Abstract for: Structuring of stakeholders’ knowledge using causal loop diagrams: A case study of management strategy for rural post offices

This study is a case study on the situation in which the number of rural post offices and the size of the workforce are decreasing in South Korea. Unlike general qualitative case studies, this study has adopted systems thinking and system dynamics approach to understand the case studied. The staff and managers are under-represented stakeholders who have useful field knowledge but have been marginalized in the process of developing the management strategies for the post offices. Thus, by structuring their knowledge in the form of causal loop diagrams (CLDs), this study seeks to understand the case studied and develop policies, leverages, and management strategies for governing the Korean public postal services. Documents including literature, governmental reports, and newspapers were collected and reviewed and semi-structured interviews with the staff and managers of post offices were conducted for data collection. By coding the concepts and their relations from the collected data, we developed the variables and causal relationship structures. Currently, we are developing individual CLDs of each interviewee and we are going to aggregate the individual CLDs to present the comprehensive knowledge of the group of staff and managers.