An Exploration of Owner-Manager Problem Solving Practices in Small Firms: The Central Vancouver Island Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A significant amount of research in the field of small business management has \ncorrelated small firm performance with the sophistication of overall management \nskills (see, for example, Gasse, 1997; Gadenne, 1998; Zinger, leBrasseur and \nZannibi, 2001; Balderson, 2003) and more particularly problem solving skills. Yet, \neven though problem solving skills are at the core of the small business management \nprocess (Jennings and Beaver, 1997), there has been little research to date that has \nfocused on understanding the actual approach small business owner-managers take to solve the problems they encounter as the present study has done, through the \nutilization of an interpretive research design applied to a sample of small firms. \nThe primary purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate the nature of problem solving practices adopted by 11 small business owner-managers on Central \nVancouver Island, Canada, by identifying the types of problems encountered in the \nyears following their establishment, the actions taken to solve these problems and the outcomes of these actions for the firm. It examines the characteristics of the problemm solving approaches utilized by owner-managers as they encountered problems, and identifies how they perceived the impact of the approach taken on the continued survival of their firm. \nThe methodological approach taken in this study is positioned within an emergent \nbody of research in the field of small business and entrepreneurship that applies an interpretive paradigm to uncover the complex facets of how individuals develop their capabilities and management practices (Chell and Allman, 2003) with a particular \nemphasis on the small business owner-manager. The interpretive assumptions guiding the research process have allowed new understandings to emerge about \nproblem solving in small firms within the wider context of managerial capability as a \ncritical contributor to small business survival. \nMore specifically, the critical incident technique method (Flanagan, 1954; Chell, \n1998), along with an approach to data analysis and coding that draws from grounded \ntheory (Glaser, 1992; Glaser and Strauss, 1999; Strauss and Corbin, 1998), are \ncombined and applied as a qualitative research strategy. This strategy has not \npreviously been used in relation to the study of problem solving in small firms. This interpretive paradigm allows the exploration of how small business owner-managers attach meaning to their subjective experiences and the implications of these \nperceptions for the business outcomes of the firm, specifically as they relate to \nsolving critical business problems. As a result, the interpretive methods applied in \nthe course of this study make a novel contribution to the field, since they have \nyielded new interpretations on the nature of problem solving processes in the sample \nof small firms studied. \nThe findings presented here reveal the intuitive, improvised and non-linear nature of how problems are actually solved in these small firms, in contrast to a number of well-known theoretical research frameworks that propose well-defined and \ndelineated steps in the problem solving process. The results of this study make a \nvaluable contribution to building new theory in this area of inquiry by demonstrating how more dynamic processes occur in practice. An alternative way to conceptualize problem solving in small firms is presented in Chapter 6, A Holistic Framework for Problem Solving in Small Firms.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".