DBAX 8101 Week 3 Standing Objection Analysis Example

Three Notes, One Question: A Standing Objection Document Laying Together Three Differently Worded Mentor Comments on a Study of How Small Commercial Cleaning Companies Keep Their Contracts

Student Name

Walden University

DBAX 8101: Business Research Project Mentoring

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Notes, One Question: A Standing Objection Document Laying Together Three Differently Worded Mentor Comments on a Study of How Small Commercial Cleaning Companies Keep Their Contracts

The Notes, in Order

My study asks how owners of small commercial cleaning companies keep the contracts they win, through interviews with twelve owners. Over two months, my mentor wrote three notes on different parts of the draft. I answered each where it landed. Laid side by side, they turn out to ask one thing.

Table 1

History of the Three Notes

Comments quoted exactly from the returned drafts. Composite study.

What Each Response Missed

Each of my responses answered the words of the note but not the question underneath it. Kumar and Stracke (2007) found that supervisors often frame feedback as questions, and that a question can be answered literally while its purpose is missed. In March, I added a statistic, which made the problem larger but no more specific. In the second round, I compared small and large firms in general terms, but still did not say what small cleaning firms lack. In April, I added a general question about challenges, which invites owners to list complaints rather than describe what they cannot do to keep a client.

The Objection Underneath

Stated in one sentence, the objection is this: the study never says what, exactly, small cleaning-company owners lack that makes keeping contracts hard for them, so neither the problem, the literature nor the interview questions can focus on it. The mentor was asking, three times and in three places, for the study to name the deficit at its center.

What the Owners Might Lack

Naming the deficit is a research decision, not a wording change. From the literature and from my pilot conversations, three candidates stand out: the lack of a dedicated account manager who checks in with clients before problems arise; the lack of data on service quality, such as inspection records, to show clients; and the lack of bargaining power when a large client rebids the contract on price alone. Each would lead to a different study. Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) argue that strong research questions come from challenging the assumptions behind existing work, and the assumption my draft carried, that small firms simply do less of what large firms do, is the one my mentor kept questioning.

The Passage That Must Now Answer It

The passage that must answer the objection is the problem statement, because everything else follows from it. I will rewrite it to name one deficit, that no one is assigned to manage the client relationship between service visits, and show from the literature why that matters for retention. The literature review will then focus on relationship management in small service firms, and the interview protocol will ask owners directly how they learn that a client is unhappy and what they do about it.

Why the Pattern Was Hard to See

The three notes were hard to connect because they arrived weeks apart, on different chapters, and each could be answered locally. Answering locally felt like progress. Only when the notes were placed in one table, with my responses beside them, did it become clear that each response had dodged the same question in a new place.

What I Will Not Change Yet

I will not revise the literature review or the protocol until my mentor has seen the new problem statement. If the deficit I have named is not the one the mentor had in mind, revising everything at once would mean revising it all again. Caffarella and Barnett (2000) reported that dialogue with reviewers, more than simply making the requested changes, was what doctoral students credited for their learning; sending the problem statement alone first is a way of starting that dialogue.

Note to My Mentor

I will send the new problem statement with a short message: "I think your three notes were asking the same question, what small owners lack. I have tried to answer it here by naming one specific deficit. Is this the gap you meant?"

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0188

Caffarella, R. S., & Barnett, B. G. (2000). Teaching doctoral students to become scholarly writers: The importance of giving and receiving critiques. Studies in Higher Education, 25(1), 39-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/030750700116000

Kumar, V., & Stracke, E. (2007). An analysis of written feedback on a PhD thesis. Teaching in Higher Education, 12(4), 461-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562510701415433