Analysing a Past Master Thesis

Introduction

This report is part of the course “Philosophy of Social Science” and the purpose of the assignment is to describe and analyse a past master thesis according to the social scientific precepts represented by the following criteria:

• Research topic and research question
• Research design
• Theoretical basis of the thesis
• Methods used to collect and analyse the data
• Assessment of results

Additionally, this report presents an evaluation of the coherence of the theory selected, methods used and empirical results, so as an evaluation of the thesis as a product.

The thesis “Critical Success Factors for the Hotel Marketing Consortia Using the Example of AKZENT Hotels” conducted by Kristin Kuhrmann and submitted to the school of business of the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts in 2011, was used to accomplish this assignment.

Research Topic and Research Question

The research topic of the master thesis concerns on the documentation of the success factors of hotel consortia in order to identify competitive advantages that could support the positioning of hotels consortia in the market. This research also aims to evaluate the German hotel consortium “AKZENT” in order to recognise its success factors and to propose recommendations for the improvement of its performance.

The research question: “What are the critical success factors for hotel consortia and how is the assessment of the German hotel consortium AKZENT Hotels according to these identified factors?” considers two parts of research. First, the author emphasises the research of success factors for hotel consortia and second, the author intent to identify and evaluate the success factors of the mentioned German hotel consortium with the aim to identify gaps between each other.

Research Design

For the development of this master thesis, the author uses an inductive reasoning, which begins with specific observations though expert interviews, detection of patterns through desk research, formulation of hypotheses based on past theories of success factors, and finally developing a theory about the success factors of the hotel consortia. The author also employs a descriptive approach. This type of research seeks to “describe characteristics of objects, people, groups, organisations or environments”, so as to “paint a picture” of a given situation by addressing who, what, when, where and how questions (Zikmund et al. 2010, p.55).

Methodology

The data for this research paper was collected through two methods: desk research and expert interviews.

Desk research is a secondary research that entails the analysis of data (documents, statistics, figures, numbers, records, etc.) that others have collected. This has as a major advantage the collection of high-quality data at less costs and time (Bryman & Bell 2011). In this case, the author uses external sources to gather information regarding hotel consortia and success factors, and internal sources provided by AKZENT consortium.