Research
Frequently, the fields of Information Systems (IS) and project management take a human-focused view of project control. In contrast, the work of British sociologist John Law (e.g., Law 1986, 1987) suggests that it can be helpful to view control as an activity in which both human and nonhuman actors may be involved in varied and changing ways, with anticipated and unanticipated results. A longitudinal study, informed by Law's theoretical perspective on control, led to an invitation to an MIS doctoral student, Kevin Fulk, to participate in ICIS (International Conference on Information Systems) doctoral consortium for the top doctoral students worldwide in 2006 and again in 2007.
In marketing, there are two types of research projects, those that study buyers and those that study marketing managers. As an example, in his 1999 University of Houston dissertation Werner Reinartz studied the house-file database of a catalog retailer and found that that long term customers are not necessarily profitable customers, contrary to popular belief. Along with his advisor, V. Kumar, he published this finding in Journal of Marketing (2000) in a paper titled, "On the Profitability of Long-Life Customers in a Noncontractual Setting: An Empirical Investigation and Implications for Marketing" and it won the Lehmann Award for the best dissertation-based research paper to be published in the Journal of Marketing. Werner is now Professor of Marketing, University of Cologne, Germany.
Two of the Department of Management’s doctoral students and the doctoral coordinator published an article in Organizational Research Methods in 2007 that looked at survey research in Management. The study found that most published research does not investigate possible biases in survey research due to respondents’ being different from non-respondents. The study has implications for the validity of much of the research in management.
