Assignment Task: Research Methods for International Business
The first coursework is an individually written essay (1500 words excluding references or bibliography).
The task for the essay is to conduct a 'literature review' based on any 4 academic papers related to any one of the following topics.
Choose any one of the following topics:
1. What are the implications of political risk in a host country for internationalisation of firms?
2. How does cultural distance impact the entry mode choice of firms?
Selection of articles:
As this is a focused review, you must select your 4 articles very carefully. Please refer to the teaching in Week 2 on how to conduct a literature review. Note that the selection of your articles is also important for your mark. Your selected articles should ideally involve 'empirical analysis' - this can be either qualitative or quantitative or mixed methods. You can also select conceptual articles but you should not select literature review papers in your review.
The articles that you select for review must be closely related to the topic and from reliable journals. Refer to the lecture 2 for more information on how to select and review literature. To ascertain if your selected article is reliable, you can refer to the CABS journal guide (in Canvas) for journal ratings. All the journals in the CABS list are reliable, however, journals with 3, 4 and 4* ratings are considered to be excellent journals. Please also note that while your actual 'review' has to be based on 4 articles, you may read and cite more than these 4 articles (e.g. in your introduction) and include them in your bibliography.
Structure of the Coursework:
The essay should be structured as a short introduction about the theme (about 150 words), followed by the review of the four selected papers (about 1200 words), followed by the concluding remarks mentioning specific gaps in the research based on your review and what future research can address (about 150 words). You must provide the bibliography / references in a consistent style.
Tips for a good review:
Remember that a good review of literature is something that goes beyond describing the content of the articles you have selected. You must attempt to compare and contrast the findings of the articles you have selected along the theme of the topic. You must then also discuss why such differences in findings might have occurred - is this because the studies have adopted a different theory, or a different methodology? Finally, based on your review you must summarize what are the general limitations of studies on your topic, and what must future research focus on.