Academic writing style - illustration notes on referencing and tenses

Academic writing style - illustration notes on referencing and tenses

Prepared by Joseph, K.K. Ho     Dated May 22, 2018

Based on: Jackson, M.C. 2003. Creative Holism for Managers, Wiley.

I. Referencing practices:

1.     "The open systems perspective propounded by von Bertalan!y, and so influential in the 1970s and 1980s, has more recently been challenged by the biologists Maturana and Varela (1980)."

2.     "In Checkland’s ‘soft systems methodology’ (1981), a highly developed approach of this kind, systems models expressing different viewpoints, and making explicit their various implications, are constructed so that alternative perspectives can be explored systemically,compared and contrasted."

3.     "More information about other systems approaches (including these two), together with full references, can be found in Jackson (2000)."

4.     "Keys (1991), and Cavaleri and Obloj (1993), provide good introductory material on the most common OR problems;...."

5.     "Vennix’s (1996) influential work on ‘group model building’ centres on integrating individual mental models, each of which initially offers only a limited perspective on the causal processes at work."

II. Practice on tense/ singular and plural (grammar)

1.     "Weber (1969), the originator of the notion, describes ideal types as stating logical extremes that can be used to construct abstract models of general realities."

2.     "A review of the work of Burrell and Morgan (1979) on sociological paradigms and organizational analysis, complemented by that of Alvesson and Deetz (1996) to take account of postmodernism, suggests that there are four common paradigms in use in social theory today."

3.     "Quade and Miser (1985), in the first Handbook of Systems Analysis, state that: the central purpose of systems analysis is to help public and private decision and policy-makers to solve the problems and resolve the policy issues that they face. It does this by improving the basis for their judgement by generating information and marshalling evidence bearing on their problems and, in particular, on possible actions that may be suggested to alleviate them......"

4.     "Cutting through the arguments of the advocates of different strands of hard systems thinking that their favoured approach is more comprehensive than the others, Checkland (1981) used an examination of methodology to demonstrate that all variants of hard systems thinking are in fact similar in character."

5.     "For A.D. Hall (see Keys, 1991), reflecting on his experiences with the Bell Telephone Laboratories, systems exist in hierarchies and should be engineered with this in mind to best achieve their objectives."

6.     "The collection of papers in Rosenhead and Mingers (2001) is a good introduction."

7.     "Forrester and his team, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), did all the solid groundwork necessary to establish system dynamics as a rigorous and respected applied systems approach. It was Peter Senge, however, with his book The Fifth Discipline (1990), who popularized it."

8.     "Senge (1990; Senge et al., 1994) has identified a number of the counterintuitive aspects of complex systems and elevated them into 11 ‘laws of the fifth discipline’."

9.     "To ensure that both these aspects of system dynamics get equal attention, Wolstenholme (1990) likes to think in terms of a qualitative and a quantitative phase to the methodology."