Tag Archives: supply chain research

Book Review: Your Research Project

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Revised on: 2015-09-06

This book is a must-have for any serious student or budding research. Even if you consider yourself a seasoned researcher, this book could still teach you some tricks. Now in its third edition, the book will guide through how to write about your research, it will also take you through uthe various research methods, how to make a really good literature review, and it will teach you about honesty and ethics. It is a short, compact and comprehensive guide, better than most other how-to guides on research that I have read.

Did it help me?

Browsing through unfinished work on my blog I found a post draft meant to be a review of this book, dating back to October 2009, a draft I left and never returned to continue, not until now. I have no idea why I never finished that post, because the book did indeed help in me in my own research. At the time I was still aiming for a PhD, a path I have since abandoned. Or maybe not, who knows? Anyway, I did make good use of the tips and tricks the book provided me with, and I did use it when making my philosophical essay on Transportation Network Reliability and Vulnerability back in 2004, when I still believed that my PhD was not too far away.

Structure, structure, structure

The book emphasises that research is based on structure and logic. Now wonder that each chapter is like a small research project or paper in itself, with aims, introduction, content, conclusion, next steps and further reading. Tedious at first, but once you get the hang of it, you start to realise that this is indeed the way research should be conducted. The book teaches by example how to do research. I think that is what makes this such a brilliant book to have and read and put to use.

Reference

Walliman, N. (2011) Your research project, 3rd ed. Sage Publications, London UK

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Buy the book at amazon.com

Related posts

Theory versus Practice

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

What happens when theory meets practice? Theory fails and practice wins? In academia, more often than not, developing new groundbreaking theories is what is worth pursuing, because it is academically challenging, let alone meriting, despite these theories being practically irrelevant or not offering real(business)-life implications. Nowhere is the outcome of this research-versus-practice debate more important than in the supply chain realm. So say Stanley E Fawcett and Matthew A Waller in Making Sense Out of Chaos: Why Theory is Relevant to Supply Chain Research, an editorial in the Journal of Business Logistics, where they share their vision on how theory’s explanatory power should lead to better decision making, and not be seen as something apart from practice.

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What kind of Supplychainist are you?

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Revised on: 2015-09-29

With an ever-increasing number of companies outsourcing all non-core activities and  manufacturing their products in faraway countries,  Supply Chain Management (SCM) has evolved into both a professional and an academic field that is growing, spreading and developing offshoots in all directions. But what is SCM really, is it just a new name for logistics or is it possible to distinguish certain perspectives? In Logistics versus Supply Chain Management: An International Survey, Paul D. Larson & Arni Halldorsson (2004) set out to investigate how the experts themselves classify their own realms.

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Finding academic articles without academic journals

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Revised on: 2015-10-05

As a researcher within supply chain risk, I try to read as many academic journals as possible, and I scour the reference list of every article for hitherto unknown references.  I am also extremely lucky to have access to a university library that provides electronic access to a vast number of academic journals, or acquires copies of articles in journals they don’t subscribe to free of charge. Not everybody has such provisions, but there is a solution to the problem: Many management or supply chain related websites provide the same articles for free (or sometimes at a prenium). Formatting and graphics is usually stripped out, but the content is till there. Today I’d like to promote two such websites: bnet.com and allbusiness.com.

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