Summer University Course

Prerequisites

Course participants may either be Bachelor or Master students. They are expected to have read (in the past) at least a couple of published papers in well-respected scientific journals, preferably in the broad field of the social sciences, including but not limited to management / business, psychology, sociology, communication, culture, and/or research methodology.

Course description and process of the workshop

The course aims at stimulating course participants’ critical readership. More specifically, the course aims at training course participants to adequately extract scientific knowledge from (and also to better appreciate the typical academic reporting style of) a few selected papers in the field of Global (or International) Marketing. These papers are selected on the basis of multiple criteria: (1) they are dealing with a topic that is typical for the field of global (or international) marketing (i.e., an ‘illustrative’ topic); (2) they are beneficial from an ‘educational’ point of view, that is they have considerable strengths and/or weaknesses in terms of the execution of the research, the generalizability of findings, and/or the way of academic reporting (e.g., they contain descriptions of analytical procedures which fall short on preciseness and/or completeness). At the time this course document was written (February 2018) the selected set of papers was not decided upon, but selected topics might eventually include: cross-cultural differences in consumer behavior, country-of-origin effects, brand management in international consumer markets, and so on. Typically, selected papers have appeared in academic journals such as Journal of International Marketing, and International Marketing Review.  

Over and above getting introduced to a few illustrative topics in the field of global (or international) marketing course participants are trained such that they are better equipped to truly understand: (1) the real (sometimes versus the claimed) theoretical and/or practical contribution of the paper under study, as well as (2) the academic quality of the paper under study (e.g., in terms of reliability and validity aspects). This training should ultimately contribute to an improved quality of course participants’ own academic work, in particular the quality of their Bachelor or Master theses.

In the workshop students will iterate between: (1) (supervised) reading (i.e., the sequential sections of a paper text), and (2) a critical examination of these sections, which is based on typical “analytical operations” (i.e., asking oneself various types of questions to stimulate critical reading). Course participants are thus not required to do a lot of reading prior to the workshop.

Topics

• Illustrative topics in the field of global (or international) marketing: to be decided later on
• Furthermore: guidelines for critical reading, information on quality standards of academic reporting, etcetera.

Assessment

Written exam with open questions on: (1) excerpts of paper texts which have already been discussed in the workshop, and (2) excerpts of new paper texts showing resemblance to the paper texts already discussed in the workshop. 

Reading materials

Four to five illustrative papers published in the field of global (or international) marketing: to be specified later on.

Alain De Beuckelaer is Professor of Organizational Research Methods at Ghent University (Belgium), and also affiliated with Renmin University of China (P.R. China), and Radboud University (The Netherlands). His research interests are broad, encompassing: neuroscience, organizational behavior, work- and organizational psychology, consumer behavior/psychology, and quantitative research methodology (e.g., statistics, marketing research, psychometrics). His work appeared in journals such as: Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management Studies, Applied Psychological Measurement, Scientific Reports, andPLOS ONE.