AIM AND OBJECTIVES:
This project aims to investigate the impacts of recession on small businesses. The following objectives will help achieve this aim:
• To explore the impacts of recession on small businesses;
• To formulate a framework to explore these impacts on a wider scale to provide strategic guidelines that will help build the resilience of small businesses during the periods of recession.
The five topic areas are given below under five broader areas of interest (i.e., discipline). We strongly suggest you to choose a topic from one of the broader areas. However these are not the exhaustive list and you can choose beyond this list.
o Marketing:
- Marketing communications – such as why do some controversial marketing communications work whilst other fail?
- Social marketing: such as why are social networks more persuasive than traditional word-of-mouth?
- Telemarketing – such as selling goods or services to customer via telephone or surveying customer satisfaction via computer assisted telephone interview
- Branding –Impact of branding in sales or organisational development
- Factors affecting product marketing: How can countries use national culture to help them promote major exports?
o Management:
- Enterprise management – such as how can an organisation (any industry) engage with and facilitate the creation and growth of new ventures, including opportunity identification and evaluation, venture capital, and/or corporate venturing; and what are the processes for managing and improving the success of the enterprise?
- Strategic management – such as investigating high performing and innovative firms in turbulent environments
- Corporate governance such as how can an organisation (any industry) cope with environmental, social, and ethical influences upon their practices and processes of doing business; including environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder management and influence, and business ethics?
o Human Resource Management
- Leadership– such as leadership impacts on organisational performance
- Employee engagement, wages and workforce performance
- Decision making under pressure
- Avoidance approaches to conflict
- Maintaining performance during organisational change
o Accounting
- Managerial accounting- how can managers use accounting information to make better decisions?
- Technological development in accounting – such as technological development relating to information processing and its impact on accounting
- Accounting system design- The effect of accounting information and auditing on the design of organizations
- Forensic accounting- such as using forensic accounting as a tool for fraud detection
o Economics and Finance
- Property market dynamics – such as impact of global financial crisis in Australian property market
- Risk and uncertainty in coal and oil markets
- Financial characteristics of large and small firms
- Economics of production systems
- Managing cash flow