NX9624 Assessment Brief

The written element of your Management Enquiry will be in two parts.

Report One outlines the issue(s) you have selected to explore and should be written appropriate to manager readership. In essence, this report is a position paper. It should present the issue you intend to look at, outlining what you intend to examine, grounding this in existing knowledge and asserting why this matters locally and more broadly (e.g. within the sector) – i.e. you are convincing your supervisor and reader that the study is worthwhile.

The report should comprise “Explore” – explaining the rationale and context for the study (c,1,000 words), and “Review” – a review of the academic and practitioner literature pertaining to your chosen subject (c.2,500 words).

Report Two pertains to “Engage”, “Reflect” and “Connect”. That is, it comprises your empirical study, findings, interpretation of the data (in relation to the literature review and feedback you received upon it from Report One) and your context-specific recommendations for practice.

You are encouraged to structure both of your Management Enquiry reports as follows, across the three key facets:

1. Preliminaries
2. Main body of work (which is split into the main sections with a number of chapters)
3. End material

Report One (35%; 3,500 words (+/-10%))

Title Page

The title should be succinct yet clearly specify the content of the Management Enquiry. It should be descriptive and explicit rather than poetic or implicit. It may be different from the original proposed title. Please use the template in Appendix E as an advised layout for the ‘title page’.

Declarations and Word Count

A declaration page signed by the student MUST be included. See Appendix F for the Declaration. Please do not forget to sign the Declaration.

Report Two (65%; 6,500 words (+/-10%))

(NOTE: There are no suggested word counts for the chapters for Report Two. This is because different approaches and methodologies will result in different weightings/word counts for the chapters.)

Title Page

The title should be succinct yet clearly specify the content of the Management Enquiry. It should be descriptive and explicit rather than poetic or implicit. It may be different from the original proposed title. Please use the template in Appendix E as an advised layout for the ‘title page’.

Declarations and Word Count

A declaration page signed by the student MUST be included. See Appendix F for the Declaration. Please do not forget to sign the Declaration.

Abstract

The purpose of the abstract is to summarise the entire Management Enquiry, including a description of the problem, the sample/population/case, the methods used, the key findings and conclusions. Four keywords should be provided. The abstract should be 200-300 words total (See Appendix G)

Acknowledgements

You may wish to thank those people who have been particularly helpful in the preparation of the Management Enquiry. Consideration of persons external to the Newcastle Business School is particularly appropriate. Facetious acknowledgements are not acceptable.