In Search of Theory Development in Grounded Investigations: Doctors' Experiences of Managing as an Example of Fitted and Prospective Theorizing

This article draws on a study of doctors’ experiences of clinical managing to highlight research conventions that limit the development and use of middle range theories in grounded studies. Using sensemaking and the psychological contract as example frameworks, we illustrate how customary deductive evaluations of middle range theories turn grounded researchers away from theory building. As a correction to these conventions, we offer an inductive approach to building existing theory in grounded investigations that does not depend solely on working with frameworks under different empirical conditions. We suggest that forward theorizing is most likely to progress from a synthesis of fitted explanation and prospective thinking that presses at the limits of the data's usefulness. To illustrate this approach, trialled thinking about novel theoretical juxtapositions and alternative sources was used in conjunction with our clinical director data. The value of this approach was supported in two ways. First, a number of fitted and prospective conjectures are offered about how social identity articulates with psychological contracts and sensemaking in role change situations. Second, new light is shed on the process by which particular social conditions differentially modify employees’ social categorizations, and how these inform employee responses to the evolving experience of role change. The article concludes with some tentative proposals for promoting more discussion of theory building in grounded investigations.     

‘Double dipping’: the combined effects of social security and civil service pensions on employee retirement

How do macro variables such as aggregate consumption, aggregate money demand, prices, and interest rates vary in response to government attempts to redistribute income across agents through selective tax-transfer policies? This question is investigated for an overlapping generations model consisting of heterogeneously endowed three-period lived agents. In the presumably most favorable case for invariance (identical log-linear utility functions), it is shown that positive interest rate macro equilibria are invariant with respect to redistributions in social security benefits if and only if all agents initially exhibit qualitatively identical liquidity preference behavior, i.e. positive money holding only in youth, only in middle-age, or never.     

ENTREPRENEURIAL EXPORTERS: The Canadian Experience

The increasing globalization of commerce has presented incalculable challenges as well as opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises, particularly exporting firms. This study focuses on the relationship between entrepreneurship and successful export marketing performance, testing the hypothesis that entrepreneurship is positively related to such performance. The research reveals that entrepreneurial behavior is positively correlated with export marketing behavior, suggesting both firm and government actions to boost competitiveness.     

Music,music videos,and wear out

Repeated exposure to a music video was found to forestall wear out relative to repetitive exposure to the music only. Susceptibility to wear out in the case of the music video was further reduced by eliminating the closure associated with the story told by the video. The level of positive cognitive responses was posited as a mediator to help explain the observed results. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.