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Methodological Grounds (methodological + ground)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences40%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting40%

Selected Abstracts

How (not) to operationalise subnational political opportunity structures: A critique of Kestilä and Söderlund's study of regional elections

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2009
KAI ARZHEIMER
Based on an aggregate analysis of the French regional elections of 2004, Kestilä and Söderlund, in their 2007 article, ,Subnational Political Opportunity Structures and the Success of the Radical Right: Evidence from the March 2004 Regional Elections in France', examine the impact of subnational political opportunity structures on the success of the radical right and argue that such an approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross-national analyses. The present article disputes this claim on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrates that their empirical findings are spurious. [source]

Sales force automation: review, critique, research agenda

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT REVIEWS, Issue 4 2006
Francis Buttle
We review and critique the research literature on sales force automation (SFA). SFA involves the application of information technology to support the sales function. SFA software provides functionality that helps companies manage sales pipelines, track contacts and configure products, inter alia. The paper is organized into four main sections. First, we review the SFA environment, identifying definitions, vendor classifications and software attributes. We then move to a review and classification of the academic research that has been published on SFA. We find that the entire body of SFA knowledge attempts to answer just four questions: Why do organizations adopt SFA? What are the organizational impacts of SFA? What accounts for the success or failure of SFA projects? What accounts for variance in salesperson adoption of SFA? We then critique this body of knowledge on a number of theoretical and methodological grounds, and finally propose a research agenda for the future. [source]

The virtue and vice of workplace conflict: food for (pessimistic) thought

JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, Issue 1 2008
Carsten K.W. De Dreu
Many authors, myself included, have suggested that workplace conflict may be beneficial to the organization. I argue that the support for this conclusion is rather weak. A selective and necessarily limited review of the literature shows that: (1) the positive functions of conflict are found only under an exceedingly narrow set of circumstances, (2) the conclusion that (particular forms of) conflict and conflict management has positive functions can be criticized on methodological grounds, (3) even under favorable circumstances a number of serious negative functions can be identified as well, (4) negative functions easily outweigh positive functions, prohibiting the emergence of ,positive workplace conflict' (where conflict has predominantly positive consequences), and (5) organizations need cooperative conflict management not because it brings positive conflict, but because it prevents workplace conflict to hurt too much. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

MORAL CONTEXTUALISM AND MORAL RELATIVISM

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 232 2008
Berit Brogaard
Moral relativism provides a compelling explanation of linguistic data involving ordinary moral expressions like ,right' and ,wrong'. But it is a very radical view. Because relativism relativizes sentence truth to contexts of assessment it forces us to revise standard linguistic theory. If, however, no competing theory explains all of the evidence, perhaps it is time for a paradigm shift. However, I argue that a version of moral contextualism can account for the same data as relativism without relativizing sentence truth to contexts of assessment. This version of moral contextualism is thus preferable to relativism on methodological grounds. [source]

The concept of positive health: a review and commentary on its application in oral health research

COMMUNITY DENTISTRY AND ORAL EPIDEMIOLOGY, Issue 3 2006
David Locker
Abstract , Although the concept of positive health has been around for more than 60 years, acceptable measures of this construct have yet to emerge. Potential explanations are that there is no consensus on how it is to be defined and its ambiguous status with respect to medical and socioenvironmental models of health. In this paper we review definitions of positive health, the origins of these definitions, the way the concept of positive outcomes has been used in research on the outcomes of oral and orofacial conditions and assess whether the concept of positive health has any merit in terms of applied oral health research. This literature reveals many competing and imprecise definitions, many of which are similar to other constructs, such as well-being. Most are lacking empirical referents or indicators. In examining the literature on oral health we found five distinct, although overlapping, ways in which the concept of positive health has been framed: (i) positive health as the absence of negative health states; (ii) positive health as positively worded items; (iii) the positive outcomes of oral health; (iv) positive oral health as a set of psychological and social attributes, and (v) the positive outcomes of chronic conditions such as oro- and craniofacial differences. Each of these ways can be challenged on conceptual or methodological grounds. For example, the states that comprise the upper end of the negative,positive health continuum have not been defined and health states and determinants of health are often confused. Moreover, the meaning of responses to health status questionnaires and the interpretation of accounts of the illness experience is often unclear. Nevertheless, the notion of positive health, irrespective of its merits and public policy implications, provides a context for methodological and theoretical debate that can only serve to enrich theory and practice with respect to measures of health and quality of life and therapeutic interventions at the individual and population. [source]