Management concerns diagram and a related theoretical framework: an example

Management concerns diagram and a related theoretical framework: an example related to the Initial Public Offer (IPO) theme 

Diagram 1a: A management concerns diagram with to the IPO theme. Each of the components at level 0 can be expanded into a level 1 diagram:

Diagram 1b: Relationship between a Level 0 diagram and the Level 1 diagrams

Diagram 2: A level 1 management-concerns diagram for component 1 of the Level 0 diagram (re: Diagram 1a)

Diagram 3: A related theoretical framework: A level 0 diagram

Using the theoretical framework (re: Diagram 3), a student can conduct literature review, notably on academic journal articles to populate each of the components of the theoretical framework with 2-3 relevant academic ideas. Each academic idea could be related to several points (e.g., viewpoints, analytical concepts and definitions) from a number of academic articles. This is illustrated in Diagram 4, as follows:

Diagram 4: Gathering academic ideas from literature review to populate the theoretical framework (re: Diagram 3) [In this example, a level 1 theoretical framework diagram on the component of "Updating IPO requirements"] :

After populating all the components of theoretical framework (re: Diagram 3) with several academic ideas from different sources (re: Diagram 4), you should now have a theoretical framework that synthesizes a set of academic ideas (e.g. 5 components with 3 academic ideas = 15 academic ideas).  If each academic idea is based on 3 academic articles; then the preliminary reference list should have 15 x 3 academic articles = 45 academic articles. It is quite satisfactory for a proposal to have considered 45 academic articles (note: 20 articles are quite sufficient at the proposal stage; 30-50 academic articles for the final report are also enough in general; on top of that, students could also have references on Youtube videos, dissertation reports, textbooks, newspaper articles, blog articles, and consulting reports, etc... In general, universities also expect that some of the academic articles are ones recently published within the last 2-3 years.

Diagramming with two levels (i.e., level 0 and level 1) can apply to management concerns diagrams and theoretical framework diagrams.  In our examples above:

Regarding the management-concerns diagrams:
Level 0 diagram: Diagram 1a
Level 1 diagram: Diagram 2

Regarding the theoretical framework diagrams:
Level 0 diagram: Diagram 3
Level 1 diagram: Diagram 4 (although no concrete points are used in the diagrams; it just indicates academic idea 1, academic idea 2, etc....; concrete points could only be available via actual literature review done by the student concerned)


The overall evolutionary process of management concerns and theoretical framework construction should follow the agile literature review approach (ALRA). Subsequently, the student should develop a number of research methods (e.g. interview, survey questionnaire and focus group; plus the companion data analysis methods, e.g., multiple regression analysis, pivot table analysis) that can be mapped onto the theoretical framework. To do that, the students should do some study on research methods by reading textbooks and watching some relevant Youtube videos.

The theoretical framework (re: Diagrams 3 and 4) are important for writing up the chapter on Literature Review in the dissertation report. When the various research methods are mapped onto the theoretical framework, the resultant diagram is also important for writing up the chapter on Research Methods in the dissertation report.