About the resource: Learning to Think like an Expert Management Researcher

Overview

This web resource contains online learning resource intended for postgraduate and research students, and also for academics just starting out on a career in the management field. The web resource is designed to support you with developing your critical frame of mind. A constructively critical way of thinking is characteristic of expert researchers, who have gradually built-up their critical thinking capability as a product of their accumulating research experience. Acquiring this capability can be a slow process if it just occurs incidentally: a side-effect of being a student or an academic. But you can accelerate your learning as you go along by consciously developing your ability to think critically and to make informed decisions in your research.

Objectives

Key aspects of studying management are to design and obtain support for carrying out an investigation, to find things out and then to demonstrate what has been found and why it is significant. This kind of work follows the ‘logic of enquiry’, or detective-work. Developing a research proposal and finding things out involves asking well-informed questions and designing literature-based and empirical investigations to answer them. Demonstrating what has been found out typically includes writing an account that will convince other people (as with your assignments, dissertation, thesis, or academic articles for publication). Expert researchers have learned the habit of following the logic of enquiry by applying their critical frame of mind. This resource is intended to help you to develop your habit of thinking like an expert.

Authors

Prof Mike Wallace, Cardiff University
David Denyer, Cardiff University

Original Project

This ‘training trainers’ project was funded as part of the ESRC Researcher Development Initiative (RDI) and provided strategic assistance with building UK capacity for high quality management research, through the ESRC/EPSRC Advanced Institute for Management (AIM) Research. The project trained researchers in their secondary role: as teachers and supervisors of postgraduate and research students, and as mentors of their less experienced colleagues. On-line teaching materials were developed on the logic of enquiry that frames the research process and production of outputs. These materials, designed for postgraduate and doctoral students and with guidance for tutors, are now available on ReStore repository website.

Classification

Dates

This resource was included in ReStore on 2012-05-22 and updated on 2012-05-30