Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Research Methods : ECRM 2012

The 10th European Conference on Research Methodology for Business and Management Studies is hosted this year by the University of Bolton. The Conference Chair is Gill Green I am pleased to be Programme Chair.

ECRM has become a recognised event on the European research conferences calendar and provides the opportunity for individuals, working in the area of business and management research to meet and discuss their experiences of using the varied and expanding range of research methods available to them.

We are pleased to welcome three keynote speakers this year who will address diverse topics. Bob Wood from University of Manchester, UK will look at Mixed, Multi and Muddled: Methods, Paradigms and Research Integrity. Professor Peter Kawalek, also from the University of Manchester will talk about The Struggle to be Engaged and Relevant and Dr Tony Hirst from the Open University, UK will open up the proceedings on the second day.

In addition to the main themes of the conference there are mini tracks on Researching the Student Experience in Higher Education, Teaching Research Methods, Mixed Research Methods, Project Management Research Methods and Ethnographic Research Methods. For the third year ECRM is incorporating a PhD Colloquium and we have been impressed with the range of research and calibre of work that has been submitted for this.

With an initial submission of 139 abstracts, after the double blind, peer review process there are 53 academic papers, 13 PhD papers and 4 work in progress papers published in these Conference Pro-ceedings. These papers come from some 22 different countries including Australia, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the USA.

A selection of the best papers – those agreed by a panel of reviewers and the editor will be published in a conference edition of the EJBRM (Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods www.ejbrm.com). These will be chosen for their quality of writing and relevance to the Journal’s objective of publishing papers that offer new insights or practical help into the application of research methods in business research.

I wish you a most interesting conference.

Rachel McLean

Programme Chair

June 2012