Theory-based View Research Articles

The role of familiness for family business innovativeness

The interplay between the business and the family from an innovativeness-perspective seems to be a promising field for family business scholars. Nonetheless, research on the relation between familiness and innovativeness is underdeveloped. This paper aims at overcoming this deficit by targeting the question how the familiness of a specific family business impacts its innovativeness. In doing so, a systems theory-based view is employed and the case study design follows a longitudinal qualitative approach. Results of objective hermeneutic analyses show that familiness plays an important role in establishing and maintaining a high innovativeness. Furthermore, the case highlights the importance of the alignment of employees with the family’s innovative visions. Additionally, findings reconstruct the role of the family in innovation from a process as well as from an outcome perspective. Systems theory allows for the location of familiness in the coupling of family and business systems, where familiness supports the transportation of norms and values from the family system into the business system.

Is better beautiful or is beautiful better? Exploring the relationship between beauty and category structure

We evaluate two competing accounts of the relationship between beauty and category structure. According to the similarity-based view, beauty arises from category structure such that central items are favored due to their increased fluency. In contrast, the theory-based view holds that people's theories of beauty shape their perceptions of categories. In the present study, subjects learned to categorize abstract paintings into meaningfully labeled categories and rated the paintings' beauty, value, and typicality. Inconsistent with the similarity-based view, beauty ratings were highly correlated across conditions despite differences in fluency and assigned category structure. Consistent with the theory-based view, beautiful paintings were treated as central members for categories expected to contain beautiful paintings (e.g., art museum pieces), but not in others (e.g., student show pieces). These results suggest that the beauty of complex, real-world stimuli is not determined by fluency within category structure but, instead, interacts with people's prior knowledge to structure categories.

Understanding Primary School Students' Conceptual Change of 'Location'Through Theory-Based View

Understanding Primary School Students' Conceptual Change of 'Location'Through Theory-Based View

Behind the Iron Cage: An Institutional Perspective on ISO 9000 Adoption and CEO Compensation

Although institutional theorists maintain that the widespread diffusion of ISO 9000 is the result of institutional forces, they have neglected the potential gains to top management in the perpetuation of the standard. Based on a long-horizon event study with control firms to detect long-term abnormal financial gains, we investigate the impact of ISO 9000 adoption on CEO compensation in the U.S. manufacturing industry from 1994 to 2006. We find that the CEOs' total cash compensation was positively adjusted when their firms received ISO 9000 certification, and they received higher-value stock options when their firms embarked on ISO 9000 certification. However, the performance of the ISO 9000 certified firms was not improved throughout this period. Our further analyses suggest that it is likely that the CEO influences the board to obtain higher compensation under an institutionalized environment. Contrary to the traditional institutional theory-based view, we argue that a highly institutionalized environment does provide political opportunities for organizational actors to garner personal advantages.

Toward a Theory-Based Measurement of Culture

In reviewing the history of the conceptualization and measurement of “culture,” one quickly realizes that there is wide-ranging and contradictory scholarly opinion about which values, norms, and beliefs should be measured to represent the concept of “culture.” We explore an alternate theory-based view of culture via social identity theory (SIT), which suggests that each individual is influenced by plethora of cultures and sub-cultures–some ethnic, some national, and some organizational. In IS research, the culture of subjects and respondents is problematic because it is typically an overly simplistic categorization. IS research nearly always assumes that an individual living in a particular place and time belongs to a single “culture,” e.g., someone living in Egypt is automatically classified as being a member of the Egyptian culture, or, more broadly, the Arab culture. This dearth of clear concepts and measures for “culture” may explain why cross-cultural research has been so exceedingly difficult to conduct. It may also explain why it has been hard to develop and refine theories. Moreover, it may give insight into why reasonable explained variance in predictive models has not been higher. Finally, it is very possible that much cross-cultural business research could be rightly accused of advancing an “ecological fallacy” by not recognizing the individual makeup of persons with respect to culture. Using SIT (or other theory bases) as grounding for cultural research programs implies the use of certain methodological approaches. Each study would have to establish the salient “cultures” in each individual’s background and include these different “cultures” as independent variables in positivist research. In qualitative research, there would need to be an equally rigorous assessment of the cultural identifiers of each individual.

Learning with technology: Use of case-based physical and computer simulations in professional education

This paper describes a multimedia technology project in midwifery education and how it is being developed to improve student learning experiences and outcomes. The role of the university providing quality education relevant to today's world and professional practice is emphasised. A collaborative (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Australian Catholic University) interdisciplinary project ‘Pregnancy Simulator: Developing and Enhancing Student Learning of Pregnancv Assessment Skills’ was developed with university and direct Commonwealth support. This project consists of a physical simulation of a pregnant woman at term and case-based multimedia computer simulations designed to develop and enhance student learning of abdominal assessment skills. A key feature of the development has been to design a learning experience explicitly on an authoritative theory-based view of teaching, in this case Diana Laurillard's ‘Conversational Framework’.