The Use of Conceptual Framework to Increase Organizational Profitability

Conceptualization is mistakenly believed to be a tiresome intellectual exercise that brings people and organizations into analytical thinking.  Conceptualization simply means looking beyond the unkown.  “ The act of conceptualization is the act of thinking through and seeing beyond existing ideas to discover higher order ideas from within one’s own mind.” (Sedgeman p. 1).  How does an academic researcher look beyond existing ideas?

First, the academic researcher after brainstorming and deciding the direction of his research, he determines the title of the research, the nature of his references, the nature of his arguments and how to direct further research into the chosen subject area.  Mind mapping and conceptualization is used to guide and direct the academic researcher into making arguments and drawing conclusions.

Second, the academic researcher will use conceptualization to guide him make consistent and logical arguments throughout the research writing.  The significant part of conceptualization is that, it guides people to move from the known to the unkown and most importantly helps clarify things that are unclear.

Furthermore, organizations may use conceptualization to understand the needs of customers and also how communication can be designed and disseminated to research the target customer. Conceptualization can also be used to send consistent message and image about an organization and its offerings to the public. (Lee & Park 2007, p. 224).  Academic researchers use categorization as a common conceptual framework to group research data.  In categorizing data, researchers subtract the lowest number in the data set from the highest number in the data and than divide a range by the number of categories.  For instance, if data values range from 20 – 220, the researcher may want to have 10 categories grouped from 20 – 40, 41 – 60 and so on.  This helps the researcher to group certain number intervals for analysis.  A conceptual framework has also been developed by organizations to replace employees with customers in order to cut costs and increase revenues.  How do organizations use customers to replace employees in a conceptual framework? 

First, organizations use conceptualization to replace employees with customers.  With this concept, customers are used as quasi employees and this is predominant in technology based self service options such as pumping gas, self service check out counters at grocery stores and many others (Anitsal & Schumann, 2007 p. 349). 

Second an organization uses a customer as a partial employee to increase the bottom line and provide quality customer service at no cost to the organization. Conceptualization is used in everyday life to determine cost reduction measures in order to increase profit margins as seen in grocery stores, gas stations, and at the automated teller machines in various locations.

Third, organizations use conceptual framework as a competitive advantage.  For instance, Wal Mart has used the framework to determine that profits can be made by lowering prices and providing quality customer service; this is exemplified in Wal Mart’s dominance and profit margins worldwide.  The unknown is part and parcel of today’s business environment. (Rajeev & Bhattacharyya  2007 p. 78).  How does the unknown impact today’s business environment?  Organizational management has to develop conceptual framework to determine the unknown consequences of unethical behavior. Management has to make business decisions all the time on certain issues that impact the welfare of employee, the organization as well as the society.  What will be the impact of the management decision on individual employee and the organization; this may be unknown.  In this perspective, management has to carefully use conceptualization to look beyond the unknown and predict what may happen if the society views management decision as unethical.