Blog Back Online

Due to a technical goof the Blog has been down for around a week or so.  Thankfully now sorted ... normal service has been resumed.

Thanks for your forbearance

Robert

Management Learning

Here is another special issue ... the opening paper discusses the relationship between academics and practicing managers.  There are then four other great papers from very skilled scholars in the field of organization and management.  Useful as a reference resource ...

http://mlq.sagepub.com/content/43/4.toc

Special Issue on Relevance

There's another great special issue on relevance in research which appeared in Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Vol 47 Issue 1 ... it is populated by contributions from top-notch scholars and contains a number of well written and thoughtful articles.  If you are doing research in the broad field of organization studies and are doing anything which relates to practice-oriented, action research, interventions, or just trying to make sense of the relationship between professional researchers and practising managers ... this is worth looking at.

Enjoy

A Great "Researchable Question" on Scottish Football

One of my MBA students executed a great piece of research on competitiveness in Scottish Football.  To his credit he completed an A grade piece of work and we've managed to place it into one of the papers.  His research question could be summarised as "does sound business strategy affect competitiveness more than  league structure does ?"

Scotsman Article

You name it ... you can study it

My own interests are limited to the study of management and managers ... but as you'll see if you follow the link below, there's a PhD out there for everyone.  With topics ranging from industrial hygiene to leisure ... why would you study something as commonplace as management ?

http://onlinedoctoratedegree.org/20-doctorate-degrees-you-may-not-know-about

Blog ... Not Blog ... Blog

I started this Blog in 2009 because I wanted a place to put the answers to some "frequently asked questions."  At the time I was receiving a steady stream of calls from people thinking of applying for a PhD at Glasgow and heard myself repeating similar things during these calls.  I thought it might be helpful to have somewhere to point people at so that they could run through the material themselves.  I asked a colleague who said "what you want is a blog" ... but after I'd put some material up on the site I began to realise that it wasn't a blog so much as a web-site that I was constructing.  The early posts on the site aren't weekly updates in the sense of a typically blog, rather they are my attempt to summarise the main challenges. choices and issues that PhD students and applicants face.  So after a few months the site became a "not blog" ... to my great surprise, the site has generated a fair bit of traffic despite its "not blog" status.  With around a thousand hits a month and a healthy group of followers I'm therefore going to turn my "not blog" into a blog in the coming months.  Far and away the most commonly visited postings are the ones on epistemology and on gaps in the literature ... these will still be there for those that want them.  What you'll find in the coming months is something closer to a "thought for the day" format which is more typical of a blog.  Be sure to let me know what you think.  Meantime, I'm delighted to say that my "not blog" came third in a ranking of the top 50 online PhD sites ...

http://www.phd-programs-online.net/thesis-writing.

Not bad for a "not blogger" ... imagine what will happen when it turns into a blog.  If you're working on a PhD   ... hang in there. If you're thinking about starting ... stop thinking and start starting!

Oh, and happy summer

Robert

Ontological Oscillators and Ontological Purists

Burrell and Morgan (1979: 266) talk about the problem of ontological oscillation.  For example when trying to research a phenomenon that you regard as socially constructed you may find yourself "admitting a more realist form of ontology through the back door" when you come to try and operationalise your research design.  Karl Weick doesn't think that you have to stick rigidly to one ontological view for all time ... "if people have multiple identities and deal with multiple realities, why should we expect them to be ontological purists ?" (1995:35).  I sympathise with Weick's view that the issue is simply one of being consistent within a particular piece of research.  Contrast for example two recent pieces of work that I have been involved with ... one takes a constructionist perspective on relationships between clinicians and managers in healthcare settings (see http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.03.014) whilst the other involved a survey of managers to assess their familiarity with key strategy tools (forthcoming in the International Journal of Operations and Production Management).  Both papers occupy very different space in terms of ontology, epistemology and methodology ... but both are consistent within the confines of what they claim to do.  Oscillating is fine across projects ... but you need to be a purist within pieces of work and in your PhD it is too risky to claim more than one position in relation to the ologies.

Finally, whilst shamelessly plugging my own work ... here are a few of the papers I have written on the subject of research methods ... who knows, you might find them useful.


D MacLean, R MacIntosh and S Grant, Mode 2 Management Research, British Journal of Management, Volume 13, Issue 3, 189 – 207, December 2002


N Beech, R MacIntosh and D MacLean, Dialogues Between Academics and Practitioners: the role of generative dialogic encounters, Organization Studies, 31(9), 1341-1367, 2010.


 P Hibbert, R MacIntosh and C Coupland, Reflexivity, Recursion and Relationality in Organisational Research Processes, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2010, 47-62.


 N Beech, P Hibbert, R MacIntosh and P McInnes, But I Thought We Were Friends ?, in S Ybema, D Yanow, H Wels and F Kamsteeg (eds), Organizational Ethnography: studying the complexities of everyday life,  SAGE: London, Chapter 10, 196-214,  2009