Categories of literature
Students need to form a view of the categories of literature associated with their topic. There could be only two (eg. for a historian they could be pre and post-war) or many. Obviously, there is no ‘right’ number of categories. The key point concerns whether the choice and number of categories lead to a better understanding of the topic.
The following numbered blocks of text correspond to cells 1 to 9 in the table. The aim of the exercise is to gain an understanding of existing research so that there is a clear derivation of the research question. Hopefully, the latter enables a more straightforward writing up of the ‘literature section’ as well as carrying out the research itself.
‘Clear derivation of the research question’ means that after one has ‘told the story’ by filling in the nine cells, the research question should follow. In other words, the closing words could be ‘therefore, in light of this picture of existing research, I pose the following research question: …?’ How did that question emerge from the literature? The following takes you through an example of categorising the literature in a nine cell table.
The categories of literature in the example below focus on:
- i) individual examples – dealing with social life in particular organisations, such as boarding schools, jails and hospitals, or where the individual quality of an organisation surfaces by way of case studies;
- ii) the process of re-learning (resocialisation) – this literature deals with a social process. In light of the profound effects of primary socialisation in childhood, the difficulty of re-learning anything, particularly being a competent social being, is a theme in this literature. Making the military officer in a military academy, rehabilitation of the jailed criminal or getting a patient in a long stay hospital to comply with hospital routines are the types of empirical focus of this category of literature;
- iii) conceptual – this category of research may not touch on empirical instances concerned with organisations but, instead, provides explanatory insights that aid our understanding of life in the type of organisation under examination. These insights may follow the application of a causal theory or may be confined to single concepts.