Very often, students will start by picking a management theme, e.g., staff turnover, work-life balance or knowledge management, and then direct their main attention to research methods design, mainly on questionnaire survey. I recommend that, initially, students spare the main efforts to explore the research project background (involving a specific organization) to work out ideas in the following three main Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA) content areas:
Main content area 1: management theme(s): about 1 to 2 related management themes
Main content 2: A set of related management concerns, expressed in the form of a management-concerns diagram
Main content 3: A theoretical framework, representing the researcher's well-thought-out intellectual response to the set of management concerns identified (re: Content 2)
The contents of the three main content areas are to be produced via an agile process such that these contents can be said to emerge in a co-evolutionary way. The Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA) endorses this co-evolutionary view of this content generation process. This is depicted in the following diagram (Diagram 1):
Diagram 1: Co-evolutionary emergence of the ALRA contents
Besides the three main ALRA content areas, Diagram 1 also recognizes three other secondary content areas in the initial stage of the ALRA application. They are contents on: " Explore the dynamic dissertation project background", "Design research methods", and "Perform literature review". These three secondary content areas can also exert influences on the three main ALRA content areas of "Construct management theme(s)", "Construct a set of related management concerns" and "Construct a theoretical framework".
At this point, a busy student might ask: what is the most important task to do right now?
Answer: Not one task, but two main immediate tasks: (a) Find a company to study and (b) try to work out a diagram-pair prototype of "a management-concerns diagram and a theoretical framework".
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