Pär Mårtensson

Change can be challenging!

This applies equally whether you are leading a change process, or you are a member of an organization seeking to navigate new changes. This book is about a model - the Y model - a powerful tool for bringing about successful change by giving structure and focus to change processes. The Y model helps you manage change projects, no matter what role you have in the process.

Over the years, the Y model has proven to be very useful to many managers working through change projects in their organization. That is why the Y model features prominently when scholars at the Stockholm School of Economics coach students in Executive MBA and other academic programs. This book describes the Y model and demonstrates how people apply it in organizations when leading change projects.

There are few acknowledged multidisciplinary quality standards for research practice and evaluation. This study evaluates the face validity of a recently developed comprehensive quality model that includes 32 defined concepts based on four main areas (credible, contributory, communicable, and conforming) describing indicators of research practice quality. Responses from 42 senior researchers working within 18 different departments at three major universities showed that the research quality model was–overall–valid. The vast majority believed all concepts in the model to be important, and did not indicate the need for further development. However, some of the sub-concepts were indicated as being slightly less important. Further, there were significant differences concerning ‘communicable’ between disciplines and academic levels, and for ‘conforming’ between genders. Our study indicates that the research quality model proposes the opportunity to move to a more systematic and multidisciplinary approach to research quality improvement, which has implications for how scientific knowledge is obtained.

There are few widely acknowledged quality standards for research practice, and few definitions of what constitutes good research. The overall aim was therefore to describe what constitutes research, and then to use this description to develop a model of research practice and to define concepts related to its quality. The primary objective was to explore such a model and to create a multidisciplinary understanding of the generic dimensions of the quality of research practice. Eight concept modelling working seminars were conducted. A graphic representation of concepts and their relationships was developed to bridge the gap between different disciplines. A concept model of research as a phenomenon was created, which included a total of 18 defined concepts and their relationships. In a second phase four main areas were distilled, describing research practice in a multidisciplinary context: Credible, Contributory, Communicable, and Conforming. Each of these was further specified in a concept hierarchy together with a defined terminology. A comprehensive quality model including 32 concepts, based on the four main areas, was developed for describing quality issues of research practice, where the model of research as a phenomenon was used to define the quality concepts. The quality model may be used for further development of elements, weights and operationalizations related to the quality of research practice in different academic fields.

In dialogical action research, the scientific researcher does not "speak science" or otherwise attempt to teach scientific theory to the real-world practitioner, but instead attempts to speak the language of the practitioner and accepts him as the expert on his organization and its problems. Recognizing the difficulty that a practitioner and a scientific researcher can have in communicating across the world of science and the world of practice, dialogical action research offers, as its centerpiece, reflective one-on-one dialogues between the practitioner and the scientific researcher, taking place periodically in a setting removed from the practitioner's organization. The dialogue itself serves as the interface between the world of science, marked by theoria and the scientific attitude, and the world of the practitioner, marked by praxis and the natural attitude of everyday life. The dialogue attempts to address knowledge heterogeneity, which refers to the different forms that knowledge takes in the world of science and the world of practice, and knowledge contextuality, which refers to the dependence of the meaning of knowledge, such as a scientific theory or professional expertise, on its context. In successive dialogues, the scientific researcher and the practitioner build a mutual understanding, including an understanding of the organization and its problems. The scientific researcher, based on one or more of the scientific theories in her discipline, formulates and suggests one or more actions for the practitioner to take in order to solve or remedy a problem in his organization. Dialogical action research recognizes that the practitioner's experience, expertise, and tacit knowledge, or praxis, largely shapes how he understands the suggested actions and appropriates them as his own. Upon returning to his organization, he takes one or more of the suggested actions, depending on his reading of the situation at hand. The reactions or responses of the problem to the actions or stimuli of the practitioner would embody, in the practitioner's eyes, success or failure in solving or remedying the problem and, in the scientific researcher's eyes, evidence confirming or disconfirming the theory on which the action was based. The scientific researcher may then suggest, based on her theories, additional actions, hence initiating another cycle of action and learning. To illustrate dialogical action research, this paper reconstructs some dialogues between an information systems researcher and a managing director at a European company called Omega Corporation.