Friday, January 30, 2015

A research on RESEARCH


Suddenly focus in teaching profession has shifted towards research. AICTE and UGC have incorporated a model of performance management for faculty that rewards scholarly research in their area of expertise or interest. So far so good. But it is time to reflect what are we promoting in the name of academic research.In social sciences including management a new breed of professionals have come up who specialize in creating relationship even when none exists, proving universally known and accepted facts null,generating principles of management bases on perceptual survey without referring to the organizational processes and results.Statistical modelling is named as research.There are research syndicates that can offer to collect data about anything from anywhere.So there is every possibility that we end up with a new piece of wisdom that proves that pricing decision is a critical factor for commercial success of a product, after a survey of a sample of 1000 respondents spread over 200 towns of India comprising of 500 males and 500 females representing 4 age group i.e. between 18 to 28 , 28 to 38, 38 to 48 and 48 to 58 that can read and write any of the Indian languages.We can also test the hypotheses that father's age is more than that of the son by taking up another such representative sample.


I do not wish to say that research should not be encouraged. However overemphasis on a set of methods and tools is what is undesirable. Tables and graphs that researcher draws using computer packages add to the volume of knowledge no doubt but what about the depth of knowledge ? Whose concern is this? How about mounting cases of plagiarism ? Does it have anything to do with the kind of rat race that we are promoting in the name of research ? I believe we need to investigate these issues. Oh ,my God, that calls for literature review on the subject to begin with........??

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