It is not unusual for companies to generate substantial revenue through alliances. However, alliance failure rates are high, leaving much revenue at risk and value unrealized. The big challenge ...facing managers is to align company interests with alliance interests. Such alignment can only be achieved when executives pay considerable attention to building the right collaborative business model. In this article, we synthesize the insights of the existing literature to arrive at three collaborative business models—sharing, specialization, and allocation—that managers can use to address the specific requirements of their alliances. Because the literature provides limited insight regarding how to operationalize these models, we highlight what managers need to focus on when operationalizing each of these models. We find that the choice for an overall business model is relatively straightforward in most cases but that operationalization of business models requires more complex combinations of management techniques. Finally, we show how the three collaborative business models can be combined to build hybrid models.
Operationalizing Legitimacy Schoon, Eric W.
American sociological review,
06/2022, Letnik:
87, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. In this article, I synthesize existing approaches to ...conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties. I then build on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy—expectations, assent, and conformity—that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that often appear similar empirically. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has novel implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy as an explanation for socially significant outcomes.
•A meta-analysis of team communication and performance is conducted.•Team communication is significantly related to team performance.•Communication quality and frequency have different relationships ...with performance.•Additional types of communication exhibit different relationships with performance.•Team familiarity and virtuality moderate the relationship.
Although it is consistently identified as a critical component of team performance, team communication is often conceptualized in a variety of manners. The present meta-analysis addresses this inconsistency by examining the moderating influence of communication characteristics, as well as other salient team and task characteristics, on the relationship between team communication and performance. The findings revealed several fundamental insights. First, communication quality had a significantly stronger relationship with team performance than communication frequency. Second, further distinguishing between different communication types, classifying communication into the eight most commonly measured communication forms (e.g., knowledge sharing, information elaboration), has further value; information elaboration has the strongest relationship with performance while self-report frequency and objective frequency have the weakest relationships. Third, familiar and face-to-face teams exhibited a stronger relationship between communication and performance. These results indicate the necessity of distinguishing between different communication types in both practical and theoretical applications of team science.
Populism has become a pervasive concept in political science research. However, a central and basic question remains unanswered: which European parties are more populist than others? Despite the ...increasing wealth of studies on populism in parties, we lack data that measures populism in political parties in a valid and precise manner, that recognizes that populism is constituted by multiple dimensions, and that ensures full coverage of all parties in Europe. In this article, we first appraise the weaknesses of existing approaches. Arguing that parties’ populism should be measured as a latent construct, we then advocate a new approach to operationalizing and measuring populism in political parties using expert surveys. Relying on the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey spanning 250 political parties in 28 European countries, we show that populism is best measured in a multi-dimensional and continuous manner. We subsequently illustrate the advantages of our approach for empirical analysis in political science.
Both funding agencies and scholars in science studies have become increasingly concerned with how to define and identify interdisciplinarity in research. The task is tricky, since the complexity of ...interdisciplinary research defies a single definition. Our study tackles this challenge by demonstrating a new typology and qualitative indicators for analyzing interdisciplinarity in research documents. The proposed conceptual framework attempts to fulfill the need for a robust and nuanced approach that is grounded in deeper knowledge of interdisciplinarity. As an example of using the framework, we discuss our empirical investigation of research proposals funded by a national funding agency in Finland.
Solutions journalism is rigorous news reporting about how people are responding to social problems – a definition used by scholars but formulated by the Solutions Journalism Network, an independent ...organization that promotes the practice. The approach has a growing appeal in the professional world, but what little exists in academic research fails to offer thorough theoretical and conceptual definitions or a concrete operationalization of the practice. Through in-depth interviews, journalists familiar with solutions journalism offered insights about how to define and measure the practice. Specifically, journalists said solution-oriented news stories contribute to more accurate and balanced news coverage, they are sophisticated and rigorous, and they intend to motivate readers to contribute to societal change. Further findings help distinguish the Solutions Journalism Network’s conceptualization of the concept from how working journalists practice it, particularly in regard to the extent that solutions journalism overlaps with advocacy journalism. Finally, this study offers guidelines for measuring a solutions news story in an effort to spur consistent future research on the effects of the solutions journalism approach.
The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes ...affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general and for media, then introduces the concept of organizational media affordances as organizational resources. Analysis of survey data from a large Nordic media organization identified six reliable and valid organizational media affordances: pervasiveness, editability, self‐presentation, searchability, visibility, and awareness. Eight media scales based on frequency of use of 10 media within each of three organization levels were differentially associated with these affordances. The conceptualization, measurement approach, and results from this study provide the foundation for considerable future organizational communication and ICT research.
When editing regular and special issues of numerous journals, we have observed several recurring shortcomings in the manuscripts, particularly in relation to methodology. Many of these manuscripts ...are often found lacking in providing critical methodological information or justifying the use of the selected methods, thus resulting in desk rejection at the preliminary stage or major revision in the review process. Although the theoretical and managerial aspects of manuscripts are essential to publication consideration, methodological flaws can be detrimental. It is therefore of no surprise that failures to address methodological concerns are some of the common reasons for a manuscript to be rejected from publication, even after going through several rounds of revision. The purpose of this editorial is to provide clear guidelines on effectively reporting the methodological section in a quantitative manuscript in the fields of business and social sciences. Specifically, we present a set of recommendations on implementing and reporting operationalization, instrument validation, sampling techniques, questionnaire administration, and common method bias. Researchers, whether students or academics, should consider these guidelines to ensure methodological rigor in their research projects.
The term "stress" is an important but vague term in plant biology. We show situations in which thinking in terms of "stress" is profitably replaced by quantifying distance from functionally optimal ...scaling relationships between plant parts. These relationships include, for example, the often-cited one between leaf area and sapwood area, which presumably reflects mutual dependence between sources and sink tissues and which scales positively within individuals and across species. These relationships seem to be so basic to plant functioning that they are favored by selection across nearly all plant lineages. Within a species or population, individuals that are far from the common scaling patterns are thus expected to perform negatively. For instance, "too little" leaf area (e.g., due to herbivory or disease) per unit of active stem mass would be expected to incur to low carbon income per respiratory cost and thus lead to lower growth. We present a framework that allows quantitative study of phenomena traditionally assigned to "stress," without need for recourse to this term. Our approach contrasts with traditional approaches for studying "stress," e.g., revealing that small "stressed" plants likely are in fact well suited to local conditions. We thus offer a quantitative perspective to the study of phenomena often referred to under such terms as "stress," plasticity, adaptation, and acclimation.
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