Doctor of Business Administration

This module supports the student’s development of critical self-awareness and the importance of this for future theoretical, analytical and practical approaches to research.   Competing paradigms around self-reflection will be taught and students will undertake a self-analysis from a range of perspectives.   They will be encouraged to explore their own professional development and the goals, values and priorities that led them to make critical decisions at various junctures in their career.  They will position themselves in relation to the latest theoretical findings and debates in their field and critically evaluate those positions.   Whilst reflecting critically on the past, students will also explore what future successful  thought-leaders and practitioner researchers will look like, constructing a challenging professional development plan to supplement the more formal taught academic modules and hence encouraging the independent learning required for success at this level.

This module is designed to cultivate an ability to identify, analyse and creatively engage in the discourses, debates, problems and opportunities at the forefront of the professional field or discipline.   Students are encouraged to adopt multiple perspective taking, cognitive flexibility, creativity and originality, systemic thinking and global mind-sets in the addressing of complex issues which may involve conflicts of values, interests, goals and needs.  The module will explore in particular the debates about the role of capitalism in society and students will be encouraged to critically analyse, evaluate and apply the arguments to their own research.  Having engaged in the issues, the module helps students identify how their research can contribute to further understanding and generate original, insightful and useful knowledge which can make an important contribution the development of their field.

In this module students will be introduced to the various channels through which research is incorporated into knowledge.  This includes academic conferences, scholarly and professional journals and conferences and seminars held by professional bodies.   Students will acquire the skills of adapting writing and presentational styles to different audiences in order to maximise engagement with their topic. The significance and importance of engaging in a range of communities of practice and reaching out to relevant disciplines and professions will be emphasised.

This module develops your understanding of research practice by examining different theoretical positions and approaches to research.  You will explore issues of ontology and epistemology and the ways in which these influence choices of research approach and methodology in greater depth.  You will develop your understanding of the situated nature of research ethics, and different positions taken by researcher in relation to ethical issues, as well as exploring the ethical demands of research governance. In particular the issues around workplace insider action research will be explored as this will in most cases be the context for the DBA thesis. This module also includes an element of dissertation planning, to enable you to embark on development towards your thesis.

In this module students will be introduced to the latest techniques in research methods including the use of social media, gaming technology and insight analysis, whilst also developing skills in more traditional quantitative and qualitative methods.  Students will develop their understanding of how different techniques can be used in handling simple and complex data.  They will consider the theoretical and practical contexts in which researchers choose particular quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods and will develop an in-depth understanding of a variety of data collection methods.  The relationship between data collection methods and different techniques for data analysis will also be explored.

In this module students will apply the learning they have acquired over the taught modules in the implementation of a pilot study.  They will experience, evaluate and analyse a range of quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis techniques, which they will then be able to apply in management research contexts.  Students will experience the practical and theoretical strengths and limitations of various approaches to research and be able to incorporate this learning into their final research proposal.

The candidate will plan, develop, implement, theorise and critically analyse a professional intervention in the workplace which demonstrates doctoral level understanding as identified by FHEQ. The candidate, in consultation with a proposed supervisory team, will submit a proposal for the thesis to RDQC.  Approval by RDQC registers the thesis title.  The progress of the project will be monitored by RDQC in line with the regulations for postgraduate research programmes.