Strategic Ethnography: Harnessing Subsidiary Resources for Organizational Renewal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We document the process of organizational renewal at Tesco Plc, the world’s third largest food retailer, in the wake of a historically unprecedented downturn in performance in its home market. The findings are based on an action research project in which an academic team trained Asian subsidiary managers to become in- house ethnographers of Tesco UK. The objective of the study was twofold: 1) to surface and evaluate the core values and strategic practices that comprised the essence of Tesco, 2) to identify sources of learning from Tesco’s foreign subsidiaries to promote organizational renewal in light of increasing competition in its home market. The study contributes to theory on boundary spanning in MNCs utilizing an innovative method we term ‘strategic ethnography’-a dynamic, holistic method of inquiry that leverages knowledge from the periphery by the effective use of ethnographic techniques for the purpose of sustainable organizational renewal in MNCs. We develop a process model of this method delineating the key role subsidiary managers can play drawing upon their insider- outsider knowledge-bases functioning as conduits in boundary spanning across complex organizational and geographic boundaries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".