On 19 November 2015, WIPCAD guest researcher Professor Renate Meyer (Vienna University of Economics and Business) invited the WIPCAD doctoral fellows to a workshop on “Challenges for Urban Management and Governance: Open, sustainable, transparent and/or bureaucratic?”. Seven doctoral fellows followed her invitation, out of interest for either urban management or applied institutional theory.
In the workshop, Renate Meyer presented some of her ongoing research projects from the field of urban management: A mixed-methods examination of ‘idea bundles’ which explores how management reforms are less about the spread of single concepts but the diffusion of interconnected and embedded bundles of concepts. Other ongoing projects deconstruct city strategies and admininstrators’ understandings of Open Government with a critical theory approach.
Shifting to the participants’ projects, Renate Meyer asked the attending fellows to locate their dissertations in terms of empirical phenomenon, methodology, theory, and targeted audience. Based on these reflections, Renate Meyer and the fellows tried to assess each projects’ academic contribution and internal fit with regard to phenomenon, method and theory, the project’s fit with the favored publication strategy as well as the fellows’ career ambitions.
In reaction to the participants’ needs, Renate Meyer spent the remainder of the workshop presenting and sharing her experiences with different methods she has successfully used in neo-institutionalist research. The outlined methods included frame analysis from social movement research, correspondence analysis as a structure-reconstructing quantitative method applied to qualitative data, and different forms of semantic network analysis such as co-occurrence and vocabulary analysis.
Concluding the workshop, Renate Meyer offered her assistance in case of practical questions and the WIPCAD doctoral fellows left the workshop brimming with new ideas.
Report by Basanta Thapa