Following the story: narrative mapping as a mobile method for tracking and interrogating spatial narratives

Museums and heritage tourism sites are highly curated places of memory work whose function is the assembling and ordering of space and narrative to contour visitors’ experiences of the past. Variations in such experiences within and between sites, however, necessitates a method that: (1) captures how guides, visitors, and exhibits interact within spaces when representing and performing history and (2) allows researchers to document those variations. We developed narrative mapping, a mobile and geographically sensitive form of participant observation, to enable museum scholars and professionals to systematically capture, visualize, and interpret tendencies and variations in the content, affective qualities, and spatial arrangements of museum narratives over multiple sites and across multiple tours at the same site. Two antebellum plantation museum case studies, Laura Plantation in Louisiana and Virginia’s Berkeley Plantation, demonstrate the method’s utility in documenting how stories are spatially configured and materially enlivened in order to analyze the ways enslaved persons are placed within these narratives.     

Self-quantification and the datapreneurial consumer identity

ABSTRACT

This study delivers a clearer understanding of the constitution of the datapreneurial consumer, the role of the market in that construction, and the implications for consumer identity projects in the age of Big Data and an increasingly data- and surveillance-driven society. The study uses a theoretical framework of the “quantified self” (QS) to examine consumers (re)building creditworthiness. In the context of a major online credit-user forum, it employs creative-nonfiction methodology to protect forum-member privacy. To the literature on creditworthiness, the study contributes a process model of the construction of the datapreneurial credit consumer identity. To the QS literature, it offers insight into how consumers may embrace quantification and self-tracking, even in areas where they are nudged or pushed into it. To the sociology of quantification literature, it adds empirics to explain how consumers may embrace market-provided self-quantification resources in attempts to liberate themselves from the structural control of that very quantification.     

Project Team Communication and Cross-Functional Cooperation in New Program Development

The importance of communication for the successful development of new projects, particularly within the R&D laboratory setting, has been well documented. Yet researchers have seldom examined the relationship between patterns of communication and cross-functional cooperation in the development and management of new programs. In this article Mary Beth and Jeffrey Pinto report on the results of a research study that assessed the relationship of two aspects of project team communication (formal versus informal modes and reason for communication) with the level of cross-functional cooperation actually achieved within a hospital project team charged with developing a new program. A total of 262 team members were surveyed from 72 hospital project teams. The results demonstrated that high cooperation teams differed from low cooperation teams both in terms of their increased use of informal methods for communication as well as their reasons for communicating. Finally, cross-functional cooperation was found to be a strong predictor of certain project outcomes.     

A Research Note on Discrimination in Mortgage Lending

This paper examines the hypothesis that mortgage lenders rank applications from better to worst and encourage the better ones to apply. A second ranking occurs when the application is ranked by the loan committee and funds are approved from the top of the list until exhausted. A theoretically correct procedure for analyzing the resulting multivariate ordinal data is the little known rank multiple discriminant analysis. Preliminary results have revealed that this technique produces a "best" model with fewer variables and a higher classification rate than the commonly known multiple discriminant analysis, logit, or probit.     

Creating consumer durable retailer customer loyalty through order fulfillment service operations

Manufacturers now find themselves in the position of finding new ways to remain competitive in the era of retail power. The onus rests on the manufacturer's ability to implement operational strategies that help the retailer achieve its objectives. Specifically, manufacturers that establish successful order fulfillment service can affect retailer loyalty. The overarching goal of this research, therefore, is to examine the importance to operations managers of understanding the order fulfillment needs and expectations of their retail customers and to establish the value-added role that operations management plays in developing retailer loyalty. Empirical evidence is provided on the relationships between relational order fulfillment service, operational order fulfillment service, satisfaction, affective commitment, purchase behavior, and loyalty. Such evidence not only focuses on the strategic importance of the OM discipline in manufacturer–retailer relationships, but also extends previous OM theory by taking a more complex view of the loyalty phenomenon.     

Is the doctor in? A relational approach to job design and the coordination of work

When designing jobs, the degree of specialization is a key consideration. Though functional specialization allows workers to develop deep areas of expertise, it also increases the challenge of coordinating their work. In this article, we propose the concepts of stage‐ and site‐based specialization and posit that together they can counteract the divisive effects of functional specialization. Taking advantage of a natural experiment in physician job design at a Massachusetts hospital, we explore the impact of stage‐ and site‐based specialization on coordination and performance outcomes. Building on recent interest in relational approaches to job design, this study is the first to link relational job design to relational outcomes such as coordination. Our findings have practical implications for job design in professional service settings such as education, consulting, and health care. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.