What purpose does the MPharm research project serve?

In 2004, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) funded research on teaching, learning and assessment within the UK undergraduate pharmacy degree (MPharm), including the compulsory final year project. Documentary analysis showed that all schools met the project requirement, although there were wide variations in the relative contribution of the project to the final year mark and the degree classification. Interviews with staff revealed that organisation of research projects was complex and time consuming and exacerbated by increasing student numbers and the impact of research ethics. 61% of students, surveyed via a self-completion questionnaire (response rate 50.6%) perceived the research project to be very or fairly important. Whilst 47% considered that they had enough choice of topic and 37% said that their training in research methods provided a good foundation for their project, this suggests scope for improvement. In the UK, there are legislative changes impending which may provide an opportunity to review the future purpose and feasibility of a "significant" final year project within the MPharm.

Research strategies for organizational history:a dialogue between historical theory and organization theory

If history matters for organization theory, then we need greater reflexivity regarding the epistemological problem of representing the past; otherwise, history might be seen as merely a repository of ready-made data. To facilitate this reflexivity, we set out three epistemological dualisms derived from historical theory to explain the relationship between history and organization theory: (1) in the dualism of explanation, historians are preoccupied with narrative construction, whereas organization theorists subordinate narrative to analysis; (2) in the dualism of evidence, historians use verifiable documentary sources, whereas organization theorists prefer constructed data; and (3) in the dualism of temporality, historians construct their own periodization, whereas organization theorists treat time as constant for chronology. These three dualisms underpin our explication of four alternative research strategies for organizational history: corporate history, consisting of a holistic, objectivist narrative of a corporate entity; analytically structured history, narrating theoretically conceptualized structures and events; serial history, using replicable techniques to analyze repeatable facts; and ethnographic history, reading documentary sources "against the grain." Ultimately, we argue that our epistemological dualisms will enable organization theorists to justify their theoretical stance in relation to a range of strategies in organizational history, including narratives constructed from documentary sources found in organizational archives. Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved.