Management of Art Galleries – Business Models - Universität St.Gallen

Introduction11 / 225The mode, again, can vary between actually solving the existing problem or developing rules andrecommendations on how to draft a new model. The four levels of applied research allow us toposition this dissertation accordingly. The focus of our research is on a complex, diversifiedproblem, i.e. a model (the business model). The mode of our research is to actually solve the tproblem by the real-life life application of solutions and recommendations. Hence, we position ourdissertation as type 3.The following graphic shows the four types of applied research and our positioning.Table 4: Ulrich's Four Types of Management RecommendationSource: Adapted from Ulrich (1981, p. 30 – 31).When we state that we apply a practical research approach, we can validate the genuineusefulness of our results against several criteria that Thomas and Tymon (1982) have identified:descriptive relevance, goal relevance, operational validity and non-obviousness (Thomas &Tymon, 1982). . They claim: “These needs appear to be necessary conditions for theories orfindings to be directly useful to any practitioner” (p. 346). Descriptive relevance describes theextent to which studies portray organisational reality. A study is goal-relevant if the aim of thestudy corresponds with the goals of practitioners. And operational validity can be guaranteedonly if the independent variables can be manipulated/changed directly by the players involved.Finally, non-obviousness obviousness or innovativeness describes the criterion that results must be relevantand not obvious to practitioners.We believe that our research questions and approach at hand fulfil these criteria: our resultsdescribe real art galleries with actual organisational features. Our research question is highlygoal-relevant because the study uses profit as a dependant variable, which is relevant topractitioners. Moreover, our variables can be directly influenced by practitioners. Finally, sincethis dissertation is the first to analyse management in art galleries, we provide practitioners withinnovative results.