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Tuesday, 6 August 2019
On core-focus-domain-centric research formulation
On core-focus-domain-centric research formulation:
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Make own organizational capabilities item in ALRA
Make own organizational capabilities item in agile literature review approach (ALRA):
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re: BPR framework note
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re: BPR framework note
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Monday, 5 August 2019
Study note on business process re-engineering
Study note on business
process re-engineering [for the construction of theoretical framework level-1a
in the agile literature review approach (ALRA)
Subramanian Muthu, Larry Whitman, and S.
Hossein Cheraghi. 1999. " BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING: A CONSOLIDATED METHODOLOGY"
Proceedings of The 4th Annual
International Conference on Industrial Engineering Theory, Applications and
Practice November 17-20, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
Academic idea: Business Process Re-engineering; attribute: concept definition
" What is reengineering? “Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking
and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic
improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as
cost, quality, service and speed[4].” The key words in the preceding definition
are the italicized ones. BPR advocates that enterprises go back to the basics
and reexamine their very roots. It doesn’t believe in small improvements.
Rather it aims at total reinvention. As for results: BPR is clearly not for
companies who want a 10% improvement. It is for the ones that need a ten-fold
increase. According to Hammer and Champy [4], the last but the most important
of the four key words is the word-‘process.’ BPR focuses on processes and not
on tasks, jobs or people. It endeavors to redesign the strategic and value
added processes that transcend organizational boundaries";
Academic idea: Business Process in BPR; attribute: concept definition
" According to many in the BPR field
reengineering should focus on processes and not be limited to thinking about
the organizations. After all the organization is only as effective as its
processes[4,6] So, what is a process? “A business process is a series of steps
designed to produce a product or a service. It includes all the activities that
deliver particular results for a given customer(external or internal)[9].”
Processes are currently invisible and unnamed because people think about the
individual departments more often than the process with which all of them are
involved. So companies that are currently used to talking in terms of
departments such as marketing and manufacturing must switch to giving names to
the processes that they do such that they express the beginning and end states.
These names should imply all the work that gets done between the start and
finish. For example, order fulfillment can be called order to payment
process [4]. Talking about the importance of processes just as companies
have organization charts, they should also have what are called process maps
to give a picture of how work flows through the company. Process mapping
provides tools and a proven methodology for identifying your current As-Is
business processes and can be used to provide a To-Be roadmap for reengineering
your product and service business enterprise functions. It is the critical link
that your reengineering team can apply to better understand and significantly
improve your business processes and bottom-line performance[4,6]";
Selma Limam Mansar a,1, Hajo A. Reijers.
2005. " Best practices in business process redesign: validation of a
redesign framework" Computers in Industry 56 (2005) 457–471.
Academic idea: Business Process Re-engineering framework; attribute: framework/theory
"We have explored in the literature
several frameworks and business process analysis models that were potentially
suitable for business process
redesign. In [4] we explain how we have
derived an extended framework for implementing BPR best practices. It is
derived as a synthesis of the WCA
framework by Alter [3], the MOBILE workflow model
by Jablonski and Bussler [5], the CIMOSA enterprise modelling views of Berio
and Vernadat [6] and the process description classes of Seidmann and Sundarajan
[7]. In our framework, six elements are linked (refer to Fig. 1):
_ the
internal or external customers of the business process;
_ the
products (or
services) generated by the business process;
_ the
business process with two views:
a. the operation
view: how is a business process implemented?
(number of tasks in a job, relative size of tasks, nature of tasks, degree of
customisation), and
b. the behaviour
view: when is a business process executed?
(sequencing of tasks, task consolidation, scheduling of jobs, etc.);
_ the
participants in the business process considering a. the organisation structure (elements:
roles, users, groups, departments, etc.), and
b. the organisation population (individuals: agents which can have tasks assigned for
execution and relationships between them);
_ the
information the business process uses or creates;
_ the
technology the business process uses, and finally;
_ the
external environment other than the customers";
Martti Launonen__*,
Pekka Kess. 2002. " Team roles in business process re-engineering"
Int. J. Production Economics 77: 205 - 218.
Academic idea: team roles in BPR; attribute: theory
"Much of the writing on BPR concentrates
on the need for valiant and visionary leadership, but offers
little help on how these changes should be managed [4]. According to Horney and
Koonce [5] one reason for the failure of re-engineering efforts
is a lack of penetration to the deepest
organisational levels. A sociotechnical approach, giving attention both to the
technical and to the human systems, seems likely to develop [6]. Advocates of
sociotechnical systems were the first to recommend using the team
as a basic unit of organisation";
"Tikkanen and PoK loK nen
[11] have evaluated business process re-engineering projects in 21 large
Finnish organisations and one finding is that strong personel involvement and
training is a basic requirement for the success of a BPR project. On the other
hand, there has been lately some critical writings concerning BPR. For example,
Stoddard et al. [12] criticise, `what was implemented in the regions
differed from the design and was not as radical
as planneda. In BPR efforts, ownership and commitment is
needed throughout the organisation, particularly during implementation";
"In business process re-engineering, it
is assumed that team members are required to have a diverse variety of roles in
order to complete their task [28]. When forming the team and selecting the
members it must be considered what roles the team needs to complete its task.
According to Jauhiainen and Eskola [29] the distribution of tasks required by the
objectives and the need for common action influences the formation of the
roles. The role is both by its own actions procured and also set by the expectations
of others [30]. Problems are created if the team members do not have a clear conception
of what their role is or if other persons' expectations deviate from their
own concepts [31]";
Follow-up works of students after the first dissertation meeting
Follow-up works of students after the first dissertation meeting:
After the first meeting, the student should have or will shortly afterward produce the management-concerns diagram and the theoretical framework level-0. The student should then do literature search to gather academic articles relevant to the high-level research tasks in theoretical framework level-0.
Students should then:
a. study those academic articles and work on theoretical framework level-1a. At the same time, they should study the dissertation report template to try to produce their dissertation proposals;
b. keep studying the articles on ALRA and try to work on the other theoretical frameworks, notably on level-1b and level-1c.
[Their preliminary frameworks of 1b and, especially, 1c, enable to have a clearer idea on research methods; this informs them to write up the section of "methodology" in their dissertation proposals].
c. Students should also find time to watch Youtube videos to learn more about research methods at this stage.
After they have done some literature review and produced their preliminary theoretical framework level-1c; they should have quite some questions to ask their supervisors; it is thus about time to have their second dissertation meeting with their supervisor[s].
Wordings used in management-concerns diagram and theoretical frameworks in ALRA
Wordings used in management-concerns diagram and theoretical frameworks in ALRA:
For management-concerns diagram, use the following wordings:
Concerned about ....
Worried about ...
Upset about ....
Unclear how to .....
Confused about .....
Excited about ....
For theoretical frameworks, use the following wordings:
To evaluate ....
To predict ....
To understand ...
To find out more about.....
To figure out
To explain .....
To clarify .....
To refine .....
Most often, use to evaluate as the most productive choice of wording for the ALRA-based research purpose.
Sunday, 4 August 2019
Geographical imagination exam revision notes 2019 consolidation 1-3
Examination revision note - #1 (on utopia) [re: question 1]
Leonie Sandercock (2002) Practicing Utopia:
Sustaining Cities, disP - The
Planning Review, 38:148, 4-9, DOI:
10.1080/02513625.2002.10556791.
"Cities
are neither organisms nor machines. They are flesh and stone intertwined. They
are “built thought.” They are the containers of dreams and desires, hopes and
fears. They are an assemblage of active historical agents making daily choices
of how to live well";
"I’ve argued that in working towards more
sustaining cities, we need some
new models of planning practice which expand
the language of planning beyond the realm of instrumental rationality and the
system world, and speak about (and develop the skills for) organizing hope,
negotiating fear, and mediating memory, as well as developing the habits of a
critical/analytical mind. This transformed language would reflect the emotional
breadth and depth of the lived experience of cities: cities of desire, cities
of memory, cities of play and celebration, cities of fear, cities of
struggle";
Frank Cunningham (2010) Triangulating utopia:
Benjamin, Lefebvre, Tafuri, City, 14:3, 268-277, DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2010.482268.
"The positive side of utopian thinking, that
which prompted Henri Lefebvre to ask ‘Who [of progressive thinkers] is not a
utopian today?’ (1996, p. 151), is its rejection of fatalistic or, as in the
case of too many urban planners, politicians and architects, opportunistic
acceptance of a status quo. Proactively, utopian thinking is implicated in the
formulation of radical goals. As David Harvey puts it: ‘[W]ithout a vision of
utopia there is no way to define that port to which we might want to sail’
(2000, p. 189). Critical urban theorists such as Harvey and Peter Marcuse react
to this situation by the dual exercise of exposing ways that existing urban
realities
support oppressive
and exclusionary social structures and practices while at the same time
projecting alternative visions. One challenge for the critical theorist is to articulate visions while
avoiding the negative potentials of utopianism. A typical strategy for doing
this is expressed by Marcuse. General features of a desirable future are
negatively identified by reference to oppressive characteristics of the
present—justice instead of injustice, community spirit instead of profit seeking,
and so on—while more concrete prescriptions are ‘left to the democratic experience
of those in fact implementing the vision’ (Marcuse, 2009, p. 194)";
"The critical theorist thus cannot avoid
a measure of utopianism. But this raises the core challenge to all utopianisms
that the more radical their visions are, the more vulnerable they become to
dismissal as unrealistic. Classic utopians were not much bothered by this
problem, since their aim was just to describe radically different futures
leaving it to others to figure out whether or how to try attaining them. But
this stance is not acceptable to the critical theorist who wants to contribute
to actual urban change";
"A key concept in Lefebvre’s approach to
utopianism is ‘transduction’, or the intellectual construction of possible
objects. Like Tafuri, he sees utopian visions as ideologically infused, but
they can also serve in an ‘experimental’
way to prompt challenges to existing structures,
functions and forms, thus also challenging the ideological rigidity of
exclusively structuralist, functionalist or formalist thinking (Lefebvre, 1996,
pp. 151–155)";
Examination revision note - #2 (on future
city, with special reference to smart city) [re: question 1]
Malene
Freudendal-Pedersen 1, Sven Kesselring 2,* and Eriketti Servou. 2019.
"What is Smart for the Future City? Mobilities and Automation" Sustainability
2019, 11,
221; doi:10.3390/su11010221.
"In today’s cities and regions, multiple mobilities—social,
technological, geographic, cultural and digital—are at the core of new types of
socio-material and cultural relationships and shape people’s everyday lives and
businesses in many ways [1,2]. The rapidly moving technological developments in
transportation and communication have changed cities’ pulses, their pace, and
reach. The urban scale is thereby an interconnected element of the global
“network society” [3,4], with new forms of social, cultural, and economic life
emerging. This increase in the amount and speed of mobilities has strong
impacts on ecological conditions, and, so far, no comprehensive sustainable
solutions are in sight";
"The “smart cities” discourse is frequently connected to a
sort of “engineering logic” aiming for optimizing the social layout, the urban
infrastructure and networks, and (at least) parts of human interactions [26,27]. Often, “smart cities” are considered as coded spaces
facilitating self-learning socio-technical environments grounded in IT and
artificial intelligence, where software is applied to facilitate the efficient
use of resources, space, infrastructure and energy, and to provide
user-friendliness and sustainability [28]. Alternatively, they are seen as assemblages of technologies
aimed at increasing competitiveness, administrative efficiency, and social
inclusion [26,29–33]. These ideas of the smart city have been strongly criticized for
being an enforcement of the “technocentric planning paradigm” [22,34] where the planning of movements in cities focuses mainly on
traffic, with “seamless mobility” as an almost unchallenged principle for an
efficient organization of societies [35,36]. Against the
background of the growing debate on smart cities, it becomes even more
important to integrate the human scale and the social and cultural practice
systematically in scientific analysis, planning, business models, and
collaborative work on the future of urban living and working conditions";
"The debate around “smart cities” is still very dynamic and
open and it lacks clear definitions and sharp distinctions. Some of the
prominent concepts in the field are currently the digital, the virtual, the
networked, the connected, and even the cyber city [26,41–43]. Beginning in
the early 2000s, many of these debates coincided with the increasingly powerful
discursive framing of smart cities [26]. For some authors, the smart city discourse is concerned with
developing and deploying new technologies in cities for a range of sectoral
objectives [44–47]. Others see the smart city as
an assemblage of technologies aimed at increasing competitiveness,
administrative efficiency, and social inclusion";
"From the early 2000s onwards, the smart city discourse has
become hegemonic in articulating solutions to the risks and unintended externalities
of increasing demographic trends that are caused by the urbanization of the
21st century and environmental concerns about climate change [48,61]. This is based within a regime of technological innovations and
the digitalization of society [65]. In this context, smart cities promise to solve urban problems
(such as environmental degradation, traffic congestion, inefficient services,
etc.) to increase economic prosperity. Citizen participation will be
facilitated by bringing together a range of innovative technologies,
infrastructure, and data management techniques";
"According to Hajer and Dassen (2014) [71], the formation of the smart cities discourse
revolves around five key characteristics.
(1) The dominant concepts are smart grids, big data, efficiency,
infrastructure, system, energy, monitoring, and information, which highlight a
“managerial take” on cities with the new possibilities of ICT tools being
applied to urban problems (ibid).
(2) Smart cities are typically discussed within “glue coalitions”,
which are new cross-over forums where business, government, and knowledge
institutes meet each other, but their enthusiasm has not penetrated into
academic debate. These forums function as discourse coalitions that reproduce a
particular way of seeing and perceiving society. Some representative examples
are the “Guggenheim lab” organized by BMW, the Crystal pavilion in London built
by Siemens to showcase the future of the smart city or the Inzell Initiative,
which is a cooperation between the State Capital of Munich and the BMW Group [71].
(3) The smart cities discourse is often being institutionalized
through liberal practices, such as public-private partnerships. As part of this
shift from public service and infrastructure to public-private partnerships,
the way in which consumers pay for their urban services is likely to change and
public works will be replaced by a “pay per” approach [57]. While this change might provide a fertile
ground for urban entrepreneurship, it ignores how cities work sociologically
and politically, and how particular understandings of smart cities relate to
the existing system of governance [72].
(4) Within the smart city discourse innovation gets approached
mainly as a technological matter. Often, its protagonists neglect the social
complexity of urban environments and the contested nature of regional and local
debates and decision-making. The move from problem to solution is frequently
made too fast and it leaves very little time for debate. In other words, the
conditions under which the future of sustainable cities has to be achieved are
not discussed adequately [71].
(5) Finally, the smart city discourse lacks historical sensitivity
and awareness. Case studies show that it often fails to articulate why things
are the way they are. Urry (2016) [73] points out that missing knowledge and awareness of historical
developments very often are the reason for failure
in urban and technology policies. This attitude reproduces the
technocratic planning regime of modernity, where positivist ideas, rationalism,
functionalism, and the universal power of generic optimal solutions based on
quantitative models were dominant";
Examination revision note - #3 (on divided
city) [re: question 4]
PETER
MARCUSE. 1993. "What’s So New
About Divided Cities?" International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research, Wiley.
"... the city may be seen as
divided roughly into the following quarter:
(1) Luxury housing, not really part of the
city but enclaves or isolated buildings, occupied by the top of the economic,
social, and political hierarchy.
(2)
The gentrified city, occupied by the professional-managerial-technicalg roups,
whether yuppie or muppie without children.
(3) The suburban city,
sometimes single-family housing in the outer city, other times apartments near
the centre, occupied by skilled workers, mid-range professionals, upper civil
servants.
(4) The tenement city, sometimes cheaper
single-family areas, most often rentals, occupied by lower-paid workers, blue-
and white-collar, and generally (although less in the United States) including
substantial social housing.
(5)
The abandoned city, the end result of trickle-down, left for the poor, the
unemployed, the excluded, where in the United States home-less housing for the
homeless5 is most frequently
located"
"These
felt divisions in the residential city are roughly paralleled by divisions in
the economic city:
(1) The places of big decisions include a
network of high-rise offices, brownstones or older mansions in prestigious
locations, but are essentially locationally not circumscribed; it includes
yachts for some, the back seats of stretch limousines for others, airplanes and
scattered residences for still others.
(2)
The city of advanced services, of professional offices tightly clustered in
downtowns, with many ancillary services internalized in high-rise office
towers, heavily enmeshed in a wide and technologically advanced communicative
network.
(3) The city of direct production,
including not only manufacturing but also the production of advanced services,
in Saskia Sassen’s phrase; government offices, the back offices of major firms,
whether adjacent to their front offices or not, located in clusters and with
significant agglomerations but in varied locations within a metropolitan area - sometimes,
indeed, outside of the central city itself.
(4) The city of unskilled work and the
informal economy, small-scale manufacturing, warehousing, sweatshops,
technically unskilled consumer services, immigrant industries, closely
intertwined with the cities of production and advanced services and thus
located near them, but separately and in scattered clusters,6 locations often determined
in part by economic relations, in part by the patterns of the residential city.
(5) The residual city, the city
of the less legal portions of the informal economy, the city of storage where
otherwise undesired (NIMBY) facilities are located, generally congruent with
the abandoned residential city";
Mehdiabadi,
Parisa Mard (2015). "Divided Cities," Agora Journal of Urban Planning
and Design, 118-126.
"Architecture is entangled in a web of political, social, cultural, and
economic powers. As a spatial practice, architecture has the capacity to
reallocate cultural powers and to constructively contribute to social change.
In divided cities, however, architecture is
misused as an ultimate method of containing and managing intercommunal
tensions. Giving physical form to fear and misunderstanding, these constructs
only sustain and exacerbate long-standing problems, since “physical partition
often affirms local assumptions about persecution and encourages one ethnic
community to antagonize another” (Calame, 2009, p. 5). Division of the urban
fabric destroys the essence of place, hinders communal identity and sustains
distrust as competing groups manipulate images of the city and historical past for
their own benefit. Intercommunal tension cannot and should not be addressed by
erecting of walls, fences, and no man’s lands, but rather through open dialogue
and exchange. Although divided cities are not prevalent in urban history, they
represent the power of architecture as a cultural agency and demonstrate how,
if misused, they can lead to urban dysfunction and permanent division";
"Historically, the purpose of city fortification has been
twofold: to provide passive security against external threats and to inhibit
the social assimilation that usually accompanies a dense and cooperative urban
environment. Although creating a wall around a city helps with the physical
definition of a community, it also has the power to divide because it draws a
distinction between those within and outside of the city. As Lewis Mumford
noted, “physical barricades have historically provided a functional separation between
civilized and uncivilized domains for resident communities” (Mumford, 1960, p.
54). The city boundary emphasizes social hierarchy and sustains prejudice and
mistrust among community members";
"Similar to city walls, permanent or temporary partitions
in divided cities are constructed out of fear and distrust among different
ethnic and/ or social groups. In the case of Cyprus, the Green Line is a de
facto international boundary between the self-proclaimed but unrecognized
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Greekspeaking Cypriots in the
south. The partition line is about ten kilometers long and varies in width between
twenty meters and four meters as it runs through the urban and suburban
terrain. “We are destined to get worse, not better, for as long as there is the
concept of fear and siege. So if fear is, at the core, the most dangerous
emotion… then remove the fear. Now, how do you do that? Is it done by walls? Is
it done by education? Is it done by being inventive about how you share the
land? I’m not sure that I have any of the answers – plenty of the questions.” ...";
"As cities reflect local demographics in spatial form, each
city can be perceived on a continuum between perfect spatial integration and
complete segregation. As an example of a divided city, Nicosia, capital of
Cyprus, reflects total spatial segregation between its two ethnic groups. Intercommunal
rivalry in Nicosia frayed the normal urban functioning, resulting in a complete
schism along its east-west ethnic fault-line";
Marco Allegra1*, Anna Casaglia2 and Jonathan
Rokem3. 2012. "The Political Geographies of Urban Polarization: A Critical
Review of Research on Divided Cities" Geography
Compass 6/9 (2012): 560–574,
10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00506.x.
"In
the last few decades, a growing interest has surrounded the urban dimension of conflicts.
The concept of the ‘‘divided city’’, in particular, has been employed to
describe a wide range of political, economic and social cleavages in the urban
sphere and their spatial manifestation";
"The contemporary metropolis is
characterised by new forms of closure and exclusion (Wacquant 1996, 2008) and increasing
social, economical, and political fragmentation (Sassen 2001); it appears ‘‘to
be manifesting as an intensely uneven patchwork of dystopian spaces that are […] physically
proximate
but institutionally estranged’’ (MacLeod and Ward 2002). The body of academic contributions
on the subject of divided cities implicitly supports the guiding hypothesis of
this review article: that, in Haim Yacobi’s words, ‘‘in the present global context,
more and more cities are becoming polarized, ghettoized and fragmented in
surprisingly similar ways’’ (Yacobi 2009, preface). Yacobi’s observation points
to the problem of understanding what kind of conditions produce spatial
polarization and how different kinds of conflict intertwine in the same
cities";
"The
common emphasis on the idea of ‘‘divided city’’ hides a great variety of
definitions, approaches and methodologies, and covers a wide range of
investigations. The literature on world cities investigated how the process of
globalization and economic restructuring creates spatial polarization in the
urban structure (Castells and Mollenkopf 1991; Fainstein et al. 1992; Sassen
1991), while other authors focus on the ‘‘wounds’’ inflicted by economic asymmetries
and state-violence – as well as the processes of recovery of the urban systems
(Schneider and Susser 2003; Till 2012). Other contributions underlined how socioeconomic
and cultural cleavages result in phenomena of residential segregation (Massey
1996; Massey and Denton 1993; Philips 2007; Scho¨nwa¨lder 2007) or
privatization of urban space (Atkinson & Blandy 2006; Glasze et al. 2002,
2006; McKenzie 1994).
Violence
and fear are entangled with processes of social change in contemporary cities generating
new forms of spatial segregation (Atkinson et al. 2004; Caldeira 1996, 2000); in
turn, spatial inequalities tend to reinforce social inequalities (Skop 2006).
Many authors have interpreted this trend as the progressive demise of a more
integrated model of urban development in favour of a fragmented patchwork of
impoverished ghettoes and affluent enclaves (Davis 1990; Graham and Marvin
2001), while others have observed the delicate and often controversial role
played by urban planning and artefacts in framing the encounter of groups and
communities (Bollens 2009; Brand 2009; Healey 1997; Sandercock 1998; Yiftachel
1998)";
Wednesday, 31 July 2019
Some reflection on the nature of applied business research project using ALRA
On the nature of applied business research project using the agile literature review approach (ALRA), some comments are made based on some personal reflection:
1. The dissertation project very often involves mainly evaluation-type of research tasks (as depicted in the theoretical framework level-0 components (e.g. to evaluate ......). Since it is at the same time an applied research project, it comprises characteristics of both research and evaluation works (re: Evaluation as a research design PowerPoint).
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