From our DBA School: meet the candidates

MSM’s Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) School has the ambition to create an ever more lively and inspiring community of doctoral students and supervisors. To this end, it is increasingly connecting its on-campus and blended programs, continues to improve its selection and admissions processes and has attracted a range of new top-end supervisors. In addition, MSM’s DBA School from now on endeavors to share monthly news items about examples, events and resources that are relevant to our international DBA community.

This first MSM DBA news item starts out with the core of our DBA program: our DBA candidates. Pursuing a professional doctorate for most DBA candidates entails a careful balancing act between work commitments, research ambitions and social and family obligations. Determined and talented though they may be, this means that our DBA candidates perpetually struggle with finding the time to do develop their conceptual frameworks, collect their data and engage in analysis and writing. Presenting at academic conferences and publishing in academic journals hence sometimes seem unattainable luxuries – even more so because many of our candidates prioritize the applied managerial relevance of their studies over theoretical innovation.

In its efforts to continuously stimulate our students and enhance the quality of our program, however, the MSM DBA School in fact very much encourages candidates to strive for conference participation and journal publications. We believe that presenting and publishing ongoing research is not merely intellectually exciting, but can also serve as important milestones in a DBA trajectory characterized by an almost inherent challenge to maintain momentum.

Adu-Ampomah Yaw Junior, one of MSM’s 197 DBA candidates could not agree more. Having completed the first phase of data generation and analysis of his study on the potential of local food procurement as a poverty alleviation strategy in the Ghanaian hotel industry, Adu-Ampomah has been selected to present his ongoing work at the 12^th Annual Organization Studies Conference to be held from 18 to 20 May on the Greek island of Crete. In preparing for the conference, Adu-Ampomah has already experienced how conference deadlines feel much firmer than regular appointments for submitting work to his supervisor. As such, the conference for him is an excellent motivator to continue to prioritize his research and work towards concrete outputs. As he lectures at an academic institute in his native Ghana, moreover, Adu-Ampomah sees his conference paper as a step stone towards a publishing his paper as a journal article as well. He surmises: “the chance to get feedback from high ranking scholars in your field is a unique opportunity for improvement.” Encouraged by his supervisor Prof. Dr. Jakomijn van Wijk, Junior aims to meet high standards and sees the critique he expects to receive at the conference as “the best possible way to effectively identify room for improvement” in his thesis.

MSM’s DBA School would like to encourage every DBA candidate and supervisor to embrace Adu-Ampomah’s point of view and see the peer-review processes related to conferences and journal publications not merely as intellectual indulgences but as helpful instruments to solicit feedback and enforce planning, which are key challenges in the demanding context of professional doctorates. We invite them to contact our Director DBA School with any questions or challenges they may face in this regard.

For further details about Adu-Ampomah’s research, you can contact him at major2gh@yahoo.co.uk.