A.

INTRODUCTION TO UNIT
This Unit will introduce and define important concepts, such as “research
methodology”, “methods”, and “research”. We will look at the features of good
research, and the way we can assess and evaluate management research.

This Unit will provide sets of criteria to be used to assess the management
research of others including, but not only, academic articles and also, as a set
of principles to design and evaluate your own Dissertation.

Your Objectives

When you have studied this Unit and completed the assignments,

YOU WILL BE ABLE TO:

• Choose a suitable method for a given research question.

• Understand what criteria make good research.

• Understand how the quality of management research can be assessed.

• Outline a typical structure for an MBA Dissertation.

Essential Reading

Saunders M, Lewis P and Thornhill A (2007); Online Course Pack:

Research Methods for Business Students; 4th edition; FT Prentice Hall,
Pearson Education. Chapters 2, 4, 5.4 and 6

Research Method
 B. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The term “research” in everyday life is sometimes used for the collection of
facts and information, reading a few books or articles, or talking to a few
people or asking questions. This is often collected or interpreted in an
unsystematic way, without a clear purpose in mind.

This is not what will be considered as research in this Module. Research is

defined as “something that people undertake in order to find out things in a
systematic way, thereby increasing their knowledge” (Saunders et al. 2007).

Systematic refers to the fact that research should be based on logical

relationships, not just personal beliefs. Other aspects related to the
systematic character of research will be discussed the next section ‘What is
good research?’

Blumberg, Cooper and Schindler (2005) distinguish four types of research,

and describe these types as follows:

1. Reporting

Reporting entails providing an account or summation of some data, which

might be statistics. This could for instance be an industry report that reports
the average profitability in the industry, and gives full account of important
events in the industry over the last year, such as mergers and acquisitions,
recent technological developments, and so on. This sort of research may not
consist of much systematic inference or conclusion drawing.

Some scholars do not consider “reporting” as research, unless it is

“investigative” reporting that refers to accepted standards of qualitative or
quantitative research.

2. Descriptive Research

Descriptive research aims to discover answers to questions who, what, when,

where and, sometimes, how. A descriptive piece of research attempts to
Research Method

describe, or define, a subject, often by creating a profile of a group of

problems, people or events. Early work in the entrepreneurship literature has
tried to describe the “characteristics” of entrepreneurs or small business
owners, or tried to make a profile of the types of entrepreneurial firms in which
venture capitalists or business angels appear to invest.

3. Explanatory Research

Explanatory research goes beyond description and attempts to explain the

reasons for the phenomenon that the descriptive study has only observed.
Explanatory research tries to answer “how” and “why” questions. In this line of
research, researchers use theories and hypotheses to account for the forces
which caused a certain phenomenon to occur.
For instance, research that seeks to explain why some entrepreneurial firms
are more successful than other entrepreneurial firms, may draw from
resource-based theory, positioning theory or population ecology to uncover
the antecedents of business success.

4. Predictive Research

As the name suggests, predictive studies seek to predict when and in what
situations an event might re-occur. For instance, marketing researchers may
have a huge dataset from a retail store at their disposal. They can use this
data to develop sales forecast models of particular types of products. These
forecast models may consist of predictive elements, such as price and the
timing of when a product is on display or advertised.

A research philosophy, such as positivism or interpretivism, refers to important

assumptions about the world. These assumptions do not necessarily equate
with the assumptions of the researcher as a person, but relate to the work
produced by a researcher.

Different methods generally relate to different “views of the world”. Before we

discuss those views shortly, we would like to refer to Blumberg et al.’s (2005)
comment about how different research philosophies have often been treated
in the literature.

“Looking at the often fierce debates between positivists and

interpretivists, one might get the impression that research is either
conducted on planet ‘positivarium’ or on planet ‘interpretivarium’, and
research has to be embedded in one philosophy. Using the survey
methodology seems to imply a deductive approach rooted in positivism,
and an ethnographic observational study using inductive reasoning
seems to follow interpretivism. By and large, such classifications are
reasonable, but research practice shows that researchers rarely
subscribe consistently to one philosophy and, in management research
in particular, a more pragmatic view prevails’.

Unfortunately, Chapter 4 of Saunders et al. (2007) creates the impression that

Research Method
research is either conducted on planet ‘positivarium’ versus planet
‘interpretivarium’. Saunders et al.’s example regarding the ‘resources’
researcher versus ‘feelings’ researcher illustrates this polarised view.

We argue that these types may rather come across more as caricatures than
as realistic reflections of the particular assumptions management scholars
might be making. Particularly, when reading the section about ‘positivism’,
one may be really surprised that quantitative research is still being undertaken
in the field.
 The problem with ‘positivism’ as referred to in Saunders et al. (2007)
basically entails ‘orthodox positivism’, a research philosophy drawn
from the natural sciences. ‘Orthodox positivism’ is a rather extreme
classification for most social scientists who are doing quantitative
research. This is because many social scientists would relax the
assumptions of:

• “Existence of a single reality”.

• “Research should make law-like generalisations”.

• “Researchers are independent of their research”.

Many social scientists nowadays draw their work from “probability

theory”, because they do not believe that “law-like generalisations”
can be made for the social world. For instance, they acknowledge
that it is unlikely that
findings (or laws) would hold for every single individual. Moreover, they
would acknowledge that the society in which we live may change as
well, and that this may make their findings or theories obsolete.
Furthermore, many social scientists are fully aware that their personal
opinions or biases may have an influence on the way they construct
their questionnaires or even how they explain certain statistical
relationship in their data.

However, on p. 106 in the Saunders et al. (2007), it seems that if we

are critical of the (orthodox) positivist tradition, our ‘research philosophy
is likely to be nearer to that of the interpretivist’. So, if we are not from
planet
‘positivarium’ we are from planet ‘interpretivarium’!

Researchers typically take a more pragmatic view than that. They may
adopt a quantitative approach, produce some findings and conclusions,
but may acknowledge the value of future qualitative research that
would critically examine their findings from a constructivist point of
Research Method

view. Indeed, they may even do qualitative research from a

contructivistic perspective as well.

For instance, research on the success factors of small business based

on objective facts, such as age, experience, features of the industry,
education and so on, may acknowledge that an important omitted factor
may be the motivation of the small business owner. The motivation of
the small business owner may be a factor which is not very static. It
may interact with changes in the industry environment such as the
relationships small business owners have with their employees.