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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.
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