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1. Breadth of options. For the culminating essay, students are encouraged to emphasize their deeply felt interests. To experience the project as an opportunity, not a hurdle. Flexibility is the most important strategic principle in setting the norms for acceptable problem areas and for research methodology options in MBAD 625. Any topic on community economic development, economic geography, leadership, strategy, human resources, organizational behaviour, marketing, or other business disciplines is acceptable.
2. Interactive development/approval process. It is unwise – indeed, impossible – to lay out highly specific requirements to suit all cases. Instead, within broad parameters, each student’s project plan has to emerge through an interactive and iterative process. The key strategic principle of that process is to enrich a student’s opportunity to develop an engaged and good quality piece of work. Particulars will have to evolve through practice and further discussions, but presently the process involves the following.
Each student would submit a proposal to the MBA in CED office, for feedback and initial approval/screening. This stage could include an interview. The subsequent development and assessment would then become the responsibility of the student and his or her two academic advisors. The student will have a major say in who these advisors will be. One’s mentor-practitioner will also play an important part in the evolution of the project.
If the envisioned project pushes the prescribed boundaries of theme and/or design (see below), it is the student’s responsibility (in consultation with the advisors) to justify her/his approach within the proposal. We also encourage students to include project elements that expand their personal range of previously achieved expertise.
3. Essay competencies. We expect the final paper to embody good standards, which include the following.
(a) It meets firm academic standards of scholarship and of presentation form.
(b) It makes a significant contribution to the CED or business literature – not that it has to be a ground-breaking triumph, but something that CED practitioners and managers will find worth reading.
(c) It is written well – not a stylistic masterpiece, but clear and thus accessible to a rather broad readership.
(d) It should not exceed 150 pages (37,500 words), for the main body of the report, excluding appendices and the like.
4. Thematic & research design options. We addressed two basic questions about parameters here.
(a) Quantitative, qualitative, or both? The research problem has to dictate the process, not the reverse. Thus, the type of data and ensuing analysis may be quantitative or qualitative or a combination, depending on the nature of the research questions.
(b) “Business” or “social/community” focus, or both? The short answer is “both.” But these components are not to be understood narrowly or rigidly.
There is a flexible interpretation of what is meant by a business focus. At one extreme, a student may opt to mobilize technical tools and frameworks in accounting, venture analysis, finance, etc. At the other extreme, a student may deal with themes and approaches that are business-relevant rather than “technical.” The former might be matters of government policy, leadership, organizational behaviour, consumer or community responses, or many other such possibilities.
Community themes must also appear in the essay, even in the instance where the student designs a project with a technical business-analysis focus. (See the heuristic “model” A, below.)
The following sketch of five “typical” approaches or heuristic models will suggest the range of flexibility we envision. These descriptions merely indicate – rather than rigidly prescribe – students’ options (remember p.1, above). Also, blends of these forms are feasible. Students should use these categories as a stimulus for thought, not to pigeonhole their projects into one or another category in the list.
A. A conventional business emphasis. Analysis of an existing or proposed business as a multifaceted feasibility study, etc. Probably more quantitative in strategy. Must also, however, address CED questions of what the business “does for” the community – beyond such elementary issues as yielding jobs.
B. A qualitative case study of a CED initiative. Probably relying on (for example) participant observation, interviews, &/or textual analysis as data-generating approaches. Must not be mere “description,” such as a sheerly “factual history.” Rather, has to build around a theoretical concern or around an issue/problem. Ought to culminate in a statement of what the case teaches about community impact and what is to be done as a consequence.
C. A survey. Design and carry out a sample survey. Typically quantitative. Focusing on any subset of a wide variety of potential issues, while ensuring that both social/community and business-relevant dimensions fall within the scope.
D. A problem-focused analysis. Quantitative &/or qualitative. A wide range of thematic and design foci are possible here. For example: design a process for program evaluation; design and carry out a program-evaluation study; scrutinize issues of governance in a CED initiative.
E. A theory-centered critique. Data could consist of documentary texts (published &/or unpublished). One version of this option, for example, could be study of an enterprise, policy process, movement, etc., relative to a fundamental theoretical model of social relations and priorities (such as free-enterprise market theory or feminism or socialism or communitarianism), with implications for assessment of good CED practice.
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