What actually counts as a driver of transformation
Thesis Series #11
What actually counts as a driver of transformation:
Yesterday, I shared the approach I used to narrow my research on the drivers of transformation down to 88 academic articles.
I was left with a serious body of work on drivers of transformation spanning more than 40 years.
The articles came from journals in economics, sociology, medicine, technology, sustainability, and public policy. The forces reshaping firms do not belong to one discipline. Understanding them requires a multidisciplinary view.
At this point, I needed two inputs.
1) A definition of a ‘driver of transformation’.
I needed to decide what actually qualifies as a driver of transformation.
After extensive discussion with my PhD supervisor, Prof. Florian Lüdeke-Freund, I settled on this:
A driver of transformation affects humans and their environment and can be concrete (i. e. can be seen, touched, heard, smelled, or tasted, such as electric cars, extreme weather events, pollutants, or medicines) or abstract (i. e. an idea, quality, state, or concept, such as a pandemic, political ideology, the internet, or war).
2) A disciplined way to extract signal from noise.
I used descriptive coding techniques (Saldaña, 2021).
This requires the researcher to read every sentence carefully, and if relevant to the research question, capture a word or short phrase that assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing attribute to it.
The result of the process is 1,000s of captured ‘codes’ from the research, from which I distilled them into 292 drivers of transformation.
Interestingly, after about 60 articles, I had exhausted the findings (meaning I was not finding any new signals). The remaining papers reinforced and refined what was already present.
At this point, I had answered the first research question: what drivers of transformation are discussed in the academic literature?
The harder question remained: how should these drivers be organised into a framework that leaders, researchers, and policymakers can actually use?
That is what I will cover next, starting tomorrow.
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This post is part of a series of notes I am writing on my PhD thesis, sharing how I approached it and what I learned. You can see the entire series on my website.