This chapter confirms and extends the empirical evidence that discusses the role of individual traits in determining resource acquisition by entrepreneurs. Using a sample of 59,538 crowdfunding campaigns launched on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, it explores how the use of language can impact a campaign's success. This chapter adopts a combined methodology that relies on the Crovitz 42 Relational Words, emotional text mining (ETM), and machine learning to model key variables and identify the elements of a campaign that could primarily affect successful funding. This research concludes with practical suggestions for how entrepreneurs can use language and other controllable variables to increase their chances for success with their crowdfunding campaigns from the very start, as well as understand which uncontrollable variables may boost their chances of success during a campaign.

Research about the implications that cultural differences have for managers in different parts of Anglophone Canada and the United States, like management studies of regional culture throughout the world, have been based on varied, narrowly focused theories and have reached varied conclusions. Here, we identify and compare theories about immigrant group characteristics and contemporary socioeconomic characteristics that figure strongly in research comparing Canada, the United States, and their regions. We summarize the predictions that each immigration theory and each socioeconomic characteristic makes for the two implications of culture that are most prominent in regional studies of North America – self-reliance and deference to authority. We conclude with thoughts about the potential contributions of culture research about North American regions along with theories of culture emergence and change that need to be revised or added to them to advance research about cultural regions of Europe.

In order to understand immigration sentiment and its relationship to other concepts in the Italian general election campaign of 2018 and the European election campaign of 2019, we collected in two corpora all the tweets in the Italian language containing the word “immigration” in the period preceding the vote. Both corpora underwent a sentiment analysis and a stop word analysis using two textual software packages: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) (Pennebaker et al., 2015) and WORDij. LIWC was originally designed by James Pennebaker to understand how some patients recover from traumatic experiences by writing about those experiences and the emotions associated with it then and afterwards. LIWC consists of a dictionary of words which assesses the percent that they occur in a given text. LIWC analysis provides a measure of positive and negative emotion in the immigration text over time. WORDij is a text analysis program that can compute a Z-Score or the relative proportional test of difference between words and words pairs in two sets of texts. Using an include list of stop words we can determine how these relational words change over time with an emotional valence and Z-score to assess the immigration political debate over time. The paper represents a focus on stop-words, which have been an aspect of textual analysis that is often dismissed yet can be very important to our understanding of relational power.

The automotive industry is going through a transformation. Disruptive technologies and tools are shifting the business model from one of automobiles to one of mobility. To accomplish this shift, automotive companies are embracing acquisitions and partnerships. In a time when the consumer electronics industry is delivering new products to market at a rapid rate, automotive manufacturers must identify ways of getting new products and features to customers faster and with high quality to maintain or increase market share. We provide an analysis of interviews with global automotive company professionals to understand the impact that quality requirements have on innovation and the advanced product design process. The research contributes to the literature on innovation and quality, identifying organizational behaviors and practices that facilitate or obstruct the development of high quality fast-to-market innovations, particularly in the area of mobility.

For centuries “innovation” has been a topic of book authors and academic researchers as documented by Ngram and Google Scholar search results. In contrast, “innovators” have had substantially less attention in both the popular domain and the academic domain. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a text analysis research methodology to linguistically identify “innovators” and “non-innovators” using Hebert F. Crovitz’s 42 relational words. Specifically, we demonstrate how to combine the use of two complementary text analysis software programs: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and WORDij to simply count the percent of use of these relational words and determine the statistical difference in use between “innovators” and “non-innovators.” We call this the “Crovitz Innovator Identification Method” in honor of Herbert F. Crovitz, who envisioned the possibility of using a small group of 42 words to signal “innovation” language. The Crovitz Innovator Identification Method is inexpensive, fast, scalable, and ready to be applied by others using this example as their guide. Nevertheless, this method does not confirm the viability of any innovation being created, used or implemented; it simply detects how a person’s language signals innovative thinking. We invite other scholars to join us in this linguistic sleuthing for innovators.

The automotive industry is going through a transformation. Disruptive technologies and tools are shifting the business model from one of automobiles to one of mobility. To accomplish this shift, automotive companies are embracing acquisitions and partnerships. In a time when the consumer electronics industry is delivering new products to market at a rapid rate, automotive manufacturers must identify ways of getting new products and features to customers faster and with high quality to maintain or increase market share. We provide an analysis of interviews with global automotive company professionals to understand the impact that quality requirements have on innovation and the advanced product design process. The research contributes to the literature on innovation and quality, identifying organizational behaviors and practices that facilitate or obstruct the development of high quality fast-to-market innovations, particularly in the area of mobility.

Global teams have become a basic building block for organizing work that crosses geographic boundaries. They are an alternative to more traditional forms of hierarchy-based organizing and form the foundation of what is becoming known as the global networked organization. Global teams connect people who are geographically dispersed and work together on specific projects or tasks, crossing national, cultural, organizational, and linguistic boundaries. While global teams hold promise for organizing global work, they face conditions of complexity: (1) a multiplicity of different cultural contexts, governmental requirements, and multiple diverse stakeholders; (2) interdependence brought about by global flows of capital, information, and value chains; and, (3) ambiguity of meanings despite the fact that there is plenty of information. Management scholars have conducted most of the research about global teams from 1990 to 2018. These studies have shed light on global teaming processes, including communication and collaboration, facilitation and brokerage, leadership, language and identity, shared meaning, trust, power, national and organizational culture, distance, time, and technology. Some of the factors shown to improve global team effectiveness are as follows: a clear mission and objectives, explicit expectations for members’ roles and responsibilities, facilitating relationships among team members that leads to shared knowledge and a team identity, managing cultural, language and other contextual challenges, and monitoring and managing changing environmental conditions. While knowledge has grown about how global teams function, there is still much to learn about the complexity of multilevel cultural interactions in global teams and how different influence factors interact to affect performance. In-depth, longitudinal studies by anthropologists can provide such insights. The role of anthropologists is to assist the development of global teams by bringing nuance to the ways culture manifests in team member interactions and how social relationships are enacted and understood. Anthropologists can help build a richer understanding of contextual influences and the perceptions embedded in culture that shape sense-making across multiple contexts.

This case illustrates the use of mixed methods for analyzing structure, content, and sentiment of a city council task force appointed to guide the city (note, “the city’s” name remains anonymous as per research agreement) in updating their oil and gas drilling ordinance. The novel method approach integrates linguistic conversation analysis and social network influence to analyze the interactions among stakeholders over time as they occur both inside and outside formal meetings. The case study also represents a practical example of conducting e-Research where a small team of four researchers shared a cloud-based PC as a collaborative space for cost efficiency and data sharing and as an educational tool for team members working across mixed PC and Mac operating systems. Although this research is a single case study of one community, the data sources and methods can be scaled to include multiple communities or a larger geographic area that could include a county, state, region, or an entire country. The authors identify traditional methods that can take advantage of data analytics enabled by new technologies.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to show that virtual mirroring-based learning allows members of an organization to see how they communicate with others in a visual way, by applying principles of “social quantum physics” (empathy, entanglement, reflect, reboot), to become better communicators and build a shared “DNA” within their organization. Design/methodology/approach E-mail based social network analysis creates virtual maps of communication – social landscapes – of organizations, similar to Google Maps, which creates geographical maps of a person’s surroundings. Findings Applying virtual mirroring-based learning at various mulitnational firms has significantly increased their organizational efficiency and performance, for instance increasing customer satisfaction by 18 per cent in a large services organization, increasing retention, making sales forecasts, and improving call center employee satisfaction. Research limitations/implications To address concerns of individual privacy, the guiding principle is to give individual information to the individual and provide aggregated anonymized information to management. Originality/value Virtual mirroring-based learning offers a unique way of creating collective awareness within an organization by empowering the individual to take corrective action aligned with collective action, and improves their own communication behavior through analyzing and visualizing their e-mail archive in novel ways, while giving strategic insight to management and improving organizational culture.

As business anthropologists, we are often called upon to work on organizational change initiatives as members of a change team. This article is the story of one organizational change initiative involving a global top management team in a healthcare division of a large multinational firm and the research that was used as the basis for implementing change in the top management team and subsequently in the division as a whole. Specifically, the article focuses on how the change team, of which I was a part, communicated the research results to the top management team and to employees of the company by presenting the results in a map that became a boundary object, that facilitating translation across diverse groups, joint sensemaking, and local action in the change process.

ObjectivesWe introduce regulatory terms, definitions, and the Quality System Regulation as proposed by the US Food and Drug Administration in the 2014 draft guidance entitled Framework for Regulatory Oversight of Laboratory Developed Tests and explore medical device requirements applicable to a laboratory environment to design, develop, and validate laboratory developed tests (LDTs).MethodsWe performed nine interviews with laboratory professionals to explore concerns and challenges regarding the draft, translated the results into operational factors, and surveyed professionals to test the factors that would comprise a regulatory quality management system framework.ResultsNine interviewees and 35 survey respondents shared concerns of risk classification, process validation, patient safety, and general ambiguity regarding the proposed requirements for development of LDTs.ConclusionsRespondents agree that a regulatory quality management system is needed in laboratories that develop LDTs, but the translation and method for design control to a clinical laboratory do not exist. As a result, laboratories are taking the wait-and-see approach.