Business Schools and Business and Management Departments in Universities are increasingly under pressure to increase their research output both in terms of quality and quantity. In addition these institutions are under some pressure to provide research training for their staff as well as their Masters and Doctoral students. At the same time, in the modern labour market, i.e. the 21st century knowledge society, research training is no longer seen as being only – or even primarily – for access to academic or university careers. With these developments in mind it was decided to establish a conference addressing all aspects of business and management research thereby providing a forum for researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds to meet and have the opportunity to discuss their research ideas and practices.

In April 2002, some 70 people – academics, doctoral students, consultants and practising managers – from all over the world and from a wide variety of disciplines met at The University of Reading to present and exchange ideas concerning their research approaches and methods. These exchanges concerned both philosophical arguments and methodological issues related to the different paradigms that exist for conducting both quantitative and qualitative research. There were also a number of papers related to the detail of a variety of research tactics.

In addition to several traditional streams the conference also had a critical research track.

At the end of the conference it was decided that an electronic journal would be useful as a vehicle with which to publish papers from the conference as well as from other contributors.

This first issue of the Electronic Journal for Business Research Methods (EJBRM) includes a selection of papers presented at the conference. These papers reflect the challenging nature of undertaking business and management research and include issues such as research design, sampling, data collection, measurement and scaling, analysis, and interpretation of findings – to mention but a few of the challenges. In addition, it is hoped that the chosen papers will result in an appreciation of the variety of interesting approaches to doing business research as well as a better understanding of what constitutes good research practice. Please do note that the focus of this journal is on the research methods employed across the whole field of business and management studies.

We welcome papers from anyone who has interesting empirical, theoretical or critical work, which they would like to publish. We are also pleased to have case studies, reports on action research was well as reports on working in progress. All papers will be double blind refereed.

“The issue of how to conduct high quality academic research in business and management studies continues to exercise the minds of many of us in this community. There seems to be little convergence of views as to how research should be conducted, with new ideas and new approaches being continually added.”

So wrote Professor Dan Remenyi in the preface to the proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management studies, held in April this year at Reading University. Regular readers will know that this journal started as an offshoot of the conference in 2002, to provide a means to promulgate current thinking and work in this diverse field.

This issue of the journal contains 11 of the 41 papers presented at the 2004 conference These papers were nominated for publication in the journal by delegates and session chairs at the conference. In addition, a paper is included which formed the basis for a panel discussion. We also publish the first submission to a new book/conference review section, contributions for this area are invited at any time.

The selected papers demonstrate a wide variety of approaches to conducting and evaluating research and present ideas on research paradigms, philosophical pluralism, historiography, the Glaserian approach, Online focus groups and grounded theory. The “soft” issues are also addressed with papers on how to choose a research topic and how to help student’s assess the validity of their research. We hope that the papers published in this issue will open discussion and add to the body of knowledge, supporting further debate and future work.

We welcome suggestions for topical issues and encourage submissions of interesting empirical, theoretical or critical work. We are also pleased to receive case studies, reports on action research was well as reports on work in progress. Submission guidelines, calls for papers and publication schedules can all be found elsewhere on the website. Your comments are especially welcome.