Q Bibliography: Pfeiffer, Held, and Lee on industrial implementation

Pfeiffer, Sabine, Maximilian Held, & Horan Lee (2018, May). Digitalisierung „machen“ – Ansichten im Engineering zur partizipativen Gestaltung von Industrie 4.0 [“Doing” digitalisation – Views of industrial engineers on participation in “Industry 4.0”]. In Josephine Hofmann (Ed.), Arbeit 4.0 – Digitalisierung, IT und Arbeit: IT als Treiber der digitalen Transformation [Work 4.0 – Digitization, IT and labor: IT as a driver of digital transformation] (pp. 113-129). Wiesbaden: Springer Professional. [German] ISBN 978-3-658-21359-6. $59.99 cloth and ebook.

DOI & Full Text (German)

Chapter Summary

The German buzzword “Industry 4.0” comprises a host of diverse technologies, each requiring manifold implementation decisions as they are deployed in companies. Current forms of participatory design (including agile methods, design thinking, open innovation) often involve customers early on, but hardly the workers operating the new technologies on the shop floor. We investigate whether, and how the industrial engineers driving this change want to involve their blue-collar colleagues from the shop floor. This chapter reports unpublished results from a survey, qualitative interviews and a Q-sort at the industrial engineering department of a German automaker. Results indicate that engineers are ready to involve workers, and have made positive experiences with participation in the design process. However, such participation is often hampered by a lack of time and opportunity, as well as ideas and initiative to break with existing processes, often focused on ex-post optimisation.

Sabine Pfeiffer holds the chair for sociology for labor, technology and society at Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Nürnberg-Erlangen (FAU), Germany. Horan Lee  is a research associate at FAU. Maximilian Held is a research associate and Q data scientist at FAU, as well as the webmaster of the Q methodology website.

Qmethod(.org) Should Be a Big Tent – Our Editorial Policy

Qmethod(.org), as any platform for an academic association has a fine line to walk: on the one hand, it must be open and inclusive, but on the other hand, especially new users may expect high quality, uncontroversial resources from I4S as a sort of canonical source for things Q.

Qmethod.org is designed to fulfil both these goals.

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Migration From Legacy Qmethod.org

For future reference, here are some notes on what I migrated from the old qmethod.org.

  • All content that was still hyperlinked from the websites of qmethod.org was migrated, including all (available) old conference programs, news items and resources.
  • The Qrefs is currently being transferred to a new, permanent home and will in the meantime be archived.
  • I also added relevant material from Peter Schmolck’s Q website  and some other Q websites.
  • The old message board will not be migrated or set up again; it was hardly used, and duplicates the Q mailing list in some ways.

I’ve also migrated old content in such a way as to prevent new link rot: whenever possible (static), old URLs should still work as expected.

The progress of migration was tracked in this (public) Google Docs.

Unfortunately, a lot of the old stuff was already gone and/or had succumbed to link-rot (pointing to websites that no longer exist), especially the entire Q archive at http://facstaff.uww.edu/cottlec/QArchive/ – it’s gone. We’re setting up this page in a way to prevent future losses like this.

Why We Built This Website (the Way we Did)

When we set out to rebuild qmethod.org from scratch, we knew it had to be more than just a website:

  • qmethod.org should serve as a repository of resources on all things Q (now all migrated from the old website).
  • qmethod.org should serve as a social network for the Q community, offering facilities for debate and interaction.
  • qmethod.org should serve as an I4S membership site, distributing information about society events and making its members contributions visible.

Obviously, we also wanted a public-facing website that looks professional (because it is, and stays technically up to date).

As a small, academic society, we knew whatever software we chose had to meet some additional criteria:

  •  The software had to be cheap, both in terms of start-up costs and long-term maintenance.
  • The software had to be future-proof, so that whatever information was entered could be easily ported to the next, better platform in the future (and there always is). We learned to hard way from some link rot in the old platform how crucial it is for science to maintain a robust record.
  • The software had to be easy to use for all users and administrators, because people want to get on with their lives.

There are many all-purpose hosting products out there that offer the specs listed above, and some specialised offerings that excel at some of the features. Only a few these offerings meet our needs as a small, academic society.

wordpress.com is the strictly pragmatic choice among those products. It is a general content-management system (CMS) that is good enough for most of what we need. Because it is a) very widely used, b) based on the open-source, self-hosted wordpress.org but c) offered as a hosted, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) service, it is cheap, future-proof and convenient for users. Crucially, once all content is on wordpress.com, I4S might then migrate to a different service quite easily, something that isn’t often possible with custom-build and/or proprietary software.

To be sure, there will be edge-cases that we can’t implement elegantly within the confines of wordpress.com (automatic membership management) and some things that can’t be done at all (any number of plugins). Some of you will have come across products that can do this or that thing (much) better.

It is important to recognise that for a small organisation as ours, these limitations may be regarded not just as bugs, but as features. The greatest platform isn’t much use if it is too expensive to maintain, too hard for administrators to manage and too cumbersome for users to engage. We chose wordpress.com (for now), because it could easily be edited by any member, and even if we (Stephen and I) get hit by a bus, anyone with some lay technical interest could take over management. With this setup, there’s no one you need to go through.

While this simplicity comes at the cost of some features, we have been able to get an astonishing breadth of functionality out of the CMS wordpress.com.

For now, let’s get the tech out of the way, and focus on what matters much more, for any community: content and engagement.

Hack away. This qmethod.org is yours. (Or read the manual first, if you must).

 

Loadings-based Factor-Retention Criteria and Some (New) Alternatives

TL;DR

It seems to me that while q-specific, Humphrey’s rule and the >2 sig. factor rule are problematic to decide on the number of retained factors, because they depend on loadings, which are available only later in the procedure and dependent on the rotation method.
Instead, I suggest an additional q-specific approach, based on changes in communalities and residual correlation matrices between factor models in question.

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