DBAX 9104 Week 1 Conclusion Match Discussion Example

Week 1 Discussion: Does the Conclusion Answer the Original Problem?

Does the Conclusion Still Answer the Problem I Started With? Setting a Proposal's Specific Business Problem Beside This Term's Draft Conclusion in a Four-Shop Study of Succession in Family Machine Shops

Two Sentences, Three Terms Apart

My study looked at how owners of four family-owned machine shops in Ohio and Indiana prepared a successor, through interviews with the owners, their successors and two long-serving machinists at each shop, plus shop records. Three terms ago my proposal stated the specific business problem this way: "Some owners of family-owned machine shops lack strategies to transfer management authority to a successor before retirement." This term I drafted the following conclusion: "Owners who kept the shop solvent through a succession did so by handing over customer relationships first, introducing the successor to key buyers two to four years before transferring any management authority."

Does the Second Answer the First?

Only in part. The problem asked about management authority: who signs purchase orders, sets prices, hires and decides which jobs to quote. The conclusion is about customer relationships, which came first and, in three of the four shops, made the later handover of authority possible. So the conclusion answers a related question, how successful owners sequenced the handover, and says something about authority only as the second step. What it does not answer is the part my proposal cared about most: what owners did to transfer the authority itself. In two shops, authority moved through a series of small decisions, quoting first, then hiring, then capital purchases. In the other two, the owner kept signing authority until the day he left. Four shops are not enough to say which pattern works better, and my draft conclusion quietly skipped the question.

When the Shift Happened

I can date the drift. In the second round of interviews, successors kept talking about customers before I asked about them. I followed that thread, and by the time I coded the data, customer handover had become the largest theme. That was the right call for the analysis, but I never went back to see whether the conclusion still matched chapter one.

How Big a Claim Four Shops Can Carry

Yin (2018) distinguishes generalizing from cases to a theoretical proposition, which Yin calls analytic, from the statistical kind that projects a sample onto a whole population. My four shops can support a proposition that customer handover tends to come before authority handover in small family firms whose value sits in buyer relationships. They cannot describe how family machine shops in general handle succession. Sharma et al. (2003) found that satisfaction with succession depended partly on the successor's willingness and the incumbent's readiness to step aside, which fits the two shops where authority moved early; my data add the sequence but cannot test their predictors. Eisenhardt (1989) treats a small number of cases as a basis for building propositions to be tested elsewhere, which is the most I can claim.

My Revised Conclusion

"In three of the four shops studied, owners introduced successors to key buyers before handing over management authority; authority itself moved gradually in two shops and all at once in two. The study does not show which way of moving authority leads to a better outcome."

Question for Classmates

Quote your proposal's problem statement next to your draft conclusion. Which words in the problem does the conclusion leave unanswered?

Reply to Dana

Dana, your conclusion about remote work and turnover at three call centers answers "how managers kept agents" while your problem asked why agents left. Those are close, but the second needs the agents' view, and you interviewed only managers. Could you state the conclusion as the managers' account and name the agents' side as unanswered?

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, your survey of 212 dental practices found an association between online reviews and new patient counts, yet your conclusion says reviews "drive" growth. Your problem statement was careful to ask about relationships. Does the conclusion need the same verb your chapter one used?

References

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 532-550. https://doi.org/10.2307/258557

Sharma, P., Chrisman, J. J., & Chua, J. H. (2003). Predictors of satisfaction with the succession process in family firms. Journal of Business Venturing, 18(5), 667-687. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0883-9026(03)00015-6

Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). SAGE Publications.