To allow comparisons to be made on dimensions of theoretical interest, Menai Insight has developed representations that capturing the meaning of essentially every sentence in our focus areas.
Nature of the Textual Structures
Through substantial qualitative consideration of the text, identifying themes and similarities between the sentences (e.g., Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Ryan and Bernard, 2003), we developed textual structures that represent essentially everything that is discussed within a particular communication medium.
These textual structures provide the basis for us to represent every sentence in our focus areas into dedicated textual structures that capture substantively all of the information in the text.
Managerial Backgrounds
Overview: The Managerial Background analysis tool enables researchers to examine how top managers and directors present their backgrounds to organizational stakeholders. By capturing a rich representation of the specific information in each sentence of a manager's background, the textual structures allow researchers to examine how managers present their background and experiences. The components of this analysis include:
- Positions: Positions that a manager has had
- Qualifications: Educational achievements
- Professional Licenses: Professional or legal licenses, such as the CPA designations
- Experiences: Qualitative description of experiences
- Background Information: Such as a manager's name/salutation
Committee Oversight
Note: Our Committee Oversight Textual Structures are in beta testing - for early access, please contact support.
Overview: Our Committee Activities tool captures a detailed representation of sentences describing the activities that the committees engage in. These textual structures are intended to facilitate analysis of how corporate oversight has evolved and to capture the justification used during decisionmaking. The components of this platform include:
- Activities: Descriptions of activities engaged in by the committee, including justification of why decisions were made.
- Compensation: How committees determine and adjust the components of executive compensation.
- Objectives and targets: The targets that are established by the committees to evaluate firm and manager performance.
- Engagement of external firms: Selection of external firms, such as consultants and auditors, and the activities that those firms are selected to perform.
- Nomination and selection of director and executives: The criteria and process by which directors are selected.
- Evaluation of management: The criteria and nature of committee evaluations of management.
- Membership Status Determination: Determinations of independence and financial literacy.
- Meetings Held: How many meetings a committee held.
- Meeting Attendance: Proportion of meetings that a manager attended.
- Committee Composition: The managers who are members of a committee.
- Committees of the Board: Details of the number and names of the committees and subcommittees that the board has.
Performance Evaluations (under development)
The performance evaluation tool captures a representation of managerial performance evaluations, including descriptions of the considerations impacting compensation.
References
Glaser, B., and A. Strauss
1967 The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. New Brunswick: Aldine Transaction. (see on Amazon)
Ryan, G. W., and H. R. Bernard
2003 “Techniques to identify themes.” Field Methods, 15: 85–109.