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MAPPING RETAILING ENTREPRENEUR DECISIONS AND BEHAVIOR<br />

In the early 1970's Mintzberg (1973) asked an important question on strategymaking:<br />

how do organizations make important decisions and link them together to form strategies?<br />

Based on a review of the available literature he concluded that little systematic evidence exists<br />

about this important process, known in business as strategy-making and in government as<br />

policy-making.<br />

Fortunately, since the early 1970's substantial advances have occurred in theoretical and<br />

empirical research on how and why strategy-making occurs. One research stream on strategy-<br />

making has been labeled the "emergent stream" approach (Nutt 1993), whereby the researcher<br />

collects field data on many strategymaking case studies and immerses in the raw data describing<br />

each case to find the<br />

key decision making activities (e.g., Mintzberg, Raisinghani, and Theoret 1976; Woodside and<br />

Vyas 1987). The emergent stream approach contributes substantially to our understanding of the<br />

linkages of decision-makers perceptions of environmental signals, events, decisions, and<br />

activities through time. A criticism of the emergent stream approach: the mass of detail makes it<br />

difficult to analyze the data. As a result, researchers using the emergent stream approach are<br />

forced to examine a limited number of cases, making generalizability of their conclusions<br />

suspect. "Researchers using a small case data base may fail to discover important action-taking<br />

steps or fail to recognize the idiosyncratic nature of the steps that are discovered" (Nutt 1993, p.<br />

228).<br />

232

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