My last post on this subject, exactly one month ago, had me excitedly telling about the book, "You and your action research project". My plan then was to read the book then incorporate whatever needed to be added to the methodology chapter of my thesis. In the end, I didn't read that book exclusively; I looked for other sources of material as well. As I was reading, I was also writing the section of the thesis entitled "Action Research - the theory"; I had to describe what AR itself is, how it differs from traditional research (primarily by siting the researcher at the centre of things instead of being abstracted out) and as a result of this, presenting arguments about validity and rigour. Here it was important to bring in viewpoints that appear in other works, so in the end there must be at least six or seven works cited in this section.
When I had finished this, I went on to describe the actual methodology used in AR; for this, a paper by Näslund et al. (2010) was invaluable[1]. Whilst not containing the AR cycle that I obtained from another paper, it contained a framework for conducting the research where the topic being researched is supply chain management. Most AR has been carried out on topics concerned with education, so this specific research is closer to mine. After displaying the framework, I had to explain all the terms contained within, sometimes referencing Näslund et al. and sometimes others. I worked on this for several hours but didn't finish in that time slot. The rest was completed during the week. After I completed this section, I wrote a brief summary of the entire chapter. Then I realised that I had completed what I had planned to write during the month, so I sent the current version off to my supervisor.
After implementing any changes that he might suggest, my next task is to plan and carry out a pilot study for the thesis. This is where theory meets reality: I have to take all that I have written during the past month and actually do it. I've been thinking about which case I can use: this seems to be somewhat problematic as there isn't anything obvious that I can research. Whichever enhancement I choose has to be new (i.e. not examined in my previous research); one example that I could use is the development of time/task management, but this was implemented several months ago, meaning that I can't 'accompany' it from the beginning which is what I would like to do. There isn't anything on the books at the moment; a fair amount of my time is creating and adapting reports and procedures that I have written for the 'nesting' machine.
Actually there is something that is currently receiving a low priority but looks ready for a revival: it's a similar enhancement to one that already exists. It's meant to allow salespeople to reserve quantities of materials for a type of product called a 'screen' (I'm certain that this is not what I would call a screen in English). What's special here is that both a height and a width have to be specified. I shall now start trying to collect all the emails that I have on this subject: this is 'primary' material.
References
- Näslund, D., Kale, R. and Paulraj, A. (2010): "Action research in supply chain management—a framework for relevant and rigorous research", Journal of Business Logistics, 31(2), 331-355.
No comments:
Post a Comment