How I chose a topic and conducted methodology

The choice of a topic is extremely arduous. When I started my PhD course, after consulting several research committees I thought to take IT and ITES area. I started research about it and found very interesting topic - RP software. The software was rendering services to banks and financial institutions. 

There were three reasons why I felt it as a sound topic for me for further research.

  1. The organization was an Indian company using RP software and registered as an MNC.

  2. This software was in great use by Southeast Asian countries.

  3. This software functioned as a global software that was being used by not only Indian but also international companies.

Before writing a thesis about RP, I rigorously conducted my research. I had several appointments with the vice presidents of the company. I had constant discussions, looked at secondary data, and deeply analysed the use of the software and how it benefited to the company and why it became a global software.

Bearing in mind the business was conducted for RP software in japan, I narrowed down the teams within the company that did business in Japan. Since our aim was to decipher the functionalities of teammates with the software, I interviewed teams from three categories - project managers, project leads, and software engineers. 

Since the interview was held to collect some sort of data so I thought semi-structured interview would be fine to meet the purpose. I was also finalising the methodology tools along with the data collection when an illuminated moment came. I got to know about Barley’s work. The thing what I liked in his work was the methodology used by him to analyze the data that was not in much use in analyzing data.

After reading his work I decided to use semiotics. There were two reasons of this determination - one was to uncover the shared sense of reality as perceived by the members of research communities., and the second reason was his semiotics complimented my primary tool of data collection. 

The next appendix talks about the interview protocol utilized in many research. My informants were very helpful and they always supported me giving guidelines about the project completion successfully. I used to sit with them and talk with them and discuss all issues. I started grasing the semiotics that they used to use. It really helped me, and it was also important for me. 

With further analysis, it was found that semiotics was mentioned in organizations sciences very limited. My informants told me about the major source of empirical data, and I chose Barley’s semantic framework.

Category : Methodology
Leave a Reply