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Petro decided to research cross-cultural management. He was…
Petro decided to research cross-cultural management. He was interested particularly in national cultures and wished to compare and contrast differences between Britain, France and Nigeria in terms of their management theory and practices. He spent several days in the university library searching the online catalogue for information on national cultures in order to make comparisons between the countries selected for his project. He also used the internet search engine Google and was taken by surprise to find over 50 million hits on ‘national cultures’.
He was aware of the research of Hofstede and Trompenaars from his third-year studies. Google highlighted 159,000 hits on Hofstede and 77,000 on Trompennars. Given the numbers involved he quickly realized how time consuming this would be. Discussing this with a fellow student alerted him to the problems of such date. Apart from the fact that commercial and academic information was not easily differentiated, much of the information was not referenced in the way expected for his academic project.
Nevertheless, given the problems he had in selecting the appropriate data on cross-cultural differences in management, he arrived at his first tutorial with a range of material for his literature review. This included photocopied extracts from textbooks on management theories and practices and copies of the articles from a variety of journals. He realized that there was a lot more data on Britain and France compared to Nigeria. However, he perceived that his managerial experience in Britain and France as well as his three years working in Nigeria for a large multinational company would give him insights that were valuable for his project. Petro emailed his project tutor his written work so far on his literature review. He was careful to make what he thought were interesting and meaningful comparisons between the three countries and assemble them in chronological order of publication. He felt pleased that he had already written 3000 words towards the 10,000 words he needed for his project report.
Petro then went to see his project tutor who gave him some feedback on the information he had gathered. The tutor felt much of the information gathered was up to date and based partly on material from the company he had worked for. However, he now had to look critically at the academic literature. He suggested that Petro begin by reading recent books on the topic such as Mead (2004) and Schneider and Barsoux (2003) as well as an article by McSweeney (2002) that he felt would be useful when thinking about Hofstede’s work. He also emphasised that Petro should focus his search on academic databases of peer-reviewed business and management journals. Petro has led a busy life in which he liked to solve practical problems as a manager. He now realized that searching academic literature would be extremely time consuming. His tutor gave him some advice on learning to skim texts to speed up the process and to summarise the main issues in his own words as well as keeping careful notes of sources.
Petro searched for the textbooks and the refereed journal article. As he read and began to make notes on national cultures and their impact on management, he noticed that what he was reading was thematically organized with a clear framework. This helped him begin to define the parameters for his study. He began to make links between his practical experiences of the other cultures he was studying and concepts discussed in the books and article.
Over the next few weeks he focused more on the peer-reviewed academic journals. The more he read on the topic the more references he gathered by other researchers. He noticed that in the journal articles the authors not only applied the ideas on values associated with national cultures to different countries but that the ideas were explored in a critical way. The ideas were also justified by referring to named researchers in the field, many of whose names he recognized. However, the style of the written made his task of reading for his literature review seems impossible and he began to worry about this. He even questioned his own ability. Discussing these difficulties with other students on his course made him realize that he was not alone. They were also having problems, not only understanding the material, but also attempting to select what was appropriate and relevant for their particular project.
Gradually Petro began to order his notes around certain issues that kept recurring in the peer reviewed articles and textbooks he was reading. Over the same period, he began to better understand the practical problems he confronted during his time as a manager in Britain, France and Nigeria. The academic literature appeared to be providing a theoretical framework and possible explanations for his managerial experiences.
Questions: Respond to these questions in an essay format using APA style of writing, and use at least 5 peer-reviewed references.
1. How do you think Petro’s understanding of the literature review changed?
2. What particular skills did Petro develop in the preparation of the review?
3. Do you think Petro would have benefited from the use of mind-maps in researching his topic? Give reasons for your answer.
4. What problems do you think he would have anticipated in conducting research into national cultures that his literature review may not have highlighted?
