BRMM575

Business Research Methods

Chapter 3
Critically reviewing the literature
Introduction:
• Critical Literature Review
– Provides the context and theoretical framework for your research
• Ensure understanding:
– Your field and its key theories
– Concepts and ideas
– Major issues and debates about your topic
The critical review:
• Critical Literature Review
– Should be constructively critical analysis
– Indicating what is known and unknown about your research question
• Not a series of book and journal article reviews describing and summarizing what each is about
Rather
• Assess what is significant to your research
Then
• Decide whether or not to include it

A critical review provides you with:

• Insight about relevant previous research
• The trends that have emerged.

Figure 3.1 The literature review process:

The purpose and types of critical review:

• Integrative review
– Critiques and synthesizes representative literature on a topic
– To generate new frameworks and perspectives on a topic.
– Serving or intending to unify separate things
• Historical review
– examines the evolution of research on a particular topic over a period of time to place it in an historical context.
• Theoretical review
– examines the body of theory that has accumulated in regard to an issue, concept, theory or phenomenon.
• Methodological review
– focuses on research approaches, strategies, data collection techniques or analysis procedures, rather than the
research findings.
• Methodological reviews are often used to provide a framework for understanding a method or methodology
• To enable researchers to draw on a wide body of methodological knowledge.
 • Systematic Review
– uses a comprehensive pre-planned strategy for locating, critically appraising, analyzing and synthesizing existing
research that is pertinent to a clearly formulated research question to allow conclusions to be reached about what is
known
• Deductive approach
– you develop a theoretical or conceptual framework which you subsequently test using data.
– developing a hypothesis (or hypotheses) based on existing theory, and then designing a research strategy to test the
hypothesis
• Inductive approach
– Planning to explore your data and to develop theories
– starts with the observations and theories are proposed towards the end of the research process as a result of
observations.

Adopting a critical perspective in your reading:

• Previewing
– Considering the precise purpose of the text before you start reading
• Annotating
– Conducting a dialogue with yourself, the author and the issues and ideas at stake
• Summarizing
– The best way to determine that you’ve really got the point is to be able to state it in your own words.
– Outlining the argument of a text is a version of annotating,
• Comparing and contrasting
– Ask yourself how your thinking has been altered by this reading or how it has affected your response to the issues
and themes in your research.

Five critical questions to employ in critical reading:

1. Why am I reading this?
2. What is the author trying to do in writing this?
3. What is the writer saying that is relevant to what I want to find out?
4. How convincing is what the author is saying?
5. What use can I make of the reading?

The content of the critical review:

• In considering the content of your critical review, you will therefore need:
– to include the key academic theories within your chosen area of research
– to demonstrate that your knowledge of your chosen area is up to date
– to enable those reading your project report to find the original publications which you cite through clear complete
referencing.

What is meant by being ‘critical’ about the content:

There are 4 approaches to critiquing the content:
• Critique of rhetoric
• Critique of tradition
• Critique of authority
• Critique of objectivity

The content of the critical review:

• The content of your critical review can be evaluated using the checklist in Box 3.2.
Structuring and drafting the critical review:
• The literature review that you write for your project report should be a description and critical analysis of what other
authors have written.
• When drafting your review you therefore need to focus on your research question(s) and objectives.

Think of the review as a funnel in which you: (Diagram next slide)

1. start at a more general level before narrowing down to your specific research question(s) and objectives;
2. provide a brief overview of key ideas and themes;
3. summarize, compare and contrast the research of the key authors;
4. narrow down to highlight previous research work most relevant to your own research;
5. provide a detailed account of the findings of this research and show how they are related;
6. highlight those aspects where your own research will provide fresh insights;
7. lead the reader into subsequent sections of your project report, which explore these issues.

Figure 3.2 Literature review structure:

Structuring and drafting the critical review:

Literature sources:
• Secondary literature sources, these being formally published items such as journals and books;
• Grey (or primary) literature sources, these being items produced by all levels of government, academics, business and
industry in print and electronic formats, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers; including materials such as
reports and conference proceedings.
Main literature sources:

Assessing relevance:
• Assessing value
• Assessing sufficiency
• Evaluating the Literature

What is plagiarism?
– presenting work or ideas as if they are your own when in reality they are the work or ideas of someone else, and
failing to acknowledge the original source.

Four common forms of plagiarism which are commonly found in universities:

1. Stealing material from another source and passing it off as your own, for example:
– buying a paper from a research service, essay bank or term-paper mill (either specially written for the individual or
pre-written);
– copying a whole paper from a source text without proper acknowledgement;
– submitting another student’s work with or without that student’s knowledge
2. submitting a paper written by someone else (e.g. a peer or relative) and passing it off as your own;
3. copying sections of material from one or more source texts, supplying proper documentation (including the full reference)
but leaving out quotation marks, thus giving the impression that the material has been paraphrased rather than directly
quoted;
4. paraphrasing material from one or more source texts without supplying appropriate documentation.