Methods for Policy Research

This book about responsible and evidence-based decision making is written for those interested in improving the decisions that affect people’s lives. It describes how to define policy research questions so that evidence can be applied to them, how to find and synthesize existing evidence, how to generate new evidence if needed, how to make acceptable recommendations that can solve policy problems without negative side effects, and how to describe evidence and recommendations in a manner that changes minds.

Policies are not just the decisions made by a country’s rulers or elected officials; policies are also set by corporate executives, managers of department stores, and project leaders in non-profit organizations pursuing environmental protection. The authors’ suggestion are based on the fundamental belief that evidence-based decision making is superior to decisions based purely on opinion, intuition, and emotion. Because much has happened since 1984 when the first edition was published, this is a substantially different book with a new co-author, new and updated examples, new chapters, and new frameworks for understanding.

Ann Majchrzak (PhD, Social Psychology, UCLA, 1980) is a Professor of Information and Operations Management at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. She has been doing policy research since 1980 for U.S. government agencies, large and small non-profits, and corporations. She also does research in her specific discipline of organizational and technological innovation, including studies on knowledge sharing, innovation, distributed cognition, emergent groups, virtual collaboration, collaboration in high-secure volatile environments, emergency response, and innovation challenges. Her publications include such books as The Human Side of Factory Automation (Sage), articles in such journals as Organization Science, Information Systems Research, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, and Sloan Management Review and numerous book chapters and presentations to industry, government, and academics She has served on 3 National Academy of Sciences Committees and is a senior editor for Organization Science and MIS Quarterly. For more information: http://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/directory/majchrza M. Lynne Markus (PhD, Organizational Behavior, Case Western Reserve University, 1979) is The John W. Poduska, Sr. Professor of Information and Process Management at Bentley University and a Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research. She does practice-oriented research for businesses, associations and non-profits, and governments. Her specific areas of academic and practice-oriented research include: the effective design, implementation and use of information systems within and across organizations; the risks and unintended consequences of information technology use; and innovations in the governance and management of information technology. She has received several research grants from the US National Science Foundation and recently summarized her research on the role of IT in the mortgage crisis at a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable. Her publications include several books and over 100 articles in journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Organization Science. She served as a senior editor for MIS Quarterly. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2004. In 2008, she won the AIS Leo Award for Exceptional Lifetime Achievement in Information Systems. For more information: https://faculty.bentley.edu/details.asp?uname=mlmarkus