Recognizing the pervasive influence of modern digital technologies, this chapter argues for the supremacy of strategy work in terms of giving shape and effect to the associated agenda for strategic, organizational and technological change. The chapter focuses on the theory and practice of action research as a Mode 2 approach to knowledge production as managers co-inquire into the practice of strategizing. The discussion speaks directly to the practice of action research in government organizations, of enhancing strategy work and its related outcomes, and the broader outcomes of co-inquiry. The chapter affirms the central role of action research in knowledge production and emphasizes how the practice of action research is itself being transformed by enabling digital technologies during the current COVID-19 pandemic. The contention throughout is that good practice informs research and good research informs practice.

This chapter advocates further advancing qualitative research methods by creating tools to investigate digital traces of digital phenomena. It specifically focuses on large-scale textual datasets and shows how interactive visualization can be used to augment qualitative researchers’ capabilities to theorize from trace data. The approach is grounded on prior work in sense-making, visual analytics and interactive visualization, and shows how tasks enabled by visualization systems can be synergistically integrated with the qualitative research process. Finally, these principles are applied with several open-source text mining and interactive visualization systems. The chapter aims to stimulate further interest and provide specific guidelines for developing and expanding the repertoire of open-source systems for qualitative research.

This chapter introduces to the concepts of algorithm, model of computation, and computational resources, starting from the classic ones (time and space) and then moving to I/O complexity by introducing the two-level memory model, which constitutes a simple, yet very effective, approximation of modern hierarchical memories. Examples are given in order to motivate the importance of counting I/Os for estimating the real performance of algorithms in modern computers.

This chapter describes another family of compressors that do not derive statistics about the text to be compressed; rather, they derive a dictionary of strings and substitute their occurrences in the input text via proper references to that dictionary. The choice of the dictionary is of course crucial in determining how well the file is compressed, and it is sometimes ineffective to transmit the full dictionary along with each compressed file. Starting in 1977, Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv introduced a family of compressors that successfully addressed these problems by designing two algorithms, named LZ77 and LZ78, that process the input text to incrementally construct a proper dictionary that is, thus, not transmitted. The Lempel–Ziv compressors are very popular because of their gzip instantiation, and constitute the base of more sophisticated compressors in use today, such as 7zip, LZMA, Brotli, and LZ4. The chapter discusses LZ77, LZ78, and an interesting variant, known as LZW, and at the end presents some theoretical considerations about the effectiveness of those compressors in terms of the empirical entropy of the compressed text.

The exponential development of information technologies (IT) which has been described as the digital revolution has led to different IT outcomes at individual, organizational and societal levels. The chapter theorizes these different IT outcomes as digitally led emancipation and digitally led exploitation. The chapter postulates that the attainment of the outcomes depends on different power mechanisms and their associated fault lines. Power mechanisms and IT are theorized to create a framework explicating these dynamics. Power mechanisms are outlined as episodic power and digitally led emancipation (collective action, participation), episodic power and digitally led exploitation (manipulation, information asymmetries), systemic power and digitally led emancipation (empowerment, inclusion) and systemic power and digitally led exploitation (surveillance/monitoring, automation/algorithmification). The chapter concludes with a research agenda to understand these power mechanisms, which may enable digitally led emancipation and digitally led exploitation.

This is one of the most studied problems in computer science, which is just touched in basic algorithm and data structure courses offered at the undergraduate level.This chapter makes a step forward by first introducing universal hashing, which solves some negative issues that basic hash functions experience, and then moves on to describe several advanced approaches to hashing, such as perfect hashing, Cuckoo hashing, minimal ordered perfect hashing, and finally Bloom filters. The theoretical analysis and algorithm description is enriched by figures and pseudocodes, plus several running examples that drive the reader to a better understanding of these important and advanced algorithmic concepts and tools.