This paper presents a design-based research study on the reporting of intellectual capital in firms. It combines the designing of an organizational development (OD) intervention with the testing of the intervention using an action research methodology. A growing gap between theory-based research and practice has been identified as one of the reasons for a lack of renewal in the field of OD. Design-based research (DBR) has been proposed as a methodology that can help bridge the gap between research and practice. The purpose of the paper is to illustrate what a comprehensive methodology for design-based research can look like and to demonstrate the type of OD knowledge this research can produce. The design approach is used to design and test a tool for the reporting of intellectual capital within firms as an OD intervention into the individual and collective sensemaking of managers.
This study proposes a framework to measure touristification of consumption spaces, consisting of concentration of retail capital, business displacement and standardization of the consumption landscape. This framework is tested using business registration data and rent price estimates for consumption spaces in Amsterdam between 2005 and 2020. Touristification emerges from concentrations of retail capital and standardization, but occurs without causing significant business displacement. A cluster analysis identifies different variations of touristification. Besides the more typical cases these include nightlife areas, gentrifying consumption spaces and specialized retail areas. This suggests that local contingencies cause consumption spaces to respond differently to increasing tourism.
In many fields within management and organizational literature there is considerable debate and controversy about key theoretical concepts and their definitions and meanings. Systematic metaphor analysis can be a useful approach to study the underlying conceptualizations that give rise to these controversies and putting them in perspective. It can help identify the different ways a theoretical concept is structured and given meaning, provide insight into the way these different conceptualizations relate to each other, and show how these conceptualizations impact further theorization about the concept. This article describes the procedure for a systematic analysis of the metaphors used to conceptualize key theoretical concepts. To examine its usefulness, the authors apply the approach to the field of social capital, and in particular to the concept of ‘relationships’ in organizations. In the metaphor analysis of three seminal articles on social capital, the authors identify seven metaphoric concepts for relationships. The metaphors are illuminated as important for providing imagery that adds specific meaning in the process of authors theorizing about social capital like ‘tie’, ‘path’ and ‘bridge’. They add dynamics and controllability to the concepts by attributing an array of verbs like ‘to move between’ or ‘to use’ relationships. In addition, the metaphors allow for the attribution of specific characteristics to the concept of relationships that can be used as variables in theory construction, such as the strength of a relationship or the ‘distance’ between people. These insights are useful in exploring and reconciling differences in social capital definitions.
