As the global economy becomes more integrated, competition also becomes stiffer and to survive and even thrive, organizations need to understand their market, their customers, their product, and the internal and external dynamics in which they operate. This is achieved through business research; as a student of business, I believe I will need such skills in the future to make my career productive and to be able to make positive contributions in my professional endeavors. Having started on a business research through a proposal and literature review, in this article, I pen down my experiences so far in this course unit; experiences while undertaking the course units, how the experience has added value to my learning and skills, the usefulness of the learning experience to my with regard to the course unit, future career prospects, program, and general life. This reflective piece describes what knowledge and skills I have acquired and how I will apply them in the relevant aspects of my life including career, life, and the program in general. After this brief introduction, the reflective piece will discuss and critically evaluate my learnings from the previews weeks in business research, focusing on learnings from undertaking a literature review and making a business research proposal. At the end of the critical analysis, the paper will terminate with conclusions
Before I commenced on undertaking the literature review, I considered the specific topic that I wanted to discuss in as far as business research and social media are concerned, after doing a little research on how to undertake a literature review and course lessons on business research. I got the impression that literature review is a systematic process, rather than a random review of past research and content related to a present research topic(Das, 2010). The experience of the literature review was enlightening in that I had to first identify the sources of information that I would use for the literature review; I realized a strong literature review starts with having the right sources of information, such as peer reviewed articles, as alluded to by Ghauri & Grønhaug (2010). At the start of my study, I just had a broad and rough idea about the topic of social media in the context of business research. The literature review greatly helped me to choose a specific area of research and interest that I then based my business research proposal upon. Previously, I considered literature review to entail poring over tons of text and analyzing them; however, the literature review I undertook gave me a valuable lesson in structure and methodology of undertaking a quality review of literature; I realized that before proceeding to develop a theoretical framework for my research, I needed to overview the identified articles to get a general idea of their content and purpose and relate them to my area of study (Booth, Sutton & Papaioannou, 2016). This, I realized, was essential because while I choose the articles based on their topics, the scope and area of focus needed to be relevant to my area of research and support my research topic, a process that led to my discarding of some of the chosen articles. I then proceeded to categorize the articles and then took some notes; this is also something I learned in this course and found to be very helpful for my future research.
Taking notes help refine the entire research and makes writing the review easy and systematic as after taking the notes, I arranged the points in such a way that the literature review was flowing logically. The notes helped me identify patterns and trends and helped me identify research gaps. All these were undertaken before doing th actual write up; the steps helped make the write up logical, making me develop a strong case for the research proposal based on research gaps. Using the literature review concepts, including logical processes; I was able to identify a research gap that my research would be based on. The proposal writing also gave me new useful insights; a research project must have a scope and an objective. I realized that the research objective is very important as it will define the scope of the research and guide the rest of the research; it is the foundation for the entire research (Berbegal-Mirabent, 2013). Further, from SMART objective(s), I was able to logically know what the research wanted to find out and helped me develop the specific research questions. The important lessons in the literature review and developing the research proposal for me are that research is conducted logically and systematically; relevance must be maintained and a research topic and area must be backed by evidence identified through identification of the research gap.
The tasks and programs of undertaking a literature review and proposing a business research have been very helpful in understanding the purpose of the entire course of business research; business research seeks to identify facts and based on an existing gap in knowledge and information identified trough a systematic study of past literature (Armitage & Keeble-Allen, 2008). For the entire program, I have acquired valuable skills on how to undertake research and how to identify problems, research gaps, on gaps in knowledge. This will help me make a greater contribution to the existing body of knowledge in the filed as I will be able to undertake research in interesting topics that others would be interested in learning more about, rather than doing what has been researched on before. The units and tasks of literature review will be greatly useful to my career as I will be able to identify gaps in an organization, in the market, or in customer needs and have the intrinsic skills of how to identify these gaps and make decisions based on findings and fact, rather than on sentiment. Many at times, businesses make decisions such as in developing products based on what they think is good for the customer rather than based on what the customer wants (Thomas, 2003).
This research will benefit me greatly in successfully meeting customer needs through a systematic and logical approach to identifying needs, gaps and finding out as much information as possible about the identified gap. This will be followed by a critical analysis of the information from where logical and sound decisions that positively impact the stakeholders will be made. The literature review and research proposal have also taught me how to have SMART objectives; there must be a time frame for undertaking tasks, as I learnt when required to develop a time frame. I also learned the importance of having a suitable approach to research and methodology; this will be important in undertaking research in other units of the program and in my career and general life; the method chosen to solve a problem is as important as solving the problem (Maylor, Blackmon & Huemann, 2017). Overall, I have gained great insights on how to undertake literature reviews, how to separate facts from general knowledge, identify gaps through systematic studies, use information to develop strong arguments, and use appropriate research tools and methods to come up with answers to logically identified and defined problems
Conclusions
Undertaking the literature review enlightened me greatly; I learned that undertaking a literature review is a systematic and logical process that begins much earlier before writing the actual review is done. I learned that research is a logical process that must be defined, have a stated scope, and guided by SMART objectives and questions; the entire research should therefore focus on answering the stated research questions and meeting the research objective. These lessons are invaluable to me which undertaking the course because they have provided me with a better understanding of what business research is, how to undertake it, and why it is important. These skills will be useful for me in the program for undertaking other research, including developing a thesis. For my career, I have learned a lot in terms of establishing gaps in information and knowledge and how these can be the basis for decisions that impact a business positively. For example, using the business research principles, I can be able to identify an important but unknown customer need that can lead to a best selling product.
References
Armitage A., & Keeble-Allen D. (2008). Undertaking a structured literature review or structuring a literature review: Tales from the field. Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods. 6, 103-114.
Booth, A., Sutton, A., & Papaioannou, D. (2016). Systematic approaches to a successful literature review. Los Angeles, SAGE.
Das, S. K. (2010). Research methods for business: a skill building approach. New Delhi, Surendra Publications.
Ghauri, P. N., & Grønhaug, K. (2010). Research methods in business studies: a practical guide. Harlow, Pearson Education.
Jasmina Berbegal-Mirabent. (2013). Doing Research in Business and Management: An Essential Guide to Planning Your Project. Management Decision. 51, 1311-1316.
Maylor, H., Blackmon, K. L., & Huemann, M. (2017). Researching business and management. London, Palgrave.
Thomas, A. B. (2003). Research skills for management studies. London, Routledge.
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