Understanding the Doctoral Research Process, Annotated Bibliography Example

Hall, M.C. (1999). “A note on the use of marketing research by small businesses.” Journal of Small Business Strategy. Vol. 10, No. 2. 95-98.

The article makes note of empirical research which identifies and explains why small businesses fail to use marketing research, despite the documented value of such marketing research. The author suggests that this is the result of various disjunctions between small and big business settings, as though the paradigms were entirely different. The author endeavors to dispel these conceptions and essentially advances a text which attempts to justify the use of such research for small business owners, above all based on 1) the established value of marketing research, and 2) overturning the preconceived difference between small and big business. In this manner, the author advances an underlying hypothesis that forces us to re-consider the presupposed differences between “small” and “big” business and thereby avoid such stereotyped distinctions.

Kim-Keung Ho, J. (2014). A theoretical review on the professional development to be a scholar-practitioner in business management. European Academic Research. Vol. 1. Issue 12. pp. 5393-5422.

The article investigates one of the more contemporary concepts in business management: the scholar-practitioner. This concept entails that not only are business managers working only in the academy or in the workplace, but instead, an emerging trend is tied to work in both fields simultaneously. The author proposes a professional development framework, which is to more carefully delineate the scholar-practitioner concept, which understands how the business manager develops both as a scholar and as a practitioner in an integrated and unified manner. The article is valuable above all to the extent that it examines a new issue of importance in business research, while understanding how business practice and participation in the academic dimension of business may yield fruitful contributions.

Randall, D.M. & Gibson, A.M. (1990). “Methodology in business ethics research: A review and critical assessment.” Journal of Business Ethics. Vol. 9, Issue 6. pp. 457-471.

The article identifies a lacuna in peer-scientific reviewed articles about business ethics with regard to methodology. Namely, upon a review of 94 published articles on the subject of business ethics, the authors conclude that what they term “full methodological detail” is absent in more than half of the articles. This absence of full detailed methodology is accompanied by various other oversights with regards to methodology, such as convenience samples and validity/reliability of measures. Furthermore, the authors note that the concept of ethics used in these articles was either entirely absent, presupposed or poorly defined. Accordingly, the primary value of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it provides an account of a vibrant field of business research, that of business ethics, and diagnoses clear shortcomings on the existing literature. On the other hand, by identifying these same weaknesses, the authors indicate how methodologies could be improved in the emerging field. Whereas some of the claims of the authors are perhaps objectionable – for example, for a scientific article to contain a full definition of ethics seems inconceivable, in so far as ethics itself is a heterogeneous term – the authors provide a rigorous account of weaknesses in the field, which can be addressed with more robust research approaches.