Mastering Your Business Dissertation

How to Conceive, Research and Write a Good Business Dissertation

Robert Lomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136720093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

The ability to write to a high standard is a key skill that is often overlooked in the business world. This short book from an international, best-selling author offers a practical guide to conceiving, researching and writing a business or management dissertation.

Robert Lomas offers an inspirational treatise that will awaken the quest for knowledge among his readership. The book helps business students to frame their research questions in a more helpful manner in order to achieve their research aims and write in a clear and top scoring way. Topics covered include collecting and measuring data, using business statistics, planning research projects and the real mechanics of writing a dissertation.

Masters students across business and management will benefit enormously from reading this book, not just in adding serious value to their dissertations, but also helping to improve their writing skills throughout their business careers.

This book includes a foreword by Mark Booth.

Chapter

1

Understanding Business Research

Why Research?

RESEARCH IS A STRANGE WORD. At first meeting it seems to be made up of two parts: search – meaning to look for something which is lost – and re – a Latin-derived prefix meaning, amongst other things, to do again. So, if you had never come across the composite word research, you might assume that it meant to repeatedly search for something lost.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary tells us that it can be either a noun or a verb and gives, amongst a list of possible meanings, the following:

Research

(noun): the systematic study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions.

(verb): 1: to carry out systematic study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions about something.

2: to discover or verify information to be presented (in a book, programme, lecture, etc.).

In its broadest sense, ‘research’ includes any gathering of data, information and facts for the advancement of knowledge. Reading a factual book of any sort is a kind of research. Surfing the internet or watching the news is also sometimes considered to be a type of research. A scientist, though, would not use the word in this way. Scientists restrict it to certain narrowly defined areas – which I will discuss below – and use ‘review’ for the broad learning process which is an important part of uncovering knowledge.

A strict definition of scientific research is ‘to perform a methodical study in order to prove an hypothesis or answer a specific question’. The central goal of any experimental process is to find a definitive answer to a preset question.

Scientific research – which in its modern form is a process developed during the Manhattan Project of World War II – must be systematic, follow a series of regular steps and meet a rigid standard protocol. (The rules are broadly similar but may vary slightly between different fields of science.) It must be organized and planned. It has to include a literature review of past research and an evaluation of the exact question to be answered.

This scientific definition seems to fit the word ‘search’, particularly if we are considering a search for an answer to a pre-set question. So to return to my original question: Why research?

When we consider the component parts of this word “re-search” they imply that we are talking about a search that is being repeated, and yet the dictionary definition says that it means “to reach new conclusions”. The word embodies a verbal paradox. Its entomology suggests it is a repetition of a previous investigation whilst its definition says that it involves the discovery of new knowledge. I will return to this matter later in the chapter. But if we are going to study the nature and processes of research, we need to share a common understanding of the term before we start. The way you understand the word may be different from my intention when I use it. If I use the word research to imply a reviewing or revisiting of existing knowledge whilst you think it can only used in the context of searching for new knowledge we can easily end up at cross-purposes. Fortunately there is a simple way to resolve this matter by investigating what you intuitively think about the meaning of the word.

I have an understanding of the term which I will disclose later, but you will have your own inherent perception that you have grown up with and which has been reinforced by your education and culture. It is by no means certain that our two views will coincide so before we begin to look at the methodology and practice of “research” I want to help you to investigate your own perceptions of the meaning of the word. In due course I will explain my view.

Before I offer you my answer I want to ask you a question.

Are mathematical theories invented or discovered?

The answer you give to this question says a lot about how you view the nature of Truth.

Decide on your answer before turning the page.

How do you Think?

Sorting the Sheep from the Goats

Those of you who answered that mathematical theorems are ‘invented’ have been conditioned by your education to believe that all things have purposes which can be deduced by observation. You have a natural inclination towards a view of research that begins with observations and only then seeks to explain the observations by attributing causes to their invented purposes. I will return to this point later.

But those of you who answered that mathematical theorems are ‘discovered’ have a different view. You are the transcendental mystics of the business world. For a theorem to be discovered it must already exist before you have even thought about it.

Platonism

This idea of a transcendental world of absolute forms was proposed by the Greek philosopher Plato (427–347 BCE). He was the son of wealthy and influential Athenian parents and began his philosophical career as a student of Socrates. After Socrates was executed Plato travelled to Egypt and Italy, studied with the successors of Pythagoras and spent several years advising the ruling family of Syracuse. Eventually, he returned to Athens and established his own school of philosophy. Plato tried to pass on his heritage of a Socratic style of thinking and to guide his students’ progress through mathematical learning to the achievement of abstract philosophical Truth.

Socrates had taught Plato that the most important varieties of human knowledge are really cases of recollection. Consider, for example, our knowledge of equality. We have no difficulty in deciding whether or not two people are perfectly equal in height. In fact, they are never exactly the same height, since we recognize that it would always be possible to discover some difference – however minute – with a more careful, precise measurement. By this standard, all the examples we perceive in ordinary life only approach, but never fully attain, perfect equality. But notice that, since we realize the Truth of this important qualification from our experience, we must somehow know for sure what true equality is, even though we have never seen it. Plato developed these ideas throughout his life (Phaedo 75b).

And he believed that the same point could be made with regard to other abstract concepts. Even though we perceive only their imperfect instances, we nonetheless have genuine knowledge of Truth, goodness and beauty, as well as of equality. Things of this sort are the Platonic Forms: abstract entities that exist independently of the sensible world. Ordinary objects are imperfect and changeable, but they faintly copy the perfect and immutable Forms. Thus, all the information we acquire about sensible objects (like knowing what proportion of the population prefers butter to margarine on its sandwiches) is temporary, insignificant and unreliable, while genuine knowledge of the Forms themselves (like knowing that 1 + 1 = 2) is perfectly certain for ever.

Plato claimed that, since we have knowledge of these supra-sensible realities (knowledge that we cannot possibly have obtained through any bodily experience), it follows that this knowledge must be a form of recollection, and that our souls must have been acquainted with the Forms before birth. He believed the world was essentially intelligible, and so it must be the intellect and not the senses that had the ultimate ‘vision’ of this true being.

This vision of Platonic perfection drives all scientists and is at the heart of all systems of scientific research which have been developed in the twentieth century. This is the Research system we are going to study.

As Roger Penrose, a committed Scientific Platonist, says:

The Platonic viewpoint is an immensely valuable one. It tells us to be careful to distinguish the precise mathematical entities from the approximations that we see around us in the world of physical things. Moreover, it provides us with the blueprint according to which modern science has proceeded. Scientists will put forward models of the world – or, rather, of certain aspects of the world – and these models may be tested against previous observation and against the results of carefully designed experiment. The models are deemed to be appropriate if they survive rigorous examination and if, in addition, they are internally consistent structures. The important point about these models is that they are basically purely abstract mathematical models. The very question of the internal consistency of a scientific model, in particular, is one that requires that the model be precisely specified. The required precision demands that the model be a mathematical one, for otherwise one cannot be sure that these questions have well-defined answers.

If the model itself is to be assigned any kind of ‘existence’, then this existence is located within the Platonic world of mathematical forms. Of course, one might take a contrary viewpoint: namely that the model is itself to have existence only within our various minds, rather than to take Plato’s world to be in any sense absolute and ‘real’. Yet, there is something important to be gained in regarding mathematical structures as having a reality of their own. For our individual minds are notoriously imprecise, unreliable and inconsistent in their judgments. The precision, reliability, and consistency that are required by our scientific theories demand something beyond any one of our individual (untrustworthy) minds. In mathematics, we find a far greater robustness than can be located in any particular mind. Does this not point to something outside ourselves, with a reality that lies beyond what each individual can achieve?

(Penrose 2004)

The Platonist philosophy, which underlies the scientific method of answering questions about reality, gives rise to the term ‘re-search’. As a scientist, Penrose, when he conducts Re-Search, is repeating a search, one which any individual can repeat independently, to discover a Truth about the mathematical nature of reality.

This form of research was formalized during World War II, when scientists working for the Allies – in particular Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein in the US (DeGroot 2004) and Neils Bohr in the UK – realized that there was a distinct possibility that a weapon of immense destructive power already existed within the realms of Platonic Truth. The implication of this thought was that the weapon was sitting there waiting for the first bold searcher to discover it and apply it to winning the war. That searcher could be on either side. Basic work on nuclear instability had been carried out by Heisenberg but was ignored by Hitler. In the UK work on material preparation for a ballistic-impact uranium bomb was already well under way at the Nobel explosive works in Porth Madog, North Wales, under the secret patronage of the MAUD committee (Zimmerman 1996). This fearsome weapon was sitting, unprotected, in the realm of the Platonic Forms waiting to be discovered. Szilard and Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt urging him to devote all the US’s scientific talent to the search, suggesting that the consequences of Hitler getting there first would be catastrophic (DeGroot 2004).

Roosevelt took heed of their warning and set up the Manhattan Project. It brought together the organizational and logistic skills of Gen. Leslie Groves and the inspired scientific leadership of Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer in the remote desert site of Los Alamos. The result was two types of atom bomb, one based on uranium (Little Boy) and one based on plutonium (Fat Boy). Both designs worked, and both were deployed over Japanese cities. A major spin-off of this massive wartime effort, for our purposes, was a new method for conducting research (Hughes 2002).

It is that method of research, which underlies most of the standard textbooks on Research Methods. The Platonists among you will be completely comfortable with this approach.

But what of those who answered that mathematical theorems are ‘invented’? They are following a different philosophy.

Aristotelianism

Those who think mathematical theorems are invented are subscribing to a view of reality which believes that everything can be understood by observing reality and then thinking about the purposes of the objects they have seen.

This view was first put forward by another Greek philosopher, Aristotle (384–322 BCE). He was born at Stagira in northern Greece and is the most notable product of the educational programme devised by Plato; he spent twenty years studying at Plato’s Academy. When Plato died, Aristotle returned to his native Macedonia, where he is supposed to have participated in the education of King Philip of Macedon’s son, Alexander (the Great). He returned to Athens with Alexander’s approval in 335 and established his own school at the Lyceum, spending most of the rest of his life engaged there in research, teaching and writing. His students acquired the name ‘Peripatetics’ from the master’s habit of strolling about as he taught. The aim of Aristotle’s logical treatises (known collectively as the Organon) was to develop a universal method of reasoning by means of which it would be possible to learn everything there is to know about reality.

Aristotle said that everything has four purposes, or causes, associated with it. These purposes can be deduced from observing the objects a...