Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to offer a reconceptualization of the critical incident technique (CIT) and affirm its utility in management and organization studies.
Design/methodology/approach
Utilizing a case study from a leadership context, the paper applies the CIT to explore various leadership behaviours in the context of nonprofit boards in Canada. Semi-structured critical incident interviews were used to collect behavioural data from 53 participants – board chairs, board directors, and executive directors – from 18 diverse nonprofit organizations in Alberta, Canada.
Findings
While exploiting the benefits of a typicality of events, in some instances the authors were able to validate aspects of transformational leadership theory, in other instances the authors found that theory falls short in explaining the relationships between organizational actors. The authors argue that the CIT potentially offers the kind of “thick description” that is particularly useful in theory building in the field.
Research limitations/implications
Drawing on interview material, the authors suggest that incidents can be classified based on frequency of occurrence and their salience to organizational actors, and explore the utility of this distinction for broader theory building purposes.
Practical implications
Principally, the paper proposes that this method of investigation is under-utilized by organization and management researchers. Given the need for thick description in the field, the authors suggest that the approach outlined generates exceptionally rich data that can illuminate multiple organizational phenomena.
Social implications
The role of nonprofit boards is of major importance for those organizations and the clients that they serve. This paper shed new light on the leadership dynamics at the top of these organizations and therefore can help to guide improved practice by those in board and senior management positions.
Originality/value
The CIT is a well-established technique. However, it is timely to revisit it as a core technique in qualitative research and promote its greater use by researchers. In addition, the authors offer a novel view of incidents as typical, atypical, prototypical or archetypal of organizational phenomena that extends the analytical value of the approach in new directions.
Human trafficking, the exploitation of humans for monetary gain or benefit, is a widespread humanitarian issue that is typically sub‐classified into labor and sex trafficking. In the last decade, sex traffickers have used online classified advertisements to advertise sexual services. Although these advertisements are visible to the general public and law enforcement, the volume of ads, the frequency with which their posting locale changes, and the use of obfuscation tactics make it difficult for law enforcement agencies to react. Existing products for law enforcement focus on identifying, tracking, and correlating individual activity by performing deep searches for specific information against a database of historical posts. While this deep search capability is useful for investigating specific cases, it overlooks higher‐level patterns that exist in ads. Using a website that has been linked to several sex trafficking‐related arrests, we demonstrate a framework for harvesting, linking, and detecting these patterns in a dataset comprised of more than 10 million advertisements targeting US cities. Our framework combines information systems and operations research concepts to identify groups of posts based on text, phone numbers, and pictures; determine circuits associated with post groups, and predict future movements using four different methods. Our description of the framework and comparison of the grouping and prediction methods provide insights that can assist law enforcement agencies to combat individuals/organizations involved in illicit sexual activities, including sex trafficking, proactively. Also, this demonstration provides researchers interested in developing advanced interdiction models targeting illicit sexual activities with a clear picture regarding available data formats.
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