About the Authors

Sajeel Ahmed is a researcher beginning his career at the University of Bedfordshire Business School. His PhD research is on emoji and their influence on communication on Facebook. He holds a BA (Hons) in Business Studies from Cardiff Metropolitan University, an MBA (International Business) from the University of Gloucestershire, as well as an MSc in Marketing and Business Management from the University of Bedfordshire. He has been a visiting lecturer in e-business-related units and supervises undergraduate dissertations. His areas of interest are computer-mediated communication, knowledge management, virtual communities, and gamification in higher education and other contexts. Email: sajeel.ahmed@beds.ac.uk Judith Applegarth is a registered nurse and midwife with extensive clinical and management experience in a range of healthcare disciplines including: emergency department, critical care, and peri-operative services. She holds positions as research assistant and adjunct research fellow at CQ University as well as a management role with the Monash IVF Group. Judith has completed a PhD and her research program involved a qualitative, grounded theory approach. She has presented at national and international conferences and has won several international awards for her work. Her areas of research interest include qualitative research and grounded theory. Berit Støre Brinchmann, RN, MSc, Ph.D. is a professor of nursing at Nord University in Norway. She is also a senior researcher at the Nordland Hospital Trust and an Adjunct Professor at the Arctic University of Norway (Campus Harstad). Her research interests include empirical ethics and the family perspective.  Email: Berit.s.brinchmann@nord.no Dr. Ferlis bin Bullare @ Bahari   is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology and Education, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, UMS, and is the research supervisor for Alan Kim-Lok Oh. Email: ferlis@ums.edu.my Trudy Dwyer, PhD, Associate Professor, is a nursing research academic at CQ University in Australia. She has extensive experience in teaching and learning with undergraduate and post-graduate research higher degree students. Her research interests include recognition and responding to the deteriorating patient, patient safety and quality, nurse-led models of care, simulation and knowledge translation. She has authored numerous books, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles, and is a principal author of five books in the Student Survival Guide series published by Pearson Education; one has sold over 72,000 copies. Dr. Steve Elers, is a lecturer* at the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing, Massey Business School, Massey University, New Zealand.  In his doctoral research, he examined Māori perspectives of public information advertisements as part of wider social marketing initiatives (e.g., anti-drug driving television advertisement targeted at Māori fathers).  Email: S.Elers@massey.ac.nz * Lecturer, New Zealand, is equivalent to Assistant Professor in the United States.     Tracy Flenady is a registered nurse, specialising in emergency nursing; she also maintains strong academic links and works predominantly with nursing students. Tracy is the project manager of a grant awarded to improve new nurses’ awareness of patient safety issues through the use of simulation training, and is working towards achieving a PhD. Tracy has a particular interest in sociology, fuelled by her perpetual pursuit to understand human behaviour. Email t.flenady@cqu.edu.au Barney G. Glaser is the cofounder of grounded theory (1967). He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1961. He then went to University of California San Francisco, where he joined Anselm Strauss in doing the dying in hospitals study and in teaching PhD and DNS students methods and analysis. He published over 20 articles on this research and the dying research. Since then, Glaser has written 14 more books using and about grounded theory and countless...

Editorial: New Perspectives on Conceptual Growth through GT...

Astrid Gynnild, University of Bergen What does it mean to learn grounded theory? I mean, really learn it? The question emerged while re-reading and reflecting on the final versions of the six very different, and yet interrelated, articles in this June issue of the Grounded Theory Review. Many a novice grounded theorist has experienced that, in order to truly understand grounded theory, he or she has to start doing it; grounded theory is a learning-by-doing method that constantly produces new theories firmly grounded in data. But the learning process may, in itself, be extremely challenging, even scary, no matter the circumstances. Classic grounded theory might be scary simply because it prompts researchers to get out of their personal and professional comfort zone when hunting inductively for data to explain human patterns of behavior. Taking on the responsibility of doing a grounded theory is possible only if a researcher is willing to invest in individual growth and experience while simultaneously engaging with data. In the opening article of this issue, Dr. Barney G. Glaser explains how the GT recipe for personal and professional growth goes through the constant conceptual expansion that is built into the grounded theory approach. The article, which is a preprint of the first chapter of his next book, extracts the productive design and outcomes of Dr. Glaser’s lifelong devotion to grounded theory. So far, Glaser has written 35 books on grounded theory and innumerous articles, and he steadily produces a new book yearly. In the article Dr. Glaser calls classic grounded theory a ”no preconceptions method.” He looks back on his GT career and reflects on the consistent inner drive to explore the method further. He also explains an important rationale for doing inductive research; “writing up data was much faster than thinking up conjectures to suit a perspective that could be very irrelevant.” In this issue I am also very happy to publish three new grounded theories with core concepts that might have relevance far wider than their substantive areas: mastering everyday life, collective inclusioning, and trust testing. The first theory comes from the health discipline. A group of Swedish researchers at Linnaeus University has developed a theory on “Mastering everyday life in ordinary housing for people with psychic disabilities.”  The researchers are Rosita Brolin, David Brunt, Mikael Rask, Susanne Syren, and Anna Sandgren. Their theory provides new insights into handling the complex everyday life of massive information flows paired with shifting requirements of attention, concentration, and quick decision-making. To many people, these complexities are hard to cope with, especially when combined with phobias, fatigue, attention deficits, or compulsive disorders. The main concern of the impossible mission of everyday life is resolved through the core category of mastering everyday life, which is a process as well as a set of strategies. The second theory also comes from Sweden, from the field of innovation sciences. The grounded theory of collective inclusioning by Michal Lysek offers a bottom-up approach to innovation and leadership. Lysek has studied how leaders make entrepreneurs and managers engage in undertakings that require full commitment from all people involved. The resolution is what Lysek has conceptualized as collective inclusioning, which can be applied  by afinitizing, convincing, engaging, goal congruencing, and innovation. Lysek emphasizes that collective inclusioning is a complementary theory to other strategic and management theories. Even the third theory this time was generated in Sweden. Gustaf Waxegard and Hans Thulesius provide new insights into a very complex part of health services. The...

The Grounded Theory Perspective: Its Origins and Growth...

By Barney G. Glaser PhD, Hon PhD The book is about the origins and growth of grounded theory (GT) as developed and written by Barney G. Glaser.  It is not written to compete or compare with other QDA methods.  The competition with other perspectives is up to the reader to write up, if he so desires.  My goal in this paper is to write up the GT perspective clearly and historically to date so it can be used by others in research and the rhetorical wrestle between different perspectives.  As GT spreads throughout the world a clear view of the GT perspective is constantly needed and requested from me by researchers for doing GT and for trying to explain the method to others, particularly supervisors and peer reviewers. There is an immense amount of writings on aspects of the GT perspective, often mixed with other perspectives, thus confusing its use.  I trust this paper will help clarify GT’s perspective with no remodeling. I am not saying that GT is better than other methodologies.  I am just saying the GT method stands on its own and produces excellent conceptual theory.  Let other QDA methodologies stand on their own as they wish.  This paper will just show the difference in methodologies, as the reader may see. It is not written to correct other methodologies.  I have written many books on the GT perspective.  I trust this paper will bring most of the GT perspectives under one cover. GT emerged as a fledgling methodology when analyzing the data on dying in hospitals, (Awareness of Dying, 1965).   Awareness Context theory took the world of research by storm.  We were constantly asked how we did it.  In 1967 we published our beginning formulations of GT in The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research by Glaser and Strauss. It was our first attempt to write a method that closed the gap between theory and method.  We focused on procedures for grounding theory not on verification of theory.  We called the methodology Grounded Theory. We put to rest the 100% focus on the verifying of grand theory which was all conjectured.   We discovered that GT provided us with relevant predictions, explanations, interpretations and applications that fit. It was our explanations that were the beginning of codifying GT as a methodology.  The key elements of the theory were that the concepts in the theory should have fit and relevance. So many concepts in the world of social research were conjectural, that is reified and not relevant to the area or the participants.  To gain fit and relevance the concepts had to be based on data in the field and be relevant to the participants.  In short, they had to be grounded.  They also had to be conceptual so that they could be integrated by a theoretical code into a conceptual theory.  The theoretical code that seemed to fit the dying study was context theory.  The total product was an emergent grounded theory of Awareness Contexts. How to generate grounded concepts for a grounded theory needed to be articulated.  So, I wrote a paper explaining how to generate grounded patterns to be named as concepts. It was the “The Constant Comparative Method of Qualitative Analysis” published in 1965 in Social Problems.  It dealt with the comparing of data from different respondents to find interchangeable indicators which showed a grounded pattern.  This became a GT procedure to generate enough concepts for a theory.  In generating the concepts,...

Mastering Everyday Life in Ordinary Housing for People with Psychiatric Disabilities...

Rosita Brolin, David Brunt, Mikael Rask, Susanne Syrén, Anna Sandgren Linnaeus University, Sweden Abstract The aim of this study was to develop a classic grounded theory about people who have psychiatric disabilities and live in ordinary housing with housing support. Interviews and observations during the interviews were analyzed, and secondary analyses of data from previous studies were performed. The impossible mission in everyday life emerged as the main concern and mastering everyday life as the pattern of behavior through which they deal with this concern. Mastering everyday life can be seen as a process, which involves identifying, organizing, tackling, challenging and boosting. Before the process is started, avoiding is used to deal with the main concern.  The community support worker, providing housing support, constitutes an important facilitator during the process, and the continuity of housing support is a prerequisite for the process to succeed. If the process mastering everyday life is interrupted by, for example, changes in housing support, the strategy of avoiding is used. Keywords: grounded theory, housing support, impossible mission, mastering, psychiatric disabilities Introduction The focus of this study is on people who have psychiatric disabilities and live in ordinary housing with housing support. Internationally, the provision of housing and housing support, which has replaced inpatient care for people with psychiatric disabilities, varies greatly (Fakhoury, Murray, A., Shepherd, G., & Priebe, 2002). In Sweden, the mental health reform in 1995, led to the development of two community-based housing support models for people with psychiatric disabilities: supported housing facilities, and housing support in the individual’s own apartment or house, in this paper termed “ordinary housing” (Brunt, 2002). A psychiatric disability is defined by the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (2006) as a lasting psychiatric condition (> 2 years) that involves not being able to manage everyday life on one’s own. The most common diagnoses among people with psychiatric disabilities in Sweden are psychosis, affective disorders, and neuropsychiatric disabilities (Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, 2012). The needs for care and support that have been identified among people with psychiatric disabilities are related to universal human needs as, for example, activities of daily living, social relationships, physical health, information, household chores, food and personal finances (Kulhara et al., 2010; Ochoa et al., 2003; Zahid & Ohaeri, 2013). People with psychiatric disabilities have expressed a desire to have a housing situation that satisfies their desire to live similar to what other people do (Warren & Bell, 2000), and ordinary housing is preferred to supported housing (Forchuk, Nelson, & Hall, 2006; Harvey, Killackey, Groves, & Herrman, 2012; Tsai, Bond, Salyers, Godfrey, & Davis, 2010). Approximately 17 000 people with psychiatric disabilities receive housing support in ordinary housing in Sweden (Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, 2011). Housing support consists of practical and social support with the aim of facilitating for the individual to manage his/her daily life (Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, 2010). It is a scheduled multi-faceted support, which is based on mutual interaction between the resident and the community support worker providing housing support, termed hereafter the “supporter”, and includes activities in and outside the home (Andersson, 2009). International research into residents’ satisfaction with their housing situation has revealed that important factors for satisfaction with housing situation are security and privacy, choice and proximity (Tsemberis, Rogers, Rodis, Dushuttle, & Skryha, 2003), and the ability to have control (Nelson, Sylvestre, Aubry, George, & Trainor, 2007). The importance of security and privacy was confirmed in...

Collective Inclusioning: A Grounded Theory of a Bottom-Up Approach to Innovation and Leading...

Michal Lysek, Halmstad University, Sweden Abstract This paper is a grounded theory study of how leaders (e.g., entrepreneurs, managers, etc.) engage people in challenging undertakings (e.g., innovation) that require everyone’s commitment to such a degree that they would have to go beyond what could be reasonably expected in order to succeed. Company leaders sometimes wonder why their employees no longer show the same responsibility towards their work, and why they are more concerned with internal politics than solving customer problems. It is because company leaders no longer apply collective inclusioning to the same extent as they did in the past. Collective inclusioning can be applied in four ways by convincing, afinitizing, goal congruencing, and engaging. It can lead to fostering strong units of people for taking on challenging undertakings. Collective inclusioning is a complementing theory to other strategic management and leading theories. It offers a new perspective on how to implement a bottom-up approach to innovation. Keywords: afinitizing, convincing, engaging, goal congruencing, innovating. Introduction HMS Industrial Networks AB is a Swedish company providing product solutions to connect different devices, such as robots, control systems, motors, and sensors, to different industrial networks. HMS was founded in 1988. In 1994/1995 their Anybus product was invented. In the following years, the Anybus became an innovation, and HMS became a market leader in the industrial communication industry (Lysek, Danilovic, & Liu, 2016). Despite HMS’ success within the industrial communication industry (“Frost & Sullivan,” 2013), I was more curious about the first decade of the company’s history. I began to wonder what could have been the main concern of the people who had been working for HMS between 1988 and 1999/2000 and helped the company overcome all of its challenges. By the time the core variable emerged, I had discovered what had been of most importance to both managers and employees at HMS during these years. I also discovered that a good salary was not the main reason for people staying with HMS during all these years. Money was not everything. One employee, employed by HMS before 1999/2000 told me that, “We all wanted to finish our projects on time and we all wanted our company to succeed. I do not have any specific benefits from it today, but I have a job that I like a lot”. By the time the core variable emerged, I realized that HMS’ employees could not explain exactly why they had struggled so hard in the past to make HMS succeed, despite not having a good salary, or owning any company shares. People may wonder why someone would invest so much time and work into a company that, in fact, was not theirs. I argue that the answer lies within this core variable, which explains the behavior of HMS’ managers and how they were able to increase their employee’s level of commit­ment to fulfilling the company’s goals and their own entrepreneurial dreams. Methodology This study was perormed at HMS Industrial Networks AB, where I have been employed since June 2012. I began my Ph.D. studies within innovation sciences in January 2014. My employment has allowed me to engage more closely with HMS’ employees. Discovering the main concern of people in a social environment is the main reason for using classic grounded theory (Holton & Walsh, 2017; Hartman, 2001; Glaser, 1978, 1998; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). I used classic grounded theory for this study to discover the main concern of the people employed by HMS between 1988 and 1999/2000....