CHAP: 04

THE CRITICAL LITRATURE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION
DEFINITION:

The literature review is,

“The selection of available documents (both published and unpublished) on the topic, which
contain information, ideas, data and evidence written from a particular standpoint to fulfill
certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated,
and the effective evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed”

(Hart, 1998 , p. 13).

FUNCTION OF CRITICAL LITRATURE REVIEW:

In general, a literature review ensures that:

1. The research effort is positioned relative to existing knowledge and builds on this
knowledge.
2. You can look at a problem from a specific angle; it shapes your thinking and sparks useful
insights on the topic of your research.
3. You do not run the risk of “reinventing the wheel”, that is, wasting effort on trying to
rediscover some thing that is already known.
4. You are able to introduce relevant terminology and to define key terms used in your
writing. This is important because the same term may have different meanings,
depending on the context in which it is used.
5. You obtain useful insights of the research methods that others have used to provide an
answer to similar research questions. Knowledge of the research methods used by
others allows you to replicate existing research, which will help you to relate your
research findings to the findings of others.
6. The research effort can be contextualized in a wider academic debate. In other words, it
allows you to relate your findings to the findings of others.
Indeed, familiarity with the literature on your subject area is beneficial in exploratory,
descriptive, and in causal research. A literature review is helpful in both an academic (or
fundamental) and a non‐academic (or applied) context. In both cases, a good theoretical base
will add rigor to the study.

A critical review of the literature will spark many useful insights on your research topic; it will
allow you to work in an expert manner, to make informed decisions, and to benefit from existing
knowledge in many different ways.

DEFINING WAITING FOR SERVICE

Waiting for service refers to the time between the point a customer is ready to receive a service
and the point the service starts (Taylor, 1994). A customer may have to wait before, during, or
after a transaction. In other words, there are three kinds of waits: pre‐process waits, in‐process
waits, and post‐process waits.

(Dubé‐Rioux, Schmitt & LeClerc 1988; Miller, Kahn & Luce, 2008).

Example:

Imagine you are flying with an airline from point A to B.

Pre-process wait

You may have to wait before you can board the plane.

In-process wait

Because the plan cannot land

Post-process wait

Because you cannot disembark immediately

Since the research questions of your study serve as the starting point for your critical review of
the literature, some of the functions of a critical literature review depend on the type of study
and the specific research approach that is taken

HOW TO APPROACH THE LITERATURE REVIEW

The first step of a literature review involves the identification of the various published and
unpublished materials that are available on the topic of interest, and gaining access to these.

➢ DATA SOURCE
➢
Definition:
Data source refers to specific materials or information that researcher use to gathered
data and evidence for their study.

These sources include books, academic journals, research articles, government reports.

The quality of a literature review depends on a cautious selection and reading of books,
academic and professional journals, reports, theses, conference proceedings,
unpublished manuscripts, and the like.

Academic books and journals are, in general, the most useful sources of information.

Professional journals, reports, and even newspapers may also be valuable because they
can provide you with specific, real world information about markets, industries, or
companies.

1. TEXTBOOKS:

Textbooks are a useful source of theory in a specific area. An advantage of textbooks is

that they can cover a broad range of topics. What’s more, textbooks can cover a topic
much more thoroughly than articles can. Hence, textbooks offer a good starting point
from which to find more detailed sources such as journal articles, theses, and
unpublished manuscripts. A downside of textbooks is that they tend to be less up to
date than journals.

2. JOURNALS:

Both academic and professional journals are important sources of up‐to‐date

information.
Articles in academic journals have generally been peer-reviewed: this means that the
articles have been subject to the scrutiny of experts in the same field before being
accepted for publication.

• Review articles (that may or may not contain a meta‐analysis: a type of data
analysis in which the results of several studies are combined and analyzed as if
they were the results of one large study) summarize previous research findings to
inform the reader of the state of existing research.
Review articles are very useful because they provide an overview of all the important
research in a specific area.

• Research articles are reports of empirical research, describing one or a few

related studies. The conceptual background section of a research article provides
a compact overview of relevant literature. Research articles also provide a
detailed description of the purpose of the study, the method(s) used, and the
results of the study.

3. THESES:

PhD theses often contain an exhaustive review of the literature in a specific area. Most
PhD theses include several empirical chapters. These chapters often have the same
structure and characteristics as academic journal articles. Note that not every empirical
chapter of a thesis is eventually published in an academic journal.

4. CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS:
Conference proceedings can be useful in providing the latest research, or research that
has not (yet) been published. Conference proceedings are very up to date, and for this
reason this information source is quite valuable if you are working in a relatively new
area or domain. Not every manuscript presented at a conference is eventually published
in an academic journal; hence you must critically assess the quality of this information
source.

5. UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS:

The APA defines an unpublished manuscript as any information source that is not
“officially” released by an individual, publishing house, or other company.

Examples of unpublished manuscripts may include papers accepted for publication but
still “in press,” data from an unpublished study, letters, manuscripts in preparation, and
personal communications (including e‐mails). Unpublished manuscripts are often very
up to date.

6. REPORTS:

Government departments and corporations commission or carry out a large amount of

research. Their published findings provide a useful source of specific market, industry, or
company information.

7. NEWSPAPERS:

Newspapers provide up‐to‐date business information. They are a useful source of

specific market, industry, or company information. Note that opinions in newspapers are
not always unbiased.

8. THE INTERNET:

The amount of information that can be found on the World Wide Web is enormous. You
can search for (the details of) books, journals and journal articles, and conference
proceedings, as well as for specialized data such as company publications and reports.
The number of newspapers, magazines, and journals that is available electronically is
enormous.

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! can help you to find relevant information. For
instance, Google Scholar, which can be accessed from the Google homepage, can help
you to identify academic literature, such as peer‐reviewed papers, theses, books,
abstracts, and articles from academic publishers, universities, and other scholarly
organizations.

➢ Searching for literature

With modern technology, locating sources where the topics of interest have been
published has become much easier. Almost every library today has computer online
systems to locate published information. Computerized databases provide a number of
advantages.

First = they save enormous amounts of time.

Second= they are comprehensive in their listing and review of references.
Third= gaining access to them is relatively inexpensive.

For these reasons the researcher can focus on material most central to the research
effort.

Most libraries have the following electronic resources at their disposal:

• Electronic journals. Your library is probably subscribed to journals that are

published or made available online. Discover which journals are provided online
by your library.

• Full-text databases. Full‐text databases provide the full text of the article. Find
out which full‐text databases are provided by your library.

• Bibliographic databases. Bibliographic databases display only the bibliographic

citations; that is, the name of the author, the title of the article (or book), source
of publication, year, volume, and page numbers. These contain the same
information as can be found in the Bibliographic Index(means list of sources such
 as books, articles) books in libraries, which are periodically updated, and include
articles published in periodicals, newspapers, books, and so on.

• Abstract databases. Abstract databases also provide an abstract or summary of

articles. They do not provide the full text of an article or manuscript.

➢ Evaluating the literature

Accessing the online system and searching for literature in the area of interest will provide a
comprehensive bibliography on the subject. Because the search for literature can sometimes
provide as many as 100 or more results, you will have to carefully select relevant books and
articles.

ABSTRACT OF AN ARTICLE:

The abstract of an article usually provides an overview of the study purpose, general research
strategy, findings, and conclusions. A good abstract thus provides you with enough information
to help you to decide whether an article is relevant for your study.

ARTICLE INTRODUCTION:

An article’s introduction also provides an overview of the problem addressed by the research
and specific research objectives. The introduction often ends with a summary of the research
questions that guide the study.

RECENT RESEARCH:

A good literature review needs to include references to the key studies in the field. For this
reason, articles and books that are often cited by others must be included in your literature
review, even if these articles and books were written 30 or even 40 years ago. Of course, more
recent work should also be incorporated in your literature survey since recent work will build on
a broader and more up‐to‐date stream of literature than older work.
QUALITY OF JOURNAL:

The quality of the journal that published an article can also be used as an indicator of the
quality of an article.

Important questions in this respect are: “Is the journal peer‐reviewed; that is, do all articles
have to undergo a review process before they are published?” and “What is the impact factor of
the journal?” The impact factor of a journal can be viewed as the average number of citations in
a year given to those papers in the journal that were published during a given period (usually
the two preceding years). Because important articles are cited more often than articles that are
not important, the impact factor of a journal is frequently used as a proxy for the importance of
that journal to its field.

➢ Documenting the literature review

As stated earlier, the purpose of the literature review is to help the researcher to build on the
work of others and to make informed decisions during the various stages of the research
project. A review of the literature identifies and highlights relevant themes and documents
significant findings, frameworks, and/or instruments from earlier research that will serve as the
foundation for the current project. Documenting the literature review is important to convince
the reader that the researcher is knowledgeable about the problem area and has done the
preliminary homework that is necessary to conduct the research.

A literature review is intended to synthesize (and not necessarily to summarize) relevant

research on your topic. To synthesize is to combine two or more elements to form a new whole.
In your literature review, the elements are the findings of the literature you select and read; the
new whole is the conclusion you draw from these findings.

APA (American psychological association):

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2012) offers detailed
information regarding citations, quotations, references, and so on, and is one of the accepted
styles of referencing in the management area.
OTHER FORMATS: The Chicago Manual of Style (2010) and Turabian’s Manual for Writers
(2013).

To conclude, let us take a portion of a completed literature review and examine how the activity
has helped to:

a. introduce the subject of study,

b. identify the problem statement
c. build on previous research to offer the basis from which to get to the next steps of the
theoretical framework and hypothesis development.

ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS:

Organizational effectiveness is an extent to which an organization achieve its goal with given
resoursses and mean.

Organization theorists have defined organizational effectiveness (OE) in various ways.

OE has been described in terms of,

Objectives, goals,efficiency, resources acquisition, employee satisfaction, interdependence, and

organizational vitality.

OE models are essentially value‐based classifications of the construct (the values being those of
the researchers) and the potential number of models that can be generated by researchers is
virtually limitless. Researchers are now moving away from a single model and are taking
contingency approaches to conceptualizing OE

From the above extract, several insights can be gained. The literature review

✓ introduces the subject of study (organizational effectiveness),

✓ highlights the problem (that we do not have a good conceptual framework for
understanding what OE is),
✓ summarizes the work done so far on the topic in a manner that convinces the reader
that the researcher has indeed surveyed the work done in the area of OE and wants to
contribute to the understanding of the concept, taking off on the earlier contingency
approaches in a more creative way.
 The scholar has carefully paved the way for the next step, which is to develop a more viable
and robust of organizational effectiveness. Once the scholar has explicated the framework
as to what constitutes OE and what the factors that influence it are, the next step is to
develop testable hypotheses to see if the new model is indeed viable.

ETHICAL ISSUES

Research involves building on the work of others. When you summarize, add to, or challenge
the work of others, there are two important pitfalls that you have to beware of:

1. Purposely misrepresenting the work of other authors – that is, their viewpoints, ideas,
models, findings, conclusions, interpretations, and so on.

2. Plagiarism – the use of another ’ s original words, arguments, or ideas as though they were
your own,

even if this is done in good faith, out of carelessness, or out of ignorance.

Both purposely misrepresenting the work of others and plagiarism are considered to be fraud.

PLAGIRISM:

Plagiarism is a type of fraud that is taken very seriously in the academic world, mainly because
using the work of others as if it were your own does not convey much respect for the efforts
that other people have put into their work.

Two other reasons to take plagiarism very seriously are provided by IJzermans and Van Schaaijk
( 2007 ). They point out that:

✓ Plagiarism makes it is difficult for the reader to verify whether your claims about other
authors and sources are accurate.
✓ You are participating in a scientific debate. You need to make your position in this debate
clear by designating the authors whose work you are building on or whose ideas you are
challenging.
COMMON FORMS OF PLAGIRISM:

Sources not cited:

“Th e Ghost Writer” The writer turns in another ’ s work, word‐for‐word, as his or her own.

2. “Th e Photocopy” The writer copies signifi cant portions of text straight from a single source,
without alteration.

3. “Th e Potluck Paper” The writer tries to disguise plagiarism by copying from several diff erent
sources, tweaking the sentences to make them fi t together while retaining most of the original
phrasing

4. “Th e Poor Disguise” Although the writer has retained the essential content of the source, he
or she has altered the paper ’ s appearance slightly by changing key words and phrases.

5. “Th e Labor of Laziness” The writer takes the time to paraphrase most of the paper from
other sources and make it all fit together, instead of spending the same eff ort on original work.

6. “The Self‐Stealer” The writer “borrows” generously from his or her previous work, violating
policies concerning the expectation of originality adopted by most academic institutions.

Sources cited (butt still plagiarized)

“The Forgotten Footnote” The writer mentions an author ’ s name for a source, but neglects to
include specific information on the location of the material referenced. Th is oft en masks other
forms of plagiarism by obscuring source locations.

2. “The Misinformer” The writer provides inaccurate information regarding the sources, making
it impossible to find them.

3. “The Too‐Perfect Paraphrase” The writer properly cites a source, but neglects to put in
quotation marks text that has been copied word‐for‐word, or close to it. Although attributing
the basic ideas to the source, the writer is falsely claiming original presentation and
interpretation of the information.

4. “Th e Resourceful Citer” The writer properly cites all sources, paraphrasing and using
quotations appropriately. The catch? The paper contains almost no original work! It is
sometimes difficult to spot this form of plagiarism because it looks like any other well‐
researched document.
5. “The Perfect Crime” Well, we all know it doesn ’ t exist. In this case, the writer properly
quotes and cites sources in some places, but goes on to paraphrase other arguments from those
sources without citation. Th is way, the writer tries to pass off the paraphrased material as his or
her own analysis of the cited material.

SOME ONLINE RESOURCES USEFUL FOR BUSINESS

RESEARCH

➢ Online data base

Databases contain raw data stored in a variety of ways. Computerized databases can be
purchased that deal with statistical data, financial data, texts, and the like. Computer network
links allow the sharing of these databases, which are updated on a regular basis.

Some of the databases useful for business research are listed below:

• ABI/INFORM Global and ABI/INFORM

• The Business Periodicals Index (BPI)
• Dow Jones Factiva
• EconLit
• The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
• PsycINFO
• RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)
• SSRN (Social Science Research Network)
• Web of Stories
• World Development Indicators (World Bank)

For more understanding about these database visit book page 63

➢ On the Web

Some of the many websites useful for business research are provided below.
General

Accounting: The Accounting Research Network (ARN) was founded to increase communication
among scholars and practitioners of accounting worldwide. ARN encourages the early
distribution of research results by publishing abstracts of top quality research papers in three
journals: Auditing, Litigation and Tax Abstracts, Financial Accounting Abstracts, and Managerial
Accounting Abstracts. The journals publish abstracts of articles dealing with empirical,
experimental, and theoretical research in financial and managerial accounting, auditing, and tax
strategy. ARN is a division of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Management

Financial economics

Marketing: The Marketing Science Institute is a nonprofit, membership‐based organization

dedicated to bridging the gap between academic marketing theory and business practice

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL DATABASES
The following indexes help in compiling a comprehensive bibliography on business topics.

1. Bibliographic Index. A cumulative bibliography of bibliographies – an index that lists, by

subject, sources of bibliographies.

2. Business Books in Print. This indexes, by author, title, and business subject, the books in
print in the areas of finance, business, and economics.

3. Business Periodicals Index. This is a cumulative subject index covering 270 business
periodicals.

4. Management Information Guide. This offers bibliographic references in many business

areas.

5. Human Resource Management Abstracts. This is an index of articles that deal with the
management of people and the subject area of organizational behavior.
 6. Psychological Abstracts. This summarizes the literature in psychology, covering several
hundred journals, reports, monographs, and other scientific documents.

7. Public Affairs Information Service Bulletin. This has a selective subject index of books,
yearbooks, directories, government documents, pamphlets, and over a thousand
periodicals relating to national and international economic and public affairs.

8. Work Related Abstracts. This contains abstracts of articles, dissertations, and books
relating to labor, personnel, and organizational behavior.

APA FORMAT FOR REFERENCING RELEVANT ARTICLES

A distinguish between bibliography and refrence has been made

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

A bibliography is a listing of work that is relevant to the main topic of research interest arranged
in alphabetical order of the last names of the authors.

REFERNCE LIST:

reference list is a subset of the bibliography, which includes details of all the citations used in
the literature review and elsewhere in the paper, arranged, again, in alphabetical order of the
last names of the authors. These citations have the goals of crediting the authors and enabling
the reader to find the works cited.

At least three modes of referencing are followed in business research. These are based on the
format provided in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA)
(2012), the Chicago Manual of Style (2010), and Turabian’s Manual for Writers (2013). Each of
these manuals specifies, with examples, how books, journals, newspapers, dissertations, and
other materials are to be referenced in manuscripts.

REFERENCING AND QUOTATION IN THE LITERATURE

REVIEW SECTION

Cite all references in the body of the paper using the author–year method of citation; that is,
the surname of the author(s) and the year of publication are given in the appropriate places.

For more understanding with help of example visit book page no 69

QUOTATIONS IN TEXT
Quotations should be given exactly as they appear in the source. The original wording,
punctuation, spelling, and italics must be preserved even if they are erroneous. The citation of
the source of a direct quotation should always include the page number(s) as well as the
reference.

Use double quotation marks for quotations in text.

Use single quotation marks to identify the material that was enclosed in double quotation
marks in the original source.

If you want to emphasize certain words in a quotation, underline them and immediately after
the underlined words, insert within brackets the words: italics added. Use three ellipsis points (.
. .) to indicate that you have omitted material from the original source.

If the quotation is of more than 40 words, set it in a free‐standing style starting on a new line
and indenting the left margin a further five spaces. Type the entire quotation double spaced on
the new margin, indenting the first line of paragraphs five spaces from the new margin,

EXAMPLE

Following the outcome of an event, there is initially a general positive or negative reaction (a
“primitive” emotion) based on the perceived success or failure of that outcome (the “primary”
appraisal). (. . .) Following the appraisal of the outcome, a causal ascription will be sought if that
outcome was unexpected and/or important. A different set of emotions is then generated by the
chosen attributions.

If you intend publishing an article in which you have quoted extensively from a copyrighted
work, it is important that you seek written permission from the owner of the copyright. Make
sure that you also footnote the permission obtained with respect to the quoted material. Failure
to do so may result in unpleasant consequences, including legal action taken through copyright
protection laws.

IMPORTANT POINTS
1. A literature review is helpful in both an academic (or fundamental) and a non-academic (or
applied) context.
2. textbooks can cover a topic much more thoroughly than articles can.
3. Review articles are very useful because they provide an overview of all the important research
in a specific area.
4. Research articles are reports of empirical research, describing one or a few related studies.
5. Internet is unregulated and unmonitored.
6. Databases include, among others, listings of journal articles, books in print, census data,
dissertation abstracts, conference papers, and newspaper abstracts that are useful for
business research.
7. A glance at the titles of the articles or books will indicate which of them may be pertinent and
which others are likely to be peripheral to the contemplated study.
8. A good literature review needs to include references to the key studies in the field.
9. Both purposely misrepresenting the work of others and plagiarism are considered to be fraud.
10. ARN is a division of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).