Doing research in Business and Management: An Introduction to process and method
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Book reviews
Doing Research in Business and Management: An Introduction to Process and Method By D Remenyi, B Williams and E Swartz Published by Sage Publications, London, UK, 1999, 309 pp ISBN 0 7619 5950 5 The original universities are medieval institutions. Most modern institutions of higher education still have a touch of the Middle Ages. One of the most obvious has been the apprenticeship system for educating postgraduate researchers. In many departments the relationship between doctoral candidates and their supervisors is still feudal. Scholars still conceive research to be an art best learned by a thoughtful student observing his master. A PhD provides entry to the guild of master craftsmen. Hierarchy is still very important. However, in an age of mass education we are also encouraged to make knowledge less tacit, more explicit, more transferable. It is important that we should succeed in doing this because democracy requires widespread education. Giving students the pretence of learning will not serve the best interests of society. It will only ensure that ‘more means worse’ as Kingsley Amis once quipped. In the last few years innovations, such as the MRes, have even infiltrated the training of academic researchers. With it has come the increase in books, which describe unambiguously how to do research. Doing Research in Business and Management is a contribution to this literature. My greatest concern with this book is its market focus. Its title suggests that its audience is business and management students, but several of the authors have a background in IS research. This is clear from most of the examples which the authors use. In fact it seems to me that the book contains too many references to IS research to be wholly satisfactory to business and management students. A book such as Management Research: an Introduction (1994) by Easterly-Smith et al, might be a better bet. On the other hand, by focusing on an IS audience, the authors might have made alterations which would make it even more relevant to IS students, as Cornford and Smithson (1996) have done in their book Project Research in Information Systems: a Student’s Guide. The structure of this book consists of three sections which consider the nature of postgraduate research, its conduct, and its presentation and evaluation. It is important to begin any text like this one with a discussion of the nature of research and the MPhil/PhD process. In my experience, students submit themselves to research degrees in order to promote their careers. Unfortunately, they rarely realise what they are getting themselves into. They are likely to find it a daunting experience at first. The introductory section of Doing Research addresses many of the issues, which puzzle students, in a straightforward manner but it avoids the more subtle issues such as how to select a supervisor. My students find that the text by Phillips and Pugh (1994) entitled How to
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