Oliver William Jones
@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Leeds Business School
Leeds Beckett University
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Productivity, SME, Organisational impact
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Jeff Gold and Ollie Jones
Informa UK Limited
Oliver William Jones, David Devins, and Greg Barnes
Emerald
PurposeThe 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/approachThe 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.FindingsThe 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/implicationsThe case study is based on a limited number of individual SME's, and within just the manufacturing sector.Practical implicationsSME 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/valueThe 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.
Ollie Jones, Jeff Gold, and Julia Claxton
Emerald
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.
Oliver William Jones, Jeff Gold, and Julia Claxton
Informa UK Limited
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.
Oliver William Jones, Jeff Gold, and David Devins
Emerald
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore who small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner–managers consider as key stakeholders for their business for helping increase productivity and the nature of the stakeholders' impact.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses the Lego Serious Play methodology and narrative analysis in a focus group setting.FindingsThe 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/or 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.Research limitations/implicationsThe purposiveness sample of the single focus group setting results in a lack of generalizability, but provides potential for replication and transposability based on the generic type of stakeholders discussed. The work highlights the potential to further enhance the constituent attributes of stakeholder salience.Practical implicationsThere 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.Social implicationsThe findings suggest that the implications of deskilling and job loss are major factors to be considered in the policy discourse. SMEs are less likely to pursue productivity improvements in a low growth setting because of their local social implications.Originality/valueThe 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 the future conceptual and empirical work.
Oliver Jones, Jeff Gold, and Julia Claxton
Emerald
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to report on a research project, using intervention research (IR), which aims to identify how a higher education institution could develop process improvement (PI) capability.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a practice perspectives of routines, and classifies and catalogues the potential routines that could form PI capability. The development of these routines are investigated using the constructive research approach, a form of IR), in the action research mode. Within this approach, the methodology of mediated discourse analysis 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 PI unit.FindingsOf relative significance is the implication that there is a small group of initialising PI practices which are accessible to practitioners, in contrast to a large set of critical success factors. Second, these PI practices transcend particular methodologies, meaning their development can be incorporated into customised, contextualised methodologies, by individual organisations.Practical implicationsThe set of PI practices identified are able to be enacted by practitioners and are not dependent on macro-management factors. Second they are relatively simple to understand and are not associated with any particular improvement fad or fashion.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the appreciation of PI 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 PI routines are developed in an organisational field, and a more nuanced and richer view of “process mapping” and its effect on other PI practices.
Ollie Jones, Jeff Gold, and Julia Claxton
Wiley
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 potential MDA researchers to use 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.
Ollie Jones and Andrea Gorra
SAGE Publications
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.
Ollie Jones and Marie Kerr
Elsevier BV