Morphological Analysis Framework Research Articles

Technology use in B2B sales: examining the extant literature and identifying future research opportunities using morphological analysis

Understanding the impact of technology use on the business-to-business (B2B) sales profession has been one of the priorities for scholars for over 20 years. While the extant sales literature has focused mainly on stand-alone technologies like customer relationship management and social media, few studies have taken a holistic approach to understand how technology has transformed the sales function and the corresponding impact this change has had on the salesperson and sales organizational level. Employing morphological analysis (MA), we conduct an extensive review of the last two decades of B2B sales research to highlight emergent research topics on how technology use is continuing to influence B2B selling and identify research gaps that still need to be addressed by sales scholars. We characterize the literature on technology use in B2B sales in terms of 6 ‘dimensions’ and 22 ‘variants’ and represent it as an MA framework. Using this framework, we identify 49 research gaps that can inform future research on technology use in B2B sales. These gaps were prioritized using inputs from academics and practitioners and 10 gaps rated high by both groups were identified. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications of our research.

Risk Mitigation and Monitoring Challenges in Software Organizations: A Morphological Analysis

Context: The present body of research on risk mitigation focuses mostly on sparse and dispersed research using various approaches during project development.
 Objectives: This paper's goals are to conceptualize and construct a morphological analysis (MA) framework, examine the literature that has already been published on these risks and how to mitigate them in software development, and identify research gaps that suggest areas for further study.
 Methods: Based on a survey of 102 works, we provide an MA framework. The MA framework, which is composed of five dimensions and 17 variants, identifies 33 distinct research gaps as the maximum number of potential areas for future study. The implications for future research are covered in the paper's conclusion. Risk reduction during the project development process is extremely beneficial for project managers at an organization in delivering high-quality goods on time and within budget.
 Results: Based on a review of the literature, it was discovered that the development of software projects used a very low percentage of official risk mitigation and elimination methods. Research also revealed the significance of people-related risks in the risk mitigation process for the benefit of the organization. Some key research demonstrated experimentation, case studies, and empirical approaches for evaluation. Future work may include examining project managers' perceptions and knowledge of risk management. Managers of software development teams require greater risk-mitigation strategies.
 Conclusion: Scholars and researchers need to put more effort into developing quantitative and intelligent risk models. It is crucial to identify major risks so that they won't compromise the project's future success. In our future work, we can employ more models that are helpful for combining quantitative and intelligent risk models using various AI strategies to reduce hazards.

Four decades of negative word‐of‐mouth and negative electronic word‐of‐mouth: A morphological analysis

AbstractCustomers voice their negative brand experiences to their family and friends in the form of negative word‐of‐mouth (NWOM). Web 2.0 enables the sharing of NWOM in electronic format on various social media sites, online customer review forums, and blogs, which is known as negative electronic word‐of‐mouth (NeWOM). Researchers need to study the spread of NWOM/NeWOM to prevent adverse consequences for companies and suggest an optimal response for its redressal. Existing literature review studies have focused on word‐of‐mouth (WOM) and electronic WOM (eWOM) and have considered both positive and negative WOM and eWOM concurrently. Past literature reviews have captured the breadth of the WOM domain, ignoring the depth. This research article contains a review of 282 journal papers capturing the depth of the extant literature by focusing solely on ‘negative’ WOM and eWOM (NWOM and NeWOM), and presents a broad view of the NWOM and NeWOM domains using morphological analysis (MA). This will help to conceptualize and categorize the existing state‐of‐the‐art literature into broad dimensions and identify future research opportunities. The MA framework helps to bifurcate this literature into the following four dimensions: (i) nomenclature of NWOM and NeWOM, (ii) antecedents of NWOM/NeWOM, (iii) impacts of NWOM/NeWOM, and (iv) prevention and recovery response to NeWOM. Further dissection of these four dimensions leads to 15 sub‐dimensions and 217 variants. Combinations of the 217 variants enable the identification of 550 novel future research opportunities in the area of NWOM and NeWOM.

Non-deceptive counterfeit products: a morphological analysis of literature and future research agenda

ABSTRACT The objectives of this study are to review the literature on counterfeiting, to develop a morphological analysis (MA) framework and to identify the major research gaps that offer potential for future research. The MA framework is based on 120 research papers published in 50 research journals over 25 years (1994 to 2019). This systematic literature review followed a 3-step process. Step 1 identified the relevant research papers, step 2 classified them based on their fundamental, methodological and chronological features and step 3 developed the MA framework and identified research gaps. Five dimensions, involving 41 focused themes, emerged from the analysis. It uncovers 338 distinct research gaps. Of these, those topics offering the most potential for future research are presented here. The findings intend to help marketers and researchers look at non-deceptive counterfeiting holistically.

A morphological analyses of the literature on employee work-life balance

The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature relating to work-life balance (WLB), develop a morphological analysis (MA) framework and identify research gaps to recommend future research opportunity. The MA framework has been constructed on the basis of a review of 201 papers published in 96 journals over a period of three decades from 1991 to 2019. Further, a three-stage methodology has been utilized. Stage I features a five-stage systematic review protocol for recognition and scrutiny of relevant papers for review; Stage 2 exhibits a detailed framework for categorization of the reviewed papers in terms of their fundamental, methodological, chronological and sector-wise orientations. Stage 3 exhibits the development of the MA framework based on the themes identified from the reviewed papers and uncover the research gaps. The MA framework was therefore developed on the basis of five dimensions, linking 27 focused themes and the results have showcased 219 distinct research opportunities for further research. This study claims its novelty by utilising MA framework to review WLB literature, which is first of its kind.

Dynamic capabilities

PurposeThe growth, diversity and applications of research into dynamic capabilities (DCs) have resulted in the whole literature on DCs becoming a complex and disconnected body of knowledge. This has led to criticisms of the subject of DCs as being vague, tautological and without practical value. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize the diverse scholarly literature about DCs and develop a more integrated understanding to minimize the reported apparent vagueness.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors review various relevant themes on DCs using a selection of 133 articles published in 22 recognized, top-tier management journals during the period between 1990 and 2016, with an aim to build a structured and integrated theory. For this, morphological analysis (MA), a systems-thinking technique, is applied.FindingsMA is applied to develop a multi-dimensional conceptual framework comprising five dimensions and 26 variants that enable a structured representation of the conceptual foundations of DCs. Further, the authors identify 81 individual DCs noted by various scholars; elucidate assumptions and antecedents relevant to the DCs approach; structure the key characteristics; and expound the input factors, impacting factors, desired outcomes and assessment yardsticks.Research limitations/implicationsThis would be a useful resource for researchers working in the area of DCs to explore opportunities for future research.Practical implicationsThe MA framework helps managers to look at DCs more holistically, and hence would help them in developing, managing and retaining DCs in organizations.Originality/valueThis study is the original work contributed by the authors and has no specific organizational reference. This research implies new directions to look beyond individual DCs in firms toward a more integrated theory building.

A morphological analysis of research literature on Lean Six Sigma for services

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on Lean Six Sigma (LSS) for services, construct a morphological analysis (MA) framework and identify research gaps to point to future research possibilities and priorities.Design/methodology/approachThe MA framework is based on literature review of 175 papers published from 2003 to 2015, across 67 journals recognised by Scopus or ABS Academic Journal Quality Guide 2015. A three-phased methodology is used by the authors, with Phase1 featuring a five-stage systematic review protocol to identify relevant journal papers for review; Phase2 presenting a framework for classifying the reviewed papers in terms of their fundamental, methodological, chronological and sector-wise orientations; and Phase3 constructing an MA framework on the classified papers and identifying the research gaps.FindingsThe MA framework constructed based on six dimensions, namely, organizational context of applications, desired outcomes, implementation systems, LSS tools and techniques, integration with other management philosophies and evaluation methods, involving 40 focused themes, has revealed 355 distinct research gaps as opportunities for future research.Practical implicationsThis paper confirms the existence of substantial scope and points to specific topics for further research in the area of LSS for services. The findings demonstrate the gaps in academic research on the subject. In addition, the study also helps organisational leaders and practitioners to look at LSS from a holistic perspective in the services context.Originality/valueThe MA framework of the existing literature on LSS for services presents a unique, systematic effort to identify research opportunities. In addition, a five-stage systematic review protocol is proposed in this paper. This could be valuable to researchers and practitioners in enabling them to systematically review the literature on research subjects of interest to them.

Morphological appearance manifolds in computational anatomy: Groupwise registration and morphological analysis

Existing approaches to computational anatomy assume that a perfectly conforming diffeomorphism applied to an anatomy of interest captures its morphological characteristics relative to a template. However, the amount of biological variability in a groupwise analysis renders this task practically impossible, due to the nonexistence of a single template that matches all anatomies in an ensemble, even if such a template is constructed by group averaging procedures. Consequently, anatomical characteristics not captured by the transformation, and which are left out in the residual image, are lost permanently from subsequent analysis, if only properties of the transformation are examined. This paper extends our recent work [Makrogiannis, S., Verma, R., Davatzikos, C., 2007. Anatomical equivalence class: a computational anatomy framework using a lossless shape descriptor. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Imag. 26(4), 619–631] on characterizing subtle morphological variations via a lossless morphological descriptor that takes the residual into account along with the transformation. Since there are infinitely many [transformation, residual] pairs that reconstruct a given anatomy, we treat them as members of an Anatomical Equivalence Class (AEC), thereby forming a manifold embedded in the space spanned by [transformation, residual]. This paper develops a unique and optimal representation of each anatomy that is estimated from the corresponding AECs by solving a global optimization problem. This effectively determines the optimal template and transformation parameters for each individual anatomy, and eliminates respective confounding variation in the data. It, therefore, constitutes the second novelty, in that it represents a group-wise optimal registration strategy that individually adjusts the template and the smoothness of the transformation according to each anatomy. Experimental results support the superiority of our morphological analysis framework over conventional analysis, and demonstrate better diagnostic accuracy.