By Philip A. Cola, PhD, Associate Director, Academic Affairs, DM Programs
It has long been our belief that individuals come to the Doctor of Management (DM) programs at Weatherhead to enhance their professional expertise with an increased degree of academic rigor. The DM program is aimed to attract outstanding experienced managers who hold master’s degrees and want to learn scholarly skills in order to apply academic rigor to relevant real world problems of practice. The goal is to produce “research that matters” to contemporary business management problems in chosen areas of study.
As a student, DM program leadership often referenced that the faculty were “consistently reviewing and attempting to improve the curriculum to keep up with market trends and the state of the art approaches to management research”. Sometimes this seemed like a way to get students to complain a little less about the amount of work or the challenges that we faced in matriculating through the program. However, about halfway through the program, you could see that materials and approaches for courses you had already taken were in fact evolving for the cohorts after you. It was similar to observing efforts at “continuous quality improvement” in other disciplines or organizations. For me this brought to life the words that we were hearing and I had an improved sense of the commitment toward quality in the DM program.
Today, the evolutions of these ideas of continuous quality improvement of the DM curriculum have become an important part of my role with the program. One of the first things that I was asked to work on when I arrived as faculty in 2017 was to reorganize the forum for the faculty working in the two methodological sequences so that they would meet regularly and be able to openly express their ideas for improving our approaches to ensure long-term methodological rigor in research methods and design.
This has led to the emergence of the utilization of a constructivist grounded theory approach most frequently for our qualitative research. A few weeks ago, a discussion was underway about the pros and cons of grounded theory. Someone said, “This is no longer your father’s approach to grounded theory”, signaling to me that we had indeed evolved our own way of ensuring that grounded theory methodology was being expressed in a contemporary way and following the more recent trends of Charmaz, 2014 and Johnson et al, 2015.
We have started to see more and more students moving from individual semi-structured interviews to focus group interviews. Students are embracing the importance of memoing after their interviews and in turn coding those memos as a source of original data as well in an electronic system for organizing messy qualitative data called NVivo. This follows the contemporary approaches of Charmaz, 2014 and Saldana, 2015. Yet we still investigate ways during our qualitative team meetings to explore different qualitative methodologies for students because the method needs to align with the particular research questions under investigation. We have explored ideas around ethnography (or mini ethnography) and action research. Recognize that the choice of grounded theory many years ago was so that students could reasonably complete the DM program in three years with a mixed method DM thesis. Action research or ethnography requires deeper immersion into environments where action can be taken or deep observation can be interpreted so there are some natural limitations (that benefit the limited time of the students in the program) as to the qualitative methods that we recommend, but the evolution to constructivist grounded theory ensures a state of the art approach for now.
The evolution of the quantitative sequence of methods has emerged more rapidly in the past few years, which is an indication of changing standards in the field and practice of management research. We have moved to syntax-based programming in SPSS and Mplus to ensure that the estimates produced for covariance-based structural equation models are more accurate and in line with theory and approaches for multivariate analyses. This causes a great deal of consternation among students, but it would be inappropriate for faculty to allow for approaches that produce less than accurate estimates to continue as our practice. It is difficult being the executive doctoral program in management that is consistently on the cutting edge, but we honor this position we have in the market.
Quantitatively we have also begun to move students to experimental designs, analyses of pre-existing or secondary data, or alternative approaches to single response survey data alone. More recently there has been discussion among faculty about agent based modeling as a computational approach to examine complex adaptive systems. In the quantitative sequence we have to again (just like qualitative approaches) balance the rigor with what is actionable and manageable in a lock-step three to four year doctoral program for executives. This is the challenge before all of us that we work very diligently to shape, balance and re-organize until we come up with approaches that are rigorous and manageable for students.
This is not easy, but the pure challenge of managing this is often invigorating, and students or alumni are often grateful for the challenges that they overcame which increases the pride and reputation of the degrees that they earn. I now know for sure the effort that the program and its faculty put into methodological “continuous quality improvement” and it is impressive. The staff and faculty of the DM program are committed to ensuring student success in the program and beyond the program so that all of our students make the difference in the world that they desire to achieve. I certainly do not feel short changed in any way and I have enormous pride in the degree that I earned and the amount of rigor required from the Weatherhead DM program. In presenting my own research at conferences or submitting my work to journals, reviewers and editors, may not always like my research ideas or the way in which I articulate them, but it is very rare to have someone question the methodological rigor of what I learned in the DM program.
It has long been our belief that individuals come to the Doctor of Management (DM) programs at Weatherhead to enhance their professional expertise with an increased degree of academic rigor. The DM program is aimed to attract outstanding experienced managers who hold master’s degrees and want to learn scholarly skills in order to apply academic rigor to relevant real world problems of practice. The goal is to produce “research that matters” to contemporary business management problems in chosen areas of study.
As a student, DM program leadership often referenced that the faculty were “consistently reviewing and attempting to improve the curriculum to keep up with market trends and the state of the art approaches to management research”. Sometimes this seemed like a way to get students to complain a little less about the amount of work or the challenges that we faced in matriculating through the program. However, about halfway through the program, you could see that materials and approaches for courses you had already taken were in fact evolving for the cohorts after you. It was similar to observing efforts at “continuous quality improvement” in other disciplines or organizations. For me this brought to life the words that we were hearing and I had an improved sense of the commitment toward quality in the DM program.
Today, the evolutions of these ideas of continuous quality improvement of the DM curriculum have become an important part of my role with the program. One of the first things that I was asked to work on when I arrived as faculty in 2017 was to reorganize the forum for the faculty working in the two methodological sequences so that they would meet regularly and be able to openly express their ideas for improving our approaches to ensure long-term methodological rigor in research methods and design.
This has led to the emergence of the utilization of a constructivist grounded theory approach most frequently for our qualitative research. A few weeks ago, a discussion was underway about the pros and cons of grounded theory. Someone said, “This is no longer your father’s approach to grounded theory”, signaling to me that we had indeed evolved our own way of ensuring that grounded theory methodology was being expressed in a contemporary way and following the more recent trends of Charmaz, 2014 and Johnson et al, 2015.
We have started to see more and more students moving from individual semi-structured interviews to focus group interviews. Students are embracing the importance of memoing after their interviews and in turn coding those memos as a source of original data as well in an electronic system for organizing messy qualitative data called NVivo. This follows the contemporary approaches of Charmaz, 2014 and Saldana, 2015. Yet we still investigate ways during our qualitative team meetings to explore different qualitative methodologies for students because the method needs to align with the particular research questions under investigation. We have explored ideas around ethnography (or mini ethnography) and action research. Recognize that the choice of grounded theory many years ago was so that students could reasonably complete the DM program in three years with a mixed method DM thesis. Action research or ethnography requires deeper immersion into environments where action can be taken or deep observation can be interpreted so there are some natural limitations (that benefit the limited time of the students in the program) as to the qualitative methods that we recommend, but the evolution to constructivist grounded theory ensures a state of the art approach for now.
The evolution of the quantitative sequence of methods has emerged more rapidly in the past few years, which is an indication of changing standards in the field and practice of management research. We have moved to syntax-based programming in SPSS and Mplus to ensure that the estimates produced for covariance-based structural equation models are more accurate and in line with theory and approaches for multivariate analyses. This causes a great deal of consternation among students, but it would be inappropriate for faculty to allow for approaches that produce less than accurate estimates to continue as our practice. It is difficult being the executive doctoral program in management that is consistently on the cutting edge, but we honor this position we have in the market.
Quantitatively we have also begun to move students to experimental designs, analyses of pre-existing or secondary data, or alternative approaches to single response survey data alone. More recently there has been discussion among faculty about agent based modeling as a computational approach to examine complex adaptive systems. In the quantitative sequence we have to again (just like qualitative approaches) balance the rigor with what is actionable and manageable in a lock-step three to four year doctoral program for executives. This is the challenge before all of us that we work very diligently to shape, balance and re-organize until we come up with approaches that are rigorous and manageable for students.
This is not easy, but the pure challenge of managing this is often invigorating, and students or alumni are often grateful for the challenges that they overcame which increases the pride and reputation of the degrees that they earn. I now know for sure the effort that the program and its faculty put into methodological “continuous quality improvement” and it is impressive. The staff and faculty of the DM program are committed to ensuring student success in the program and beyond the program so that all of our students make the difference in the world that they desire to achieve. I certainly do not feel short changed in any way and I have enormous pride in the degree that I earned and the amount of rigor required from the Weatherhead DM program. In presenting my own research at conferences or submitting my work to journals, reviewers and editors, may not always like my research ideas or the way in which I articulate them, but it is very rare to have someone question the methodological rigor of what I learned in the DM program.
