Search

In response to competitive and economic pressures, an increasing number of manufacturing firms are adding services to their traditional product offerings. However, companies are confronted with an arduous undertaking, and find it difficult to servitize successfully and profitably. This thesis investigates the transformation that traditional manufacturers undergo to become providers of integrated products and services, a phenomenon known as servitization. Servitization is considered a strategic re-direction of the manufacturing organisation and a major challenge for senior management. The purpose of this study is to provide better understanding of the change that occurs when a manufacturer attempts servitization. The study adopts a qualitative theory building approach to investigate an under-researched phenomenon and a major managerial challenge. It follows a strategy of engaged scholarship to understand a complex organisational problem. The research utilised multiple case studies, action research, and focus groups to tackle a problem with significance to industry. The findings reveal the nature of servitization as a complex transformative change which exposes the manufacturing company to its environment in new ways, and closely interlinks the organisation with a network of stakeholders through new dependencies. The transformation of traditional manufacturers towards servitized organisations is multi-dimensional and goes through eleven dimensions of transformation across the organisation and its network. In addition, thirty nine forces of change were found to influence the outcome of servitization, and were categorised into three sets of change drivers for servitization. The results of the study led to the formation of a model for transformation towards a servitized organisation for use by industry practitioners to roadmap and facilitate their organisation‟s shift towards services. The model represents a novel approach to managing servitization. This research has addressed a literature gap and met an industrial need, and has made a significant contribution to knowledge about the change that traditional manufacturers experience to become servitized organisations.

Technology and digital media are increasingly present in today’s classrooms, often used as tools for learning, connectivity, or even subversion. This dissertation project examines how everyday cybernetic practices–the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine, and between the physical and non-physical (Haraway, 2006)–are intentionally leveraged in the individual and collective development and enactment of expertise. Specifically, I explore how diverse undergraduate novice teachers, representing a range of majors, ethnicities, nationalities, and language practices, participated in a hybrid (online/in-person) education practicum course aimed at developing critical practices of service learning and engaged scholarship.This study is grounded in Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 1999) which posits that learning is situated and dependent on social, historical, and cultural contexts that we navigate in our everyday. Following this theory, I examine how learning is mediated by material and psychological tools that are passed down through generations but always have the potential to be changed and transformed (Cole, 1996). Special attention is paid in this study to the way that digital tools, in the age of the cyborg (Haraway 2006; Lupton, 2012), can be transformed across timescales in ways that allow us to trace a person’s history of engagement with material and psychological tools almost instantly.As a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurow, 2016), this research project employed ethnographic and social data analytic methods to illuminate cyclical and iterative processes of collaborative inquiry and co-operation (Goodwin, 2017) when students used custom-designed, state-of-the-art digital collaboration tools, across multiple sites (digital and face-to-face) of learning. To this end, data included video recordings of classroom interactions, field notes generated by study participants and myself, digital artifacts, back-end network analytics, student surveys and semi-structured interviews. By employing analytic tools from actor-network theory (Latour, 1996) as well as participation frameworks (Goodwin, 2007), this study aimed to illuminate (a) the discursive and textual features of face-to-face and online collaboration; (b) the tools and contexts that mediate these practices; and (c) the relationship between digital and face-to-face interactions and the development and sharing of expertise.Findings demonstrate that in tool-dense spaces learners engaged in robust collaborative inquiry that leveraged the connectivity and rhetorical affordances of digital technologies. The first iteration of the designed study, where the online aspect of the course was intentionally integrated into face-to-face interactions in our class, highlights how undergraduate novice teachers make use of their cyborg selves to openly share and develop expertise around teaching and learning. Over the course of this iteration, the following theories of collaboration and learning emerged: (1) Sustained attention to the social organization of learning in the design of a hybrid course resulted in collaboration at the intersection of the digital and in-person interactions that are characterized as meshworks marked by careful relationship building, and the creation, sharing, and remixing of syncretic (Gutiérrez, 2008) digital artifacts/texts across the digital and physical terrains; and (2) Through this collaborative meshwork of enactment of expertise, undergraduates begin to collectively develop models for teaching and learning. Further analysis of the composition and archiving practices that were fostered by the design of this course also illuminate the following: (1) When everyday practices of digital production and curation are privileged in a course, students engaged in archival processes by means of which students curated their own and their classmates’ language, images, responses, likes, and pins (cf. DeKoskink, 2016; Gutierrez, 2008) that then became salient compositional resources; (2) These multimodal, translingual, and “transmodal” (Lizárraga, Hull & Scott, 2015) archives then informed the writing of a variety academic texts; and (3) Syncretic texts that merged everyday and academic knowledge served as resources for the appropriation of socio-critical literacy perspectives. This research has implications for both the research and design of learning environments that aim to leverage digitally-mediated collaboration and multimodal composition. Methodologically, this study highlights the need for employing a variety of analytical tools from the digital humanities and sociocultural disciplines in order to understand the complex ways that undergraduates connect and collaborate at the intersection of the digital and face-to-face. The findings of this dissertation further highlight the necessity of designing courses at the undergraduate level that recognize the fluidity with which learners navigate virtual and in-person terrains in everyday activity of meaning-making and knowledge production, and nurturing of social relationships. This work also contributes to understandings of how undergraduate novice teachers develop notions of service learning and engaged scholarship in an increasingly digitized and interconnected world.

This qualitative, collective case study is designed to examine the processes by which urban, metropolitan institutions determine the impact their community engagement has within the local community. The study addresses the lack of research on community engagement at the institutional level, the processes that track and coordinate engagement, as well as the perspectives of community partners in this work. Research is more developed regarding individual engagement activities and student learning outcomes than it is to institutional accountability structures or community impact. Studies that center the institution as the unit of analysis are needed to address these limitations in research and practice. A collective case study using grounded theory was designed to address the research question. The use of grounded theory aligns with the exploratory nature of the research, allowing for data from institutional contexts to inform an area of research with limited models and theories. Three institutions were selected as cases to provide comparative data. Multiple data sources informed each case. Data were collected over eight months, including a two-month pilot phase to revise interview protocols and planned implementation. Findings across cases indicate that institutional processes vary, and determining the extent and impact of their community engagement efforts at the local level are limited. Respondents in all cases noted pockets of high engagement activity, and in some cases subsequent assessment, but these levels vary in quantity and quality. The capacity to determine impact was cited up to the individual project, program, or course level. Respondents further suggested the ability to identify, track, and report these activities, creating an institutional narrative on a particular area of impact, was limited without greater institutionalization of engagement. Community representation and voice in institutional assessment processes were limited or not included, though community input at the unit level was cited across cases. Findings suggest that as institutional capacity for engagement and its assessment builds (i.e. institutionalization), systematic solicitation of community perceptions of impact may serve as a proxy for realized community outcomes. Findings further indicate that greater attention to community engagement assessment can support institutional relevance, productivity, and mission attainment. Conclusions and recommendations for research and practice are presented in the final chapter.

Although initially established for the purpose of training teachers and management staff for the formal education sector, one of the major objectives of the University of Cape Coast (UCC) is to establish partnerships with both local and international communities and organizations in ways that simultaneously enhance academic scholarship and socioeconomic development. For this reason, this study examined the significance of university policies on community engagement and the practice of public sociology. Specifically, the influence of epistemological dispositions and perceptions concerning disciplinary, institutional and social demands on engaged scholarship are addressed. The challenges associated with the practice of engaged scholarship and “public sociology” are discussed by identifying the ironies presented by the laws and decrees of UCC and two other national policies for Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs). Data was also collected from fifteen (n=15) academic faculty (sociologists) from DSA and the CEGRAD using a questionnaire with mostly open-ended questions. The responses of participants of this research elucidated some of the major factors associated with the feasibility of the practice of public sociology. Also outlined are some of the community engagement practices pursued in the midst of all the challenges presented in the UCC and Ghanaian context.

All organizations, including mobile services enterprises, must be able to adapt and respond to discontinuous and rapidly changing business environments. Although mobile service providers have considerable IT-enabled dispatching options, knowledge is limited on how to leverage these technologies to augment adaptive management practices that improve business performance and create customer benefits. Against this backdrop, my collaborative action research study adapted the framework and principles of sense-and-respond (S&R) adaptive enterprise design to help a mobile service provider, LSG, Inc., develop the transactional and transformational capabilities it needed to improve outcomes in providing field services for the State of Georgia’s lottery terminals. The dissertation examines how LSG leveraged its recent implementation of IT-enabled dispatching technology both to augment restructuring of its managerial framework and to develop adaptive strategies and modular capabilities that let it systematically sense and respond to rapid and unpredictable changes in its business environment. The study gave LSG an approach for developing and implementing adaptive enterprise design processes using the S&R framework as a heuristic to identify, modify, and redesign the command-and-control (C&C) organizational architecture and operational routines; this effort was augmented by new dispatching technology. My research revealed specific dynamic capabilities and guided senior managers’ implementation of new adaptive governance mechanisms, organizational learning processes, dynamic stakeholder resource commitments, and modular “customer-back” resource customization strategies. More generally, the research shows how adaptive enterprise design principles can transform and address the specific discontinuity challenges that small service enterprises face, and offers insights and understanding into how practitioner–researchers can use theory to leverage firm resources and assets to co-create operational value with stakeholders.

Over the past two decades researchers have analyzed motivating factors and institutional barriers that influenced a professor's initial decision to utilize a service-learning pedagogy. The majority of this research has been quantitative in nature, surveying faculty members' initial attitudes around service-learning. However, the extant literature fails to qualitatively examine the experiences of faculty members who successfully integrate service-learning, especially at a public research institution with civic-engaged mission. Because a public institution relies upon a critical mass of faculty members to support its civic engagement mission, this study focused on explaining the lived experience of exemplar professors in service-learning to understanding their motivations, barriers, and experiences. Faculty members are important to study because service-learning is a form of community engagement that cannot happen without sustainable efforts from professors. Moreover, students and communities cannot derive the benefits of service-learning, nor can civically minded institutions achieve their goal, if faculty members do not incorporate service-learning into their classrooms. Thus, the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to understand the experiences of service-learning faculty members at a four-year public research institution where community engagement is a stated priority. Utilizing a recently developed faculty engagement model (Demb & Wade, 2012) as the guiding theoretical framework, this research study seeks to understand the lived experience of faculty members at The University of Texas at Austin by inquiring 1) how faculty members implement meaningful community engagement through their service-learning classes, 2) how service-learning may shape a faculty members' professional and personal identity at a research institution, and 3) how service-learning fits into faculty members' larger scholarship agenda.

A handful of scholars conducted research and advocated for change in the San Joaquin Valley of California during twentieth century. Six social scientists, who I refer to as "politically engaged scholars," engaged in struggles for social justice, economic equity and democratic governance, both as scholars who produced knowledge and constructed theory and as political actors who aimed to advance particular interests and ends. In the Valley's adversarial contexts, they varied their roles as scholars by leading strikes, organizing underserved communities, founding community development programs, creating non-profit institutions, in addition to working as traditional social scientists. Their intellectual work illustrated the political dimensions of social science and the educational praxis of engaged scholarship as the scholars deviated from the conventional role of detached observers into active participants in highly charged debates. The concept of pedagogy frames my research because it allows an alternative understanding of these scholars who entered research settings as change agents and openly admitted values into their scholarship. Since social scientists produce knowledge for cultural and professional consumption, and sometimes explicitly for public purposes, their work occupies an educational nexus between the academy and the broader society where research findings and academic knowledge are produced, disseminated and represented in particular ways. In order to understand their pedagogical practice, I use a narrative structure comprised of the scholar's first person stories and my interpretation of a variety of texts including their academic papers. The resulting narrative informs pedagogies of political engagement through scholarship. The scholars' experiences, values and findings blend together as the harassment they experienced and politicization of their scientific findings become subplots in larger struggles for economic justice and the defense of democracy in the San Joaquin Valley. Their stories and this narrative find that democracy is fundamentally linked to a just, sustaining and egalitarian economic system.

What leadership approaches and operational strategies should traditional civil rights organizations, like the Urban League, undertake to in this post-civil rights era? Specifically at the local level, what expectations must the Urban League of Central Carolinas satisfy to reassert its leadership in Charlotte? In recent years, an increasing array of social enterprises across different sectors has emerged to address failures in civil society. Civil rights organizations have long served a niche in the battle for an equitable society. However, the role of civil rights organizations in community revitalization has been diffuse and subject to fundraising constraints. I undertook this action research study to assist the Urban League of Central Carolinas in developing earned-income strategies based upon their assessment of market needs, resources and socio-political realities. The pursuit of such strategies will enable the agency to create new partnerships, renewed community engagement and greater financial sustainability. This study demonstrated the recurring nature of strategy development and execution. Interestingly, both external and internal environmental factors surfaced the following lessons: (1) Civil rights organizations remain relevant. There remains an important role for the ULCC (traditional civil rights organizations) in ameliorating the conditions of social and economic inequality; (2) Leadership by the ULCC must be fluid, vigorously asserted and continuously exercised. In addition, capacity building, engaged leadership and strategic alliances are necessary steps; (3) The depth and breadth of problems such as poverty, homelessness, and educational failures require comprehensive solutions, collaborative efforts and shared leadership; (4) Social enterprise strategies require organizational change and generative governance; and (5) Action Research practitioners must be alert to organizational readiness. Undertaking A/R efforts asks us to pay keen attention to team development and team process as key elements of one's methodologies. This study contributes to the field of community development and social change by broadening our understanding of the ways in which community-based organizations and their leaders evolve in response to economic and social influences. Such an understanding may enable us to improve organizational practice and improve local policy decisions. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in the open-access OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd.