From an early age Emmanuel had a keen interest in current affairs, keeping up to date with significant stories in the news. During the first semester of his MSc in Management, he became particularly concerned about the frequency and impact of large industrial accidents reported by the media. A meeting with his project tutor confirmed for Emmanuel that crisis management was a topic worthy of a research project.
His project tutor suggested Emmanuel make a start on the research by undertaking a literature review on crisis management. Emmanuel had read a book chapter by Denyer and Tranfield (2009) and a book by Petticrew and Roberts (2006) on Systematic Review. Emmanuel was particularly taken with the idea of Systematic Review as it provided him with a step-by-step process for his review. He produced a ten-step protocol (or plan) for his review and shared it with his project tutor. She was impressed.
She felt that he was technically competent and was confident in his ability to perform the review.
1 To help focus the review he sought advice and feedback from a community of academics and practitioners via a discussion forum on LinkedIn. The group also informed Emmanuel that much of the focus for research within this field had been on the antecedents of disasters or managing incidents. However, fewer studies had focused on organisational learning and change management after the event. Emmanuel decided that this would be an interesting focus for his project.
2 He developed a well-formulated, answerable initial review question: What are the enablers and barriers to organisational learning and change after major industrial accidents?
3 He then searched an online database, Business Source Complete, to locate literature that could be used to answer the review question: setting the start date for his search as 1980, he used the following search strings:
a crisis* OR disaster* OR accident* OR catastrophe* (string 1)
b change* OR learning* (string 2)
Limiting the search to peer-reviewed academic journals this resulted in 9563 articles, which was clearly too many. Emmanuel sought the advice of his discussion forum on LinkedIn. One particularly insightful suggestion was to focus on industrial accidents rather than all crisis events, as his search also included natural disasters, which was making the scope of the review unmanageable in the time available. Another forum member encouraged Emmanuel to reduce the scope further by focusing on the role of investigations and Inquiry reports. Emmanuel thought that this was a good idea so added a third search string:
c investigation* OR inquiry* OR inquest* (string 3)

Adding this third string produced 319 potentially relevant publications. He felt that this was manageable. To ensure that he was thorough, Emmanuel repeated the search process with a second online database – Web of Knowledge. While there were many duplications, the second database revealed a further 16 potentially relevant publications.
4 Given the new focus, Emmanuel amended his review question to: What is the role of investigations and/or public inquiries in facilitating or inhibiting organisational learning and change after major industrial accidents? He then read the abstracts of all 335 papers to see whether or not they addressed this question. He compiled a list of criteria to explain and justify his decision to include or exclude a publication. Emmanuel thought that 98 were relevant.
5 Through scanning the reference sections (bibliography) of the 98 relevant publications, he identified a further 16 relevant papers.
6 The online group also suggested that Emmanuel needed to review the ‘grey literature’, meaning reports, theses, conference proceedings, and other documents not published commercially. The process of searching for the grey literature seemed to Emmanuel to be less systematic and was painstaking as he was required to search a number of websites suggested to him by the online group. However, he realised that it was important because he found 23 relevant documents.
7 Emmanuel used a quality appraisal checklist downloaded from the Critical Appraisals Skills Programme (CASP nd) to help make sense of and evaluate the quality of the different types of research he encountered in his reading. He decided to discard 18 texts because they were particularly weak. He documented his reasons for exclusion.
8 Citation information for all 119 relevant texts was uploaded to Endnote – citation management software that was supplied by his university’s library. Full-text PDFs were retrieved for all the papers and also uploaded to Endnote.
9 Emmanuel extracted data from each individual study and created three tables related to his review question: (i) the roles played by investigations and public inquiries; (ii) the facilitators of learning and change after major industrial accidents; (ii) the inhibitors of learning and change after major industrial accidents.
10 Emmanuel wrote a findings section, which summarised what was known and not known about the topic. This had three sections that corresponded to his three tables (see 9) and described each of the papers in turn.
With much excitement he sent a draft to his tutor. A week later he met with his tutor who said that his review was ‘too descriptive’ and he hadn’t engaged critically with the literature.
She told him that while it is important to adopt a thorough and systematic approach so that nothing of relevance is missed, it is equally important for reviewers to develop their own ideas and express them as a ‘storyline’. He had more work to do to achieve a high grade. The next day Emmanuel thought about his tutor’s feedback. He didn’t really understand what being critical meant. Surely it was disrespectful to be critical, particularly of papers published by ‘experts’ in the field. Fortunately, a fellow student lent him a copy of a book by Wallace and Wray (2011) on critical reading and writing.
Emmanuel soon realised that a critical approach was not just about identifying flaws, weaknesses and inconsistencies in texts but also about offering alternative insights, ideas and explanations. Applying the critical synopsis tool from Wallace and Wray’s book to some of the papers he had read, he noticed that certain authors were coming from different perspectives, or schools of thought, and that they often made a number of assumptions. For example, some authors like Perrow (1984) assumed that industrial accidents were inevitable whereas other authors like Roberts (1990) argued that organisations could be managed in ways that result in exceptional levels of safety and reliability. Over time he became more sensitive to his own position and personal beliefs about the topic. He also realised that reading and writing required imagination and creativity. Just like some of the really interesting papers that he had read, Emmanuel tried to look at things in a new way, shed fresh light on texts he was reading and reveal previously unnoticed connections between ideas.
Emanuel decided to keep his original findings section. However, he added a discussion section that built an argument. Emmanuel also rewrote his introduction section to ensure that he told the reader about his significant ideas early so that he would capture their interest and motivate them to read the whole document. In the conclusion section he made certain that he told the reader the most important things that had emerged from the review and why they were important. Emmanuel’s tutor thought that the revised document was exceptional.

Questions 1 

a Why is it important to have a clear focus and a well-formulated review question?
b What problems might you encounter if your focus is too broad or too narrow?
c Why was it important for Emmanuel to revise his review question?
2 

a What are the advantages and disadvantages of being systematic in your approach?
b What are the advantages and disadvantages of being critical in your approach?
c How did Emmanuel balance being both systematic and critical?
3 Emmanuel has decided to produce a case study of the Deepwater Horizon accident for his research project. How can he use the findings of his Literature Review to inform his subsequent data collection?