How should a postgraduate research student present a thesis? This paper provides a structure as a starting point for understanding what a thesis should set out to achieve, and also provides a basis for communication between a student and his or her supervisor. Firstly, criteria for judging a thesis are reviewed and justification for its structure is provided. Then writing style is considered. Finally, each of the five sections are described in some detail: introduction, literature review, methodology, analysis of data, and conclusions and implications.
In 1971, Kilby likened research about the psychology of entrepreneurs to search for a "heffalump", with no convincing descriptions resulting from the research. This paper surveys later research which compares entrepreneurs with other people, and concludes that more is now known about the psychology of entrepreneurs, but that entrepreneurs are not as different from other groups within the general population, managers included, as was once assumed.
Purpose – There has been little research about incident management decision making within real-life, dynamic emergencies such as urban fire settings. So this research addresses the research problem: how do incident managers make decisions in urban fire settings? These decision behaviours cover five areas: assessment of the fireground situation, selection of a decision strategy, determination of incident objectives, deployment and management of firefighting resources and ongoing review of the incident. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach – Case research was used to examine management of different types of fires, through in-depth interviews with a range of incident managers.
Findings – This research identified five key behavioural elements associated with incident management in urban fire settings such as their application of a mix of recognition-primed, value based, procedural and formal decision strategies throughout the course of an incident rather than a single style.
Research limitations/implications – The in-depth framework of decision making could provide foundations for later research about other emergency settings. And this research is limited to analytic generalisation (Yin, 2009); so quantitative research such as surveys and large scale interviews could be done to further extend the research for statistical generalisation.
Practical implications – The decision procedures uncovered in this research will assist incident managers in many emergencies, assist policy making and foster the development of future incident managers.
Originality/value – The findings expand the knowledge of how incident managers develop situation awareness, make decisions and plans, implement them, and review the incident as it evolves. Another contribution is the comprehensive framework of decision making developed from these findings.
This article explores how complexity theory can help marketers to understand a market and to operate within it. Essentially, it argues that complexity theory has the potential to provide both global and some local explanations of markets and is complementary to local theories like relationship marketing that may be more familiar to marketing managers. It establishes four types of complex systems that might be used to model social systems. Of these four types, complex adaptive systems seem most appropriate to describe markets. This is illustrated in an investigation of Honda in the global automobile industry. Implications for marketing managers centre on the need to understand feedback loops at many levels of a path‐dependent system that are inherently difficult to predict and control.
Relationship marketing (RM) has emerged as a new marketing idea for many firms in Western countries. The aim of this paper is to review the evolution of RM ideas. Definitional difficulties are sorted out, a typology of many of the relationships is developed, structural and social bonds are identified and whether RM is a paradigm shift for marketing theorists and practitioners is debated. This paper argues that RM is not a paradigm shift, but rather an appropriate marketing approach when management considers product/service, customer, and organization factors. The paper's contribution is its comprehensiveness and up‐to‐date review of the evolution of core RM ideas.
The impact of the internet on inter-firm relationships has received little attention in the academic literature. This theory building research develops a conceptual framework about internet-facilitated relationships based on the literature and research findings from convergent interviews. The convergent interviews were conducted with CEOs and/or marketing managers of 10 Australian service companies. Results show that the internet does not appear to hinder inter-firm relationships as the internet is not being used at the expense of more traditional and personal forms of communication and has little impact on the level of trust in internet exchange partners and the dependence they have on one another at this relatively early stage of adoption. Rather, internet use is thought to be linked with improved business performance and satisfaction with the exchange partner's performance. The findings of this research add to the body of marketing knowledge and provide guidelines for managers to more effectively use the internet in managing their relationships with other businesses.
Most research about relationships and networks concentrates on social bonds such as trust and commitment. Little research considers technical bonds and how they interact with social bonds within a relationship. Thus this research investigates how technical bonds of information technology link with social bonds in the relationship between two organisations in a business system, in particular, between a franchisor and franchisees within a franchise system. First, a framework of the structure of a relationship between business alliance partners was synthesised from the business‐to‐business literature. Then Australian franchisors were surveyed about the effects of their investments in information technology upon their franchisor‐franchisee relationship. Structural equation modelling techniques were used to analyse the survey data. The results provided support for the framework, with the franchisor's increased technical competence from information technology improving the social bonds in a relationship but those bonds being secondary to further technical investment. An implication for managers is that investments in information technology operate through the social bonds within their business.
PurposeWriting and publishing research is an integral part of any academic's job. It is important for an individual's academic progression and is vital for the development, updating and refinement of teaching materials. This paper aims to focus on the purpose and value of publishing.Design/methodology/approachEditors, reviewer and authors have different roles to play in the pre‐publishing life of a potential article and so the different perspectives of editors, reviewers and authors in relation to successful journal article publication are discussed.FindingsThe paper describes the process of preparing academic papers and a stage by stage approach to writing an article. This includes how to target a suitable journal, taking account of the editor, reviewers and potential readers of an article, how to write an academic article, with an appropriate structure and style, redrafting and sending a paper off for review and carrying out requested revisions.Originality/valueThe views expressed in this paper are based on the authors' combined experience of performing all three roles over a number of years. This experience has been enriched by participation in discussions at "meet the editors" sessions at a variety of academic conferences throughout the world, and from discussions of academic committees, in particular, the Academy of Marketing Research Committee during 2005.
