Dr Oliver Jones

Exploration of the nature of productivity, how it should be measured and how to go about improving it

Successive governments have developed strategies and initiatives over the last two decades to help SME’s increase productivity often through government funded quasi-agencies, the latest of these new industrial strategy document, The research aim of this paper was to explore from the SME perspective who they might consider are key stakeholders or agents for their business in terms of helping increase productivity, and what support these stakeholders might offer. The study uses the LEGO serious play methodology and narrative analysis to develop a stakeholder ‘orbital map’ which shows a small ‘depth of field’ of ‘close’ stakeholders, and the complexity of some of the resulting relationships, and the implications for policy makers.

There are many pressures on academics to ‘satisfy’ students’ needs for feedback, not least the inclusion of questions about feedback. Many have commentated on the lack of student engagement with summative feedback while most believe that feedback is necessary to improve individual student performance. Several have looked at a range of reasons why students do not collect their feedback, but investigated in this article is how many students collected summative feedback and why they did so. This article outlines an action research–based intervention that involved offering feedback ‘on demand’ to undergraduate students and utilised access statistics data from the virtual learning environment to identify the actual rate of feedback collection by students. Investigated is whether or not there is a discernible preference for seeking feedback where there is a difference between the expected grade and the actual grade. Student survey and the virtual learning environment access data were used to indicate whether students are satisfied with a few short comments and a marking grid, if the mark is similar to their expectations. The resource efficiency and effectiveness for academic staff in terms of providing detailed individual feedback to all students are discussed.

Often students find that the terminology involved in a new subject can be a barrier to learning, Some theorists term this 'cognitive load' - a high amount of information that the brain has to process before it can begin to construct new knowledge. Glossaries have been used in many different educational contexts; however traditional glossaries are passive and have less capability to promote student engagement. This paper outlines a small scale study in a UK business school that used a small wiki situated within the Virtual Learning Environment to encourage students to construct their own glossary at the start of a module. Whilst many studies have looked at use of wikis in student work, especially collaborative projects, relatively few have investigated the use of wikis for constructing simple glossary entries created by students. In our study each student was allocated a particular subject related term. The students were instructed to construct a wiki entry describing what the term meant, citing at least two appropriate references. The study was evaluated by a variety methods including quantitative analysis of the Virtual Learning Environment usage and access statistics, alongside qualitative and quantitative survey data. Generally the quality of the entries was very high and students indicated that writing the wiki glossary entries helped them to understand the terminology of the new subject. Students stated that they had read a number of entries over the course of the module and some chose to reference the wiki in their final written assignment. Our research indicates that students found creating the wiki more useful than the finished resource itself.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been particularly challenged by the Covid pandemic, the climate crisis, war and political tensions including the fuel price crisis. Strategic responses to crisis including cost-cutting as retrenchment in the short run, debt financing to preserve the status quo and exit. However, perhaps the most positive is to innovate for renewal. The paper considers how working with an approach to futures and foresight learning, three different SMEs during the Covid pandemic and beyond formed action learning groups and were able to find future opportunities from which innovation ideas for action in the present could be undertaken. The paper considers the meaning of innovation including what Revans saw as an ‘Innovation Paradox’ as a gap between invention and innovation. In SMEs, the importance of informal innovation and an innovation orientation are identified. The meaning futures and foresight learning is considered and the focus on the identification of new opportunities for products and services, delivered by a process of action learning. Findings from three SMEs are presented from meetings that took place during 2021 to 2022, when Covid restrictions were partly in place. They show how each programme begins with opportunity questions for the future which then lead to ideas after a consideration of trends and patterns. Further methods of futures thinking are presented which allow further ideas to be developed for innovation. In each case, ideas are selected for business planning after approval. Discussion of the findings considers the importance of futures and foresight learning combined with action learning for SMEs to become more strategic, future-oriented and creative in seeking opportunities for innovation.

To explore who SME owner-managers consider as key stakeholders for their business for helping increase productivity, and the nature of the stakeholders’ impact. The study uses the LEGO serious play methodology and narrative analysis in a focus group setting. The analysis revealed a narrow depth of field of productivity stakeholders and identified critical narratives, involving close stakeholders which could constrain productivity. Lack of information on current and /future productivity states, and a social brake due to the potential impact on employees are two at the forefront of owner-manager perspectives. The study also identified the importance of internal and external champions to improve productivity and re-enforced the significance of skills gaps, the role of Further Education providers and other infrastructure assets. The purposiveness sample of the single focus group setting results in a lack of generalizability, but provides potential for replication and transposablity based on the generic type of stakeholders discussed. The work highlights the potential to further enhance the constituent attributes of stakeholder salience. There is a potential for different network agents to increase their collaboration to create a more coherent narrative for individual productivity investment opportunities, and for policy makers to consider how to leverage this. The study is innovative in using Lego to elucidate narratives in relation to both stakeholder identification and their contributions to productivity improvement impact in a UK SME context. The study introduces an innovative stakeholder orbital map and further develops the stakeholder salience concept; both useful for future conceptual and empirical work.

This paper outlines a novel approach to developing, presenting and using a multimedia case study for the assessment of a large (circa 230 students) Operations Management module at undergraduate level on a Business Studies programme. Engagement, realism and handling complexity are important issues in Operations Management teaching, learning and assessment. It is argued that traditional text based case studies do not address these concerns sufficiently and consequently can encourage surface learning approaches. Consultancy and simulation are more likely to be effective on these issues with the greater focus on experiential learning. However the constraints of these techniques restrict use as assessment options, particularly for large undergraduate programmes. This paper offers tutors of Operations Management an alternative approach to facilitating experiential learning using a multimedia case. The action research reported here develops this multimedia approach, identifies the practical considerations and the potential for improved student learning outcomes. The findings indicate that this multimedia approach was engaging, realistic and challenging hence facilitated greater student interest, understanding and skills.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight an enhancement in the methodology of participant-driven photographic-elicitation (PDPE) to explore the lived embodied retail spatialities of vintage fashionistas at vintage fashion fairs. An experimental approach is applied to an already existing research method, which uses smartphones and social media and places it in a novel contemporary consumption setting. Whilst using participant-generated photographs, and exploring them in interviews, has often been used in many ways and contexts, this paper shows it in a fresh light. The method involves vintage fashion buyers and sellers who are briefed to take photographs of their surroundings with their smartphones, and these are subsequently used as interview stimuli, leading to a novel contribution in an area previously underexplored in the academic literature. The paper’s enhancement of PDPE by including smartphones is called SP-PD-PE, or ‘smartphone participant-driven photo elicitation’, and the method is shown to lead to rich visual stimuli, which energises subsequent interviews and explores protagonists’ spatialities. The paper shows precisely how the enhanced method is done, through a unique illustrative case, and how using this methodology can lead to a theoretical development of the retail space via critical spatiality. The paper demonstrates how SP-PD-PE has benefits for researching the entwined futures of retail spaces and consumer experiences. Overall, it is concluded that SP-PD-PE has potential to provide deep understanding of retail spatialities, and while it is not an entirely new method, it has been little used in this way.

The paper provides an introduction into the innovative use of the methodological approach of Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA) and illustrates this with examples from an interventionist insider action research study. An overview of the method, including its foundation and association with the analysis of practice and how it can be situated within a reflexive ethnographic and critical realist stance is presented. It offers samples of findings and analysis for each of the different aspects of method, structured by a set of heuristic questions, as well an example showing the possibilities of theory development. The paper constructs and shows an analytical pathway for HRD researchers to use MDA and concludes with a discussion about the advantages of utilising MDA, in terms of theory and practice, as well as the practical issues in conducting an MDA study. The implications for the Human Resource Development (HRD) research community is that MDA is a new, innovative and germane approach for analysing HRD practice within organisational settings

Purpose This paper aims to provide an exposition of the constructive research approach (CRA) to show the potential utility of CRA in transcending or mitigating the methodological and practical issues involved in researching organisations. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a literature review, and resulting thematic discussion of methodological and practical issues involves in action research (AR) in organisations through the lens of the CRA approach. Findings The paper identifies that CRA has benefits in orientation to a practical outcome grounded in a theoretical domain but with leeway to facilitate creativity, which can also potentially improve the quality of the collaborative relationships. The centrality of the construction within the method provides a “vantage point” to manage the emic (inside) and etic (outside) positionality concerns of action researchers working within organisational settings. Practical implications CRA has multiple practical benefits for action researchers and their collaborators in terms of time, risk and collaborative commitment. Originality/value The paper develops a useful tactical framework for discussing the practical and methodological issues when considering AR in organisations and highlights how CRA can be used in wider organisational scholarship outside its roots in management accounting.

The paper utilises a form of Action Research, known as the ‘Constructive Research Approach’ (CRA), to explore how project teams could engender the development of process improvement (PI) routines in a higher education context. The methodology of Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA), an ethnographic approach to researching practice, is used to trace the development of PI routines over time. The findings showed that process owners and actors who were engaged because of ‘power’ of an initial pre-project Kaizen event, then became more passive participants in the ensuing traditional improvement project, with reduced performances of the PI routines. The main contrition stemming from the work was the abduction of a hybrid model of participatory engagement, that of a ‘Kaizen series’. This extended series of events affords the development of two key routines, ‘the working with a process map’ and the process analysis routine, by increasing opportunity for actors to perform these routines both within and between events, and by balancing the facilitation and empowerment routines. In addition, the Kaizen series is not dependent on any individual PI methodology. The resulting Kaizen series offers PI practitioners an opportunity to blend the best aspects of two different modes of engagement, Kaizen events and project improvement teams.

Purpose: This paper reports on a research project, using Intervention Research (IR), which aims to identify how a Higher Education Institution (HEI) could develop Process Improvement (PI) capability. Design/methodology/approach: The paper adopts a practice perspectives of routines, and classifies and catalogues the potential routines that could form process improvement (PI) capability. The development of these routines are investigated using the Constructive Research Approach (CRA), a form of Intervention Research (IR), in the Action Research mode. Within this approach the methodology of Mediated Discourse Analysis (MDA) was employed to trace the empirical trajectory of the routine development, in a student management office within the context of an improvement project by the institutions process improvement unit. Findings The study shows a smaller set of ‘initialising’ practices; those which are present, or desired, and instrumental to the beginning of a process improvement activity. The analysis reveals the mechanisms of why ‘process mapping’ is significant in the development of process improvement routines and the potential recursive power of the interrelatedness of these. Practical implications Of relative significance is the implication that there is a small group of initialising process improvement practices which are accessible to practitioners, in contrast to a large set of critical success factors. Secondly, these process improvement practices transcend particular methodologies, meaning their development can be incorporated into customised, contextualised methodologies, by individual organisations. Originality/value The study contributes to the appreciation of process improvement in higher education as a capability, and outlines the potential array of routines that could constitute that capability. It provides a theoretical view on how key process improvement routines are developed in an organisational field, and a more nuanced and richer view of ‘process mapping’ and its effect on other process improvement practices.

Purpose The paper is a proof of concept (PoC) intervention study aimed for developing performance management (PM) practices in manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the longer-term aim enabling the SMEs to improve their productivity. The intervention was designed and deployed by a collaborative quartet of academics, management consultants, accountancy firm and a commercial bank manager. Design/methodology/approach The paper firstly musters a set of initialising PM practices aligned to productivity improvement. These are utilised to design a knowledge transfer intervention for deployment with a set of manufacturing SMEs incorporating some associated productivity tools. The evaluation of the intervention utilised a case study approach founded on a logic model of the intervention to assess the development of the PM practices. Findings The intervention contributed to a partial development of the mustered practices and the productivity diagnostic based on the multi-factor productivity (MFP) abstraction and a data extraction protocol had the strongest impact. The study revealed the importance of the three interlaced factors: Depth of engagement, feedback opportunities and the intervention gradient (the increase of independent action from the participating SME's and the diminishment of the external intervention effort). Research limitations/implications The case study is based on a limited number of individual SME's, and within just the manufacturing sector. Practical implications SME businesses will require a more sustained programme of interventions than this pilot to develop PM capability, and depth of engagement within the SME is critical. Professional stakeholders can be utilised in recruitment of firms for intervention programmes. Business can start developing PM capability prior to PMS implementation using the tools from this programme. Originality/value The productivity diagnostic tool, based on a synthesis of MFP and the performance pyramid, an array of potential initialising practices for PM capability and discovery of potential mechanisms for PM practice development.