1. How do you think Petro’s understanding of the literature review changed? Summ
ID: 347942 • Letter: 1
Question
1. How do you think Petro’s understanding of the literature review changed?
Summary: National Culture and Management Styles Petro decided to research cross-cultural management. He was interested particularly in national cultures and wished to compare and contrast differences between Britain, France and Nigeria in terms of their management theory and practices. He spent several days in the university library searching the online catalogue for information on national cultures in order to make comparisons between the countries selected for his project. He also used the internet search engine Google and was taken by surprise to find over 50 million hits on 'national cultures'. He was aware of the research of Hofstede and Trompenaars from his third-year studies. Google highlighted 159,000 hits on Hofstede and 77,000 on Trompennars. Given the numbers involved he quickly realized how time consuming this would be. Discussing this with a fellow student alerted him to the problems of such date. Apart from the fact that commercial and academic information was not easily differentiated, much of the information was not referenced in the way expected for his academic project. Nevertheless, given the problems he had in selecting the appropriate data on cross-cultural differences in management, he arrived at his first tutorial with a range of material for his literature review. This included photocopied extracts from textbooks on management theories and practices and copies of the articles from a variety of journals. He realized that there was a lot more data on Britain and France compared to Nigeria. However, he perceived that his managerial experience in Britain and France as well as his three years working in Nigeria for a large multinational company would give him insights that were valuable for his project. Petro emailed his project tutor his written work so far on his literature review. He was careful to make what he thought were interesting and meaningful comparisons between the three countries and assemble them in chronological order of publication. He felt pleased that he had already written 3000 words towards the 10,000 words he needed for his project report.Explanation / Answer
In the initial phase of the research, Petro focused more on the materials that he gathered from the organizations he worked with and he actually wanted feedback from his mentor who felt the same and asked him to study, read and research on this topic which will help him understand the literature of the topic. He started reading the text books and felt that this is actually what he was looking for as it has answer to almost all the questions Petro had regarding the topic and the books were successful in providing a valid reasoning to him. He also started reading journals regarding the topic which are peer reviewed and he started to feel that they provide him with better solution to his problems because they helped him understand the practical problems more that he experienced as a manager in the organizations. I believe this made him change his understanding of the literature review.
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