Strengths, weaknesses and employment challenges of the ALRA

Quite a number of ALRA students have encountered difficulties to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the agile literature review approach (ALRA) when when writing the dissertation report chapter on literature review. The following table summaries the main points on them. They should be a useful reference to inform them on writing about it in their dissertation reports.

Strengths, weaknesses and employment challenges of the Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA)

Strengths	Weaknesses	Employment challenges
1.     Agile (lean and responsive; easy to start 2.     easy to refine ideas and thinking) 3.     Management-concerns focused 4.     Research objectives focused 5.     Sensitive to the idiosyncrasy of the case study 6.     High visibility of the holistic view of the overall intellectual response (e.g., on a set of related literature review tasks) 7.     Foster and facilitate intellectual learning based on the existing intellectual capability of the researcher 8.     Facilitate collaborative co-learning between the dissertation project supervisor and supervisee	1.     Literature review on individual academic topic not comprehensive nor vigorous 2.     Lack of guarantee that the researcher is able to relate academic ideas between various literature review tasks 3.     Frequent changes of the overall ALRA theoretical framework can still be time-consuming and troublesome to be made 4.     Mainly suitable for doing an applied business research on a single case study	1.     Rely on the underlying engaged intellectual learning (e.g. on literature review knowledge (including the ALRA) and academic ideas in the relevant management literature review) of the researcher to employ the approach well 2.     Rely on a properly produced management-concerns diagram to justify the ALRA exercise 3.     Rely on a competent dissertation supervisor who is also well versed in the ALRA