how do you think petro’s understanding of the literature review changed how do y
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how do you think petro’s understanding of the literature review changed how do you think petro’s understanding of the literature review changed how do you think petro’s understanding of the literature review changed Case 3c National cultures 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 Trompenaars. Given the numbers involved he quickly realised how time consuming this would be. Discussing this with a fellow student alerted him to the problems of such data. 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 prac- tices and copies of the articles from a variety of journals. He realised 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 multi- national 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 assembled 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 Petro then went to see his project tutor who gave him some feedback on the information he had gathered. The tutor felt much of the information gathered was up to date and based partly on material from the company he had worked for. However, he now had to look critically at the academic literature. He suggested that Petro begin by reading recent books on the topic such as Mead (2004) and Schneider and Barsoux (2003) as well as an article by McSweeney (2002) that he felt would be useful when thinking about Hofstede's work. He also emphasised that Petro should focus his search on academic databases of peer-reviewed business and management journals. Petro had led a busy life in which he liked to solve practical problems s a manager. He now realised that searching academic literature would be extremely time consuming. His tutor gave him some advice on learning to skim texts to speed up the proces and to summarise the main issues in his own words as well as keeping careful notes of sources. Petro searched for the textbooks and the refereed journal article. As he read and began to make notes on national cultures and their impact on management, he noticed that what he was reading was thematically organised with a clear framework. This helped him begin to define the parameters for his study. He began to make links between his practical experiences of the other cultures he was studying and concepts discussed in the books and article. Over the next few weeks he focused more on peer-reviewed academic journals. The more he read on the topic the more references he gathered by other researchers. He noticed that in the journal articles the authors not only applied the ideas on values associated with national cul- tures to different countries but that the ideas were explored in a critical way. The ideas were O Pearson Education Limited 2009Explanation / Answer
Petro's initially literature review was purely based upon his and his company's experiences (company's database). The review was mainly practical in nature and had no theoretical basis as such. Even though he read a variety of journal articles and newsletters from magazines, the underlying assumptions and points were his own based upon his personal experiences and didn't reflect the views of other scholarly people.
To counter this aspect of Petro's initial report his mentor asked him to read a set of academic literature and peer reviewed business journals. I believe that this helped Petro to align his practical experiences to theoretical proofs in a better way. In fact a lot of his myths were broken as authors of such papers attached an idea to the cultural values of different countries. He noticed that the values that people of these countries exhibited were basically an extension of their ideas about the business in their respective countries. This even though was difficult for Petro to understand, initially, but by repeating the entire process of reading and taking down notes to match his practical experiences to theoretical frameworks, Petro's understanding of the literature review increased, changed and enhanced.
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