IIUM DBA programme

03/07/2015

Tips on writing Abstracts for journals or conferences

The abstract should provide sufficient detail to enable reviewers to understand what will be presented. Each abstract should be up to 400 words in length (depended on the conference or journal - could be more or less than 400 words) and should contain the following:

1. Title of presentation (brief but indicative of contents).
2. Purpose of presentation: Clearly state what your specific presentation will seek to do before
setting out the relevant debates and information on your research.
3. Clear statement on the nature of the research being presented (e.g. conceptual work, literature review discussion, reflexive analysis, empirical research) and the stage you will have been reached by the time of presentation (e.g. literature review completed, developing methodology, initial pilot study, developing theoretical framework for testing, ongoing research, reporting on completed research).
4. Methodology, approach and sample.
5. Key argument, findings, implications and/or conclusions to be presented.
6. Short list of references (it is important to locate your presentation in relation to the research
literature and to refer to this).
7. Up to 5 keywords separated by a comma
Following peer-review, if reviewers have recommended that an abstract is not suitable for an individual presentation, it may be possible for an abstract to be re-written or for the work to be submitted as a poster presentation. This could be for a number of reasons which would include work still under development, or not of significant scale for individual presentation.
If you are invited to re-submit your work you will be given feedback to support you in re-writing your abstract in order that it meets the quality required for the conference.

Some additional tips

• Write in a clear, concise and accessible way, keeping focused on what’s going to happen in this specific presentation rather than your work in general. ‘Get to the point’ quickly in the opening section, making it clear what you are going to present and why. Reviewers and delegates only have 400 words to become familiar with your work and your aims in this presentation, so spending a long time at the beginning mapping out the background to your general theoretical framework, or providing a long piece on the wider literature may not be as useful as clearly stating what your presentation will seek to do.
• Try to avoid jargon, acronyms that are not explained, overly dense language or a focus on very specific terms or concepts that may not be familiar to a wider, international audience. The audience will include a range of people researching HE from many different perspectives.
• Make good use of a small number of headings to structure your submission.
• Ensure that you cover all of the areas required in an abstract that are relevant to your submission, perhaps noting where some are not applicable to help the reviewer understand what your research is and what it is not (e.g. if you work is primarily conceptual at this stage, or presents preliminary data make it clear that is the case).
• Make reference to at least 3-4 key pieces of literature related to your field of research/enquiry. References are included in the word count, so a good balance is needed between using citations and not using up your word count.
• Make good use of the word count – if you are well below or above the 400 word abstract, then you are probably not making effective use of the space.
• Don’t forget that your abstract is not only submitted for reviewers to judge your submission, but will appear in the list of abstracts from which delegates will decide whether or not to attend your presentation. To help ensure you are attracting your target audience, make sure that your abstract is of a good quality and clearly states what you want to do and why.
• Ask a friend, colleague or supervisor to read and comment on your abstract as a critical friend.
All abstract proposals should be submitted electronically, via the SRHE website at www.srhe.ac.uk Authors will also find here the instructions on what is required in making a submission.


28/06/2015

IIUM Graduate School of Management is being re-located to IIUM KL Campus at Jalan Duta. The premises at Jalan Duta was previously occupied by ISTAC. In the meantime, students services is still operating from Gombak Campus on Level 3, Kyoto Room, GSM, Kulliyyah of Economics & Management Sciences, KENMS.

Classes for MBA, MOM and DBA are still being conducted in Gombak Campus till September 2015.

28/06/2015

The Myers & Briggs Foundation - - MBTI® Basics

26/06/2015

For those who are engaged in QUAL research.
The Qualitative Research Association Malaysia is holding a conference 20-21 Nov 2015.

Deadline for submission 21 Sept 2015.

Check out the flyer, write about the method you are using, present it and get some useful feedback to further improve and shape your research.

25/06/2015

Managing the Unexpected

Over the last 2 years we have experienced quite a few major disasters : the disappearance of airplanes and plane crash, earthquakes, an oil tanker was hijacked, major restructuring of our national airline - just to name a few.

Management were often caught off-guard, employees even more bewildered. How do we manage the unexpected? Can we have a tool of some kind to help organisations prepare for the unexpected?

Mahendira Rajan Vaitilinggam's our DBA student is researching on Crisis Management: Organizational Disaster Resilience. The output of his work is a framework to measure organisational resilience; a checklist for disaster preparedness.

There are similar models that consultants use to facilitate and support resilient development. See this for example: http://high-reliability.org/Weick-Sutcliffe

The following is extracted from the website: High Reliability Organisation.

Anticipation is more than sensing early events as it also includes the efforts to stop the development of undesirable events. Because we cannot anticipate all events we have containment practices for those unanticipated or unexpected events that occur. Containment directs activities toward events after an unexpected event has occurred while anticipation directs activities toward events before the unexpected event can occur.

Anticipation has three elements:

1) Preoccupation with failure: To avoid failure we must look for it and be sensitive to early signs of failure.
2) Reluctance to simplify: Labels and clichés can stop one from looking further into the events.
3) Sensitivity to operations: Systems are not static and linear but rather dynamic and nonlinear in nature. As a result it becomes difficult to know how one area of the organization’s operations will act compared to another part.

Containment has two elements:

4) Commitment to resilience: The organization must maintain function during high demand events. Resilience has three components:

i. Absorb strain and preserve function despite adversity
ii. Maintain the ability to return to service from untoward events
iii. Learn and grow from previous episodes.

5) Deference to expertise: This includes deference downward to lower ranking members of the organization. Expertise defers from the expert from its relational knowledge with greater emphasis on an assembly of knowledge, experience, learning, and intuition. Credibility, a necessary component of expertise, is the mutual recognition of skill levels and legitimacy.

Weick, as a social psychologist, initially studied the effect of cognitive dissonance on performance. He subsequently studied the flow of action following surprise, enactment, sensemaking of the unexpected, and mindfulness. | Powered by liveSite @ https://www.camelback.net

25/06/2015

15-16 May 2015

23/06/2015

Notes on Communicating Online
(extracted from FutureLearn.com)

Communicating online

Comments should be brief and to the point; no more than two or three short paragraphs. This is a conversation, not a monologue - no one wants to read essays!

Read your comments and replies all the way through before you post them. If you post in a hurry you may regret it later – you can’t delete but you can edit your comments.

Criticise the idea, not the person – and be polite when you do.

Don’t write a reply that you wouldn’t say face to face.

Remember that learners vary in culture, age and experience
Not all learners have English as their first language, so always try to write clearly.

Explain any acronyms you use and avoid jargon if you can
If you see a message that you think is offensive click its ‘Report’ icon. It will be reviewed by moderators and will be removed if they agree with you.

21/06/2015

"Use alternative methods (other than the popular quantitative methods) to explore a phenomenon of interest."

The eight reasons are summed up by Dr. Torsten Pieper, Assistant Editor of the Journal of Family Business Strategy and Assistant Professor at the Cox Family Enterprise Center, Coles College of Business, at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and his colleague, Dr. Joseph Astrachan, Editor-in-Chief of the journal and Executive Director of the Cox Family Enterprise Center and Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship.

Dr. Pieper, who moved from Germany to the US about five years ago, looks at the type of research submitted from different parts of the world. "Moving from Europe to the US, I see there is a marked difference between the output of US researchers compared to their European counterparts in qualitative as opposed to quantitative research for my family of journals," he said, pointing out that well over 75 percent of submissions coming from the US use quantitative methods compared to about 50 percent from Europe.
"This clearly demonstrates to me that European researchers are more embracing of alternative methods to explore a phenomenon of interest," he said. "Going forward, I would like to see a more even balance in the papers submitted from the US."

- See more at: http://www.elsevier.com/connect/8-reasons-i-accepted-your-article .ySujFQOW.dpuf

Journal editors reveal the top reasons a manuscript gets published

21/06/2015

Did you know you can manage your literature review using NVivo?
Watch and learn from this video developed by QSR International- the developer of NVivo - qualitative data management and analysis software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYHxkt8BnnY

If you are thinking about or already use EndNote, watch this video to see the value of combining EndNote with NVivo to produce a quality literature review. F...

19/06/2015

Kaplan and Norton worked with an organisation, analysing their performance and developed a framework to support improvement.

This is an excellent example of a product of a DBA research. A tool you can patent for consultancy.

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/10-074.pdf

17/06/2015

"The journey is the reward" --Steve Jobs
This is true for postgraduates - keep a focus and have a positive mindset throughout your study- it can be most rewarding.

17/06/2015

This is could well be an output of your DBA research. A tool that managers can use.

David Lidow:
"I am on a mission to improve the odds of building a self-sustaining business. I teach with these tools at Princeton which I am now making available to you, for free."

The success map and the 4 stages of enterprise maturity.

http://dereklidow.com/assets/uploads/document_uploads/Startup_Success_Map_8.5x11.pdf

http://dereklidow.com/assets/uploads/document_uploads/Startup_Success_Map_8.5x11.pdf