competency in Online Urban Planning Programs

This article investigates online urban planning degree programs. The Covid-19 pandemic forced urban planning programs to pivot to online delivery instantly. However, there is little preexisting knowledge on online learning in place-making fields of study both in the literature and in practice. Meanwhile, working and learning from home is expected to continue as part of urban planning education and practice. The key tension of teaching urban planning online, as a traditional place-dependent field, is the starting point for our inquiry in this article. To understand the state of online urban planning programs, an internet search was conducted. A database of 176 higher education programs was created that identified only eight online programs including degree-granting and certificate programs in urban planning. These urban planning program results were concentrated in the western United States. Key challenges in online learning were identified through a literature review, including pedagogical efforts in skill transfer and multiculturalism. The eight-program curriculum strategies were analyzed through a qualitative case study analysis. A discussion on the tactics during the transition from in-person to online education in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at California State Polytechnic University Pomona is also presented. This article provides online urban planning program information for educators currently teaching online and for those interested in creating an online program. Online programs in place-specific fields such as urban planning have particular challenges in understanding communities without site visits, ethnography, or robust in-person community engagement. Online urban planning programs must make additional efforts to achieve a social, collaborative learning and practice environment.

‘RNA modulation of transport properties and stability in phase-separated condensates

One of the key mechanisms employed by cells to control their spatiotemporal organization is the formation and dissolution of phase-separated condensates. The balance between condensate assembly and disassembly can be critically regulated by the presence of RNA. In this work, we use a chemically-accurate sequence-dependent coarse-grained model for proteins and RNA to unravel the impact of RNA in modulating the transport properties and stability of biomolecular condensates. We explore the phase behavior of several RNA-binding proteins such as FUS, hnRNPA1, and TDP-43 proteins along with that of their corresponding prion-like domains and RNA recognition motifs from absence to moderately high RNA concentration. By characterizing the phase diagram, key molecular interactions, surface tension, and transport properties of the condensates, we report a dual RNA-induced behavior: on the one hand, RNA enhances phase separation at low concentration as long as the RNA radius of gyration is comparable to that of the proteins, whereas at high concentration, it inhibits the ability of proteins to self-assemble independently of its length. On the other hand, along with the stability modulation, the viscosity of the condensates can be considerably reduced at high RNA concentration as long as the length of the RNA chains is shorter than that of the proteins. Conversely, long RNA strands increase viscosity even at high concentration, but barely modify protein self-diffusion which mainly depends on RNA concentration and on the effect RNA has on droplet density. On the whole, our work rationalizes the different routes by which RNA can regulate phase separation and condensate dynamics, as well as the subsequent aberrant rigidification implicated in the emergence of various neuropathologies and age-related diseases.

The Roar of the Crowd: How Interaction Ritual Chains Create Social Atmospheres

Atmospheres are experiences of place involving transformations of consumers’ behaviors and emotions. Existing marketing research reveals how atmospheric stimuli, service performances, and ritual place-making enhance place experiences and create value for firms. Yet it remains unclear how shared experiences of atmosphere emerge and intensify among groups of people during collective live events. Accordingly, this article uses sociological interaction ritual theory to conceptualize “social atmospheres”: rapidly changing qualities of place created when a shared focus aligns consumers’ emotions and behavior, resulting in lively expressions of collective effervescence. With data from an ethnography of an English Premier League football stadium, the authors identify a four-stage process of creating atmospheres in interaction ritual chains. This framework goes beyond conventional retail and servicescape design by demonstrating that social atmospheres are mobile and cocreated between firms and consumers before, during, and after a main event. The study also reveals how interaction rituals can be disrupted and offers insight as to how firms can balance key tensions in creating social atmospheres as a means to enhance customer experiences, customer loyalty, and communal place attachments.

Worlds Apart? – The Challenges of Aligning Brand Value for NGO’s

Brands are increasingly part of how international aid and development Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) operate, but there are challenges in aligning NGO brand value across diverse stakeholders. This research explores how key decision makers within one major NGO – Oxfam—construct the challenges of brand value alignment, using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology. Three master-themes emerge demonstrating key tensions around aligning NGOs brand value: the difficulty of balancing competing stakeholder needs, the internal cultural conflict around branding, and the existential dilemma underlying the societal effectiveness of NGOs. This paper proposes that NGOs can better navigate these intra—brand tensions using Brand-as-Purpose as an organizing principle; framing shared identity, creating a dynamic container for stakeholder interests and cultivating Moral Capital strongly anchored in increasing recipient wellbeing. This paper is one of the first pieces of research which explores how NGOs make sense of aligning brand value in the context of complex stakeholder cultures and recipient sovereignty. Brand-as Purpose is put forward as an organizing principle to help balance three key tensions around brand value alignment. This paper proposes that Moral Capital anchored in recipient wellbeing underpins NGO brand value and societal legitimacy and needs to be paramount in how NGO’s establish and legitimize their brands.

A Connected Community Approach: Citizens and Formal Institutions Working Together to Build Community-Centred Resilience.

Urban resilience research is recognizing the need to complement a mainstream preoccupation with “hard” infrastructure (electrical grid, storm sewers, etc.) with attention to the “soft” (social) infrastructure issues that include the increased visibility of and role for civil society, moving from (top-down, paternalistic) government to (participatory) governance. Analyses of past shock events invariably point to the need for more concerted efforts in building effective governance and networked relations between civil society groupings and formal institutions before, during, and after crisis. However, the literature contains little advice on how to go about this. In this paper, we advance a Connected Community Approach (CCA) to building community resilience with a specific focus on the relationship between community and formal institutions. In the literature review that informs this work, we assess the current, limited models for connecting communities to formal institutions, as well as the emerging role of community-based organizations in this work, and we offer our own assessment of some of the key tensions, lacunae, and trends in the community resilience field. Principally, we explore the potential of the CCA model, as spearheaded by the East Scarborough Storefront and the Centre for Connected Communities in Toronto, Canada, as a promising approach for building the relational space between civil society and the state that is so often called for in the literature. The paper concludes with future directions for research and practice.

Robust Cuts Over Time: Combatting the Spread of Invasive Species with Unreliable Biological Control

Widespread accounts of the harmful effects of invasive species have stimulated both practical and theoretical studies on how the spread of these destructive agents can be contained. In practice, a widely used method is the deployment of biological control agents, that is, the release of an additional species (which may also spread) that creates a hostile environment for the invader. Seeding colonies of these protective biological control agents can be used to build a kind of living barrier against the spread of the harmful invader, but the ecological literature documents that attempts to establish colonies of biological control agents often fail (opening gaps in the barrier). Further, the supply of the protective species is limited, and the full supply may not be available immediately. This problem has a natural temporal component: biological control is deployed as the extent of the harmful invasion grows. How can a limited supply of unreliable biological control agents best be deployed over time to protect the landscape against the spread of a harmful invasive species? To explore this question we introduce a new family of stochastic graph vaccination problems that generalizes ideas from social networks and multistage graph vaccination. We point out a deterministic (1 - 1/e)-approximation algorithm for a deterministic base case studied in the social networks literature (matching the previous best randomized (1 -1/e) guarantee for that problem). Next, we show that the randomized (1 -1/e) guarantee (and a deterministic 1/2 guarantee) can be extended to our much more general family of stochastic graph vaccination problems in which vaccinations (a.k.a. biological control colonies) spread but may be unreliable. For the non-spreading vaccination case with unreliable vaccines, we give matching results in trees. Qualitatively, our extension is from computing “cuts over time” to computing “robust cuts over time.” Our new family of problems captures the key tensions we identify for containing invasive species spread with unreliable biological control agents: a robust barrier is built over time with unreliable resources to contain an expanding invasion.

Managing the tensions in marketer-influencer relationships

The use of influencers in marketing is not new. However, the advent of the internet and, more recently, various forms of social media have both accelerated the use of influencers in marketing and also democratized its use considerably. In this article, we explore the nature of influence and power. We describe a study directed at understanding the promises and perils of influencer marketing from both the firm- and influencer perspectives to identify three key tensions that exist for marketers in the management of influencer relationships. We outline and explain these tensions and the lessons that can be learned from them, and then illustrate the lessons with a series of positive and negative cases. We close by speculating on the further evolution of influencer marketing.

Protest as Preaching. The Pneumatic Proclamation of Black Lives Matter

This article explores some of the recent protests in support of Black Lives Matter from a homiletical perspective. Specifically, the author argues that these protests reflect a non-traditional form of pneumatic or Spirit-inspired proclamation that can enrich the church’s preaching in a time of crisis. The article is arranged into three sections. First, a pneumatological framing of proclamation is proffered in order to interpret protest as a mode of Spirit-inspired preaching. Second, drawing on the author’s experience as a participant-observer in select protests in Southern California, three snapshots of proclamation at protests are offered. The article concludes by suggesting that the pneumatic proclamation of recent protests challenges the church in the United States to hold together three key dialectical tensions in its proclamation: lament and celebration, particularity and universality, and word and deed.

The Challenge of Cultivating National and Cosmopolitan Identities Through Literature: Insights From Singapore Schools

AbstractSince the late 20th century, scholars have called for a need to broaden the aims of teaching English Literature away from its Eurocentric focus. Much effort has also been invested in making the subject more relevant through diversifying the texts studied and connecting texts to current social and global issues. It is pertinent now to ask what the significant role of Literature is in a globally interconnected age. In particular, what do teachers believe are key philosophical objectives of teaching literature, and how does this influence the texts they select, the instructional strategies they employ, and the values they seek to cultivate in the classroom? In this article, we report on the first National Survey of Literature Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices in Singapore schools. First, we review four key pedagogical movements that have underpinned the teaching of literature in schools around the world: New Criticism, Reader‐Response Criticism, Poststructuralist Criticism, and Ethical Criticism. These respectively represent four key constructs (text, reader, culture, and other) used in the design and analysis of our survey instrument. Next, we report on the survey findings, focusing on Singapore as a barometer of current trends given its identity as an Anglophone country negotiating conflicting global and postcolonial identities with an education system that inhabits colonial traditions. We highlight key tensions arising from the impetus to develop national and cosmopolitan identities through Literature, and reflect on the implications for future directions in teaching.

Recorded Business Meetings and AI Algorithmic Tools: Negotiating Privacy Concerns, Psychological Safety, and Control

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithmic tools that analyze and evaluate recorded meeting data may provide many new opportunities for employees, teams, and organizations. Yet, these new and emerging AI tools raise a variety of issues related to privacy, psychological safety, and control. Based on in-depth interviews with 50 American, Chinese, and German employees, this research identified five key tensions related to algorithmic analysis of recorded meetings: employee control of data versus management control of data, privacy versus transparency, reduced psychological safety versus enhanced psychological safety, learning versus evaluation, and trust in AI versus trust in people. More broadly, these tensions reflect two dimensions to inform organizational policymaking and guidelines: safety versus risk and employee control versus management control. Based on a quadrant configuration of these dimensions, we propose the following approaches to managing algorithmic applications to recording meeting data: the surveillance, benevolent control, meritocratic, and social contract approaches. We suggest the social contract approach facilitates the most robust dialog about the application of algorithmic tools to recorded meeting data, potentially leading to higher employee control and sense of safety.

Ecosystem orchestration: Matching new ventures and established organizations to catalyze innovation

Innovation ecosystems have emerged as novel ways how to facilitate resource mobilization in order to develop innovative products and services. In such multi-actor settings, orchestrating firms play an especially interesting role; however, it is not fully understood how they attract, guide, and bring actors together. To comprehensively address this question, we draw on existing insights on network orchestration and combine them with novel theory on ecosystems. We seek to explore which mechanisms innovation ecosystem orchestrators use to identify matching resources among new ventures and established organizations, and how these ecosystem orchestration mechanisms differ from known network orchestration mechanisms. We conduct a single-case study of a Germany-based innovation ecosystem managed by one orchestrating firm. We thereby generate insights into general ecosystem management and specialized innovation programs in which the orchestrator “matches” established organizations and new ventures to identify opportunities for value co-creation. We illuminate how ecosystem orchestrators enable new ventures and established organizations to identify non-generic, multilateral complementarities. In this regard, we distinguish the outcomes of formal matchmaking programs and more informal engagement in the ecosystem. In addition, we show how the ecosystem orchestrator blends stakeholder-based network orchestration approaches with ecosystem-specific attitudes and practices. Lastly, our research adds to the dialectical perspectives on ecosystems by pointing towards key tensions that orchestrators need to manage.

Designing for “challenge” in a large‐scale adaptive literacy game for primary school children

AbstractThe use of learning games within the classroom is becoming increasingly common because of their potential to positively impact learning. Recent developments in adaptivity offer further possibilities to personalise learning by tailoring the game to an individual child's level or particular learning needs. However, designing an adaptive learning game is a complex process as many different game components have an impact on the provision of optimal challenge, crucial for maintaining player engagement, with limited prior work considering the multifaceted nature of this concept. This paper explores how to design for “challenge” within large‐scale adaptive learning games through a case study focused on the design of a literacy game for three linguistically and cognitively diverse learner groups—novice readers, children with dyslexia and children learning English as a foreign language. In reflecting on our design process, we identify three key design tensions that arose: (a) supporting longer‐term learning goals through game replayability; (b) fostering either replication or innovation in pedagogy through adaptivity rules; and (c) addressing diversity between learner groups. We present a set of design recommendations to guide researchers and designers in taking a multidimensional view of challenge when designing large‐scale adaptive learning games. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic? Adaptive learning games can have a positive impact on children's learning outcomes. Ensuring optimal challenge within games is important for maintaining engagement. Designing adaptive learning games is a complex process. What this paper adds? Designing for optimal challenge within adaptive learning game should be considered as a multifaceted concept. Identification of key tensions related to optimising challenge that can emerge during the design of large‐scale adaptive learning games. Recommendations for adaptivity researchers and learning game designers for how to address these tensions in adaptive learning game design. Implications for practice and/or policy? We need a more systematic approach to adaptivity game design to ensure wider spread adoption. Learning game designers seeking to utilise adaptive components in designing for optimal challenge should consider a focus on learners who may require a more targeted approach. Adaptive learning games offer opportunities for pedagogical innovation in the classroom through exploiting innovative game features as well as large‐scale data collection to support adaptive learning over time.

Efficient exploration and calibration of a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation with deep learning

ABSTRACT We implement a sample-efficient method for rapid and accurate emulation of semi-analytical galaxy formation models over a wide range of model outputs. We use ensembled deep learning algorithms to produce a fast emulator of an updated version of the galform model from a small number of training examples. We use the emulator to explore the model’s parameter space, and apply sensitivity analysis techniques to better understand the relative importance of the model parameters. We uncover key tensions between observational data sets by applying a heuristic weighting scheme in a Markov chain Monte Carlo framework and exploring the effects of requiring improved fits to certain data sets relative to others. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this method can be used to successfully calibrate the model parameters to a comprehensive list of observational constraints. In doing so, we re-discover previous galform fits in an automatic and transparent way, and discover an improved fit by applying a heavier weighting to the fit to the metallicities of early-type galaxies. The deep learning emulator requires a fraction of the model evaluations needed in similar emulation approaches, achieving an out-of-sample mean absolute error at the knee of the K-band luminosity function of 0.06 dex with less than 1000 model evaluations. We demonstrate that this is an extremely efficient, inexpensive, and transparent way to explore multidimensional parameter spaces, and can be applied more widely beyond semi-analytical galaxy formation models.

The Data Analytics Journey: Interactions Among Auditors, Managers, Regulation, and Technology*

ABSTRACTData analytics is transforming our global markets and significantly impacting the financial reporting environment. We investigate how auditors, company managers, and regulation interact with data analytics and one another to affect the diffusion (i.e., development and spread) of data analytics throughout the financial reporting environment. We interview company managers and their audit partners, as well as additional stakeholders, including regulators. We interpret findings from our interviews using theory that highlights the importance of dynamic interactions between people and their environments, which include the prevailing rules (e.g., regulatory guidance). Our findings contribute to the accounting literature and practice by revealing three areas of conflict emerging from stakeholders' disparate preferences for data analytics. First, we uncover growing tensions between managers and audit partners regarding audit fees. Second, we find that managers and auditors believe the lack of accounting regulation specific to data analytics causes confusion and frustration. Finally, auditors report that they strategically leverage data analytics to provide clients with business‐related insights. However, regulators voice concerns that this practice might impair auditor independence and reduce audit quality. These areas of conflict suggest a need to revisit key tensions surrounding the audit function in a contemporary context characterized with significant technological shift.

Doing missions right: Popular development imaginaries and practices among U.S. evangelical Christians

This article explores recent evangelical Christian engagements with issues of poverty and development, focusing on prescriptive accounts about the right and wrong ways to ‘do missions’. Such accounts have proliferated amidst the phenomenal expansion of popular development activities among middle-class, white evangelicals in the U.S. As more and more white Christians purposefully confront and address poverty through short-term missions, evangelical scholars and leaders must theorize the causes poverty and how best to alleviate it. Such theorization can be situated in a long, entangled history of missions and development as fields of practice – a history that has been acknowledged but not fully appreciated. This article examines popular Christian theologies of development, typified by the bestselling title, When Helping Hurts. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research with short- and long-term missionaries, thearticle highlights three key tensions within popular evangelical development theology and practice: First, it absolves the poor of responsibility for their poverty while holding the poor responsible for their own wellbeing; second, it acknowledges poverty as a material problem, yet favors spiritual solutions to material deprivation, and third, it conceives of missions as acts of selflessness and sacrifice, yet instrumentalizes poor communities as sites of spiritual challenge and fulfilment.

How societal expectations, new digital tools, andthe COVID crisis are driving a step-change in human centric remediation.

How societal expectations, new digital tools, andthe COVID crisis are driving a step-change in human centric remediation.

Promoting high-functioning mental health treatment teams in the context of low staffing ratios.

Many previous studies of health care teamwork have taken place in clinical teams with high staffing ratios (i.e., high ratios of staff to patients). The aim of this study was to identify clinicians' viewpoints of foundational resources necessary to support good team functioning in the context of low staffing ratios. We used administrative data, validated with local mental health chiefs, to identify mental health teams that had achieved high team functioning despite low staffing ratios in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers. Guided by a recently developed model of team effectiveness, the Team Effectiveness Pyramid, we conducted qualitative interviews with 21 team members across three teams within two medical centers. Interview questions focused on the resources needed to support good team functioning despite low staffing ratios. We used directed content analysis to analyze results. We found there were several domains of relevant resources: material, staffing, temporal, organizational, and psychological. These represent an expansion of the domains originally included in the Team Effectiveness Pyramid. Within the five domains, we identified key tensions to be addressed when forming teams, including the balances between providing care for new versus established patients, emphasizing shared caseloads within the team versus matching patients to clinicians based on individual expertise, and establishing reporting structures by clinical discipline versus team membership. Establishing high-functioning health care teams in the context of low staffing ratios requires attention to key resource domains and fundamental trade-offs in how teams are structured.

Conflicting Narratives of Deep Sea Mining

As land-based mining industries face increasing complexities, e.g., diminishing return on investments, environmental degradation, and geopolitical tensions, governments are searching for alternatives. Following decades of anticipation, technological innovation, and exploration, deep seabed mining (DSM) in the oceans has, according to the mining industry and other proponents, moved closer to implementation. The DSM industry is currently waiting for international regulations that will guide future exploitation. This paper aims to provide an overview of the current status of DSM and structure ongoing key discussions and tensions prevalent in scientific literature. A narrative review method is applied, and the analysis inductively structures four narratives in the results section: (1) a green economy in a blue world, (2) the sharing of DSM profits, (3) the depths of the unknown, and (4) let the minerals be. The paper concludes that some narratives are conflicting, but the policy path that currently dominates has a preponderance towards Narrative 1—encouraging industrial mining in the near future based on current knowledge—and does not reflect current wider discussions in the literature. The paper suggests that the regulatory process and discussions should be opened up and more perspectives, such as if DSM is morally appropriate (Narrative 4), should be taken into consideration.