A qualitative review of doctoral dissertations on management in Taiwan

Abstract

The doctoral dissertation is viewed as the capstone to the doctoral program. This study reviews the research topics and methodologies of management doctoral dissertations from 1988 to 1994 in Taiwan. The results of the qualitative analysis of the 120 dissertations are reported as follows: (1) financial management attracted the greatest share of the attention of the doctoral students, followed by information management; (2) over half of the dissertations were discipline based with mathematics, psychology, economics, and computer science being the most common disciplines; (3) over half of the dissertations were predominantly causal; (4) in the case of empirical dissertations, survey methods were mostly used, while mathematical modeling was frequently applied in the case of the non-empirical studies; and (5) most of the empirical studies involved the information industry. In addition, future directions for management doctoral research are also provided.