Assessing Research in Employment Figures and Studies Part One

Ani Pak and I recently explored some of the inherent problems of employment research. Employment assessment numbers and research have innate challenges in assessing macroeconomic conditions with finite resources and variable methodologies. In my assessment it seems that each journal provides its own interpretations and definitions that correspond to very different results. I selected four refereed journals on this subject to contextually analyze their composition and draw conclusions about the journals and their methodologies in employment studies.

The starting point for comparisons came between the Fail Thomas work from The Journal of Business Communications which was assertion based using a few statistics to outlines the points of the author which is quite different from drawing results from static statistics. The first suggests the author is seeking out information to support their general thesis instead of looking at the numbers to draw conclusions. I found this same phenomenon from the 1006 refereed journal by Brian Williams in “The First 10 Years of Accounting History”. The second mentioned however seems to transition when introducing raw data and makes a turn to be more analytical of the results. These two articles focus on diversity of workplace in the fields of business and educational institutions respectively.

I separated that first set of two articles mentally from the second set of references which used more resources in their work and thus made more reflections and analysis based on their findings. The next set of resources was written with lead work from Kevin Hindle on entrepreneurship research and Ramona Heck’s work on the same subject. The similar material also makes grouping this pair appropriate. These two pieces highlight a commentary on how family business strategies have subsided through the generations as quoted from Heck, “Warly family business knowledge and research came from a variety of disciplinary roots…and fields of study” (Heck,2).

Heck describes how early research brought their own methodologies from the industry which they derived their knowledge form. Heck and Williams both agree that professional organizations have established a new norm for providing data and research. Williams bring forth an opinion that the high importance of research is left wanting because the academics who would be capable of producing high quality research but cannot because of the “very little incentive to do so because academic journals do not look kindly” upon confirming existing theories rather than creating new standards (Williams, 2).

The use of varying levels of sources is an interesting dichotomy between the four pieces. Gail for example uses frequent references to Kathy Wohlert’s “An Approach to Developing communication Strategies for Enhancing Organizational Capacity” (Gail, 1). More than two paragraphs focus on this and another related article and make Gail’s work seem sort of an update to the work done by previous researchers.