Group Term Paper
- The group research project is expected to turn out a comprehensive term paper on the company’s management practices. The term paper should be 5,000 – 6,000 words (excluding references, tables, and other attachments)
- The research paper needs each group to apply major theories in the course to its target organization’s situation. It is expected to compose six major parts, whose themes, topics, and lengths are described in the table in the end of the Instructions.
- The paper should be solidly based on thorough understanding of text contents in the first place. In addition, specific presentation of the target organization’s practices (such as examples) on all those aspects should be emphasized over general discussion of those topics.
- In order to apply the theories in the text, the research also needs information from the following three major sources: First hand data. Each group is required to interview at least one manager at the top, middle, and first-line levels respectively (total interviews: 3). One interview needs to be done by at least two group members, who need to take detailed notes and cross check their notes after their interviews. Recording interview conversation with the interviewee’s permission is preferable. The interviewee’s name, contact information, job title, and tenure at the company as well as interview time and duration are also expected to provide in the final paper. Groups are also encouraged to use information from their systematic observation of the organization’s business on site. Business publications. Each paper is expected to use at least 10 references of business publications related to their target organization from public sources. They may search the university library’s online catalog for books and online database (such as EBSCOHost, ProQuest and Lexis-Nexis) for articles. Articles from popular business publications such as Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist as well as local newspapers are preferred. The quality of the articles used as references will be taken into account for the evaluation of the paper. Organizational web site and documents. Using information from an organization’s web site and corporate documents is optional. The information can be used only if it is rephrased with the students’ own language and appropriate hyperlink and/or references
are provided. Besides, the information should be cautiously used and treated similar to the company’s commercials.
- For the term paper, logical structure, in-depth analysis, creative insights, and good integration of course materials are highly emphasized for grading. Besides, the paper should use 12-point font, double spacing, and reference styles and other formats for undergraduates recommended by either APA or MLA, whose style guides are available. It should also be submitted as MS Word files rather than MS Works files (i.e., “*.wps” files are unacceptable and will not be graded). Details of grading criteria for the paper can be found in this Course Document Dossier. In addition, the submitted term paper will be subject to plagiarism check with TurnItIn.
