Chapter 5: Sources of Knowledge and Perspective

Completing a dissertation involves both knowing and doing. As part of the process you should finish knowing a lot more than you did when you began your dissertation. What you do across the entire dissertation process determines both the type of knowledge and understanding you personally develop and what you can share with others.

We roughly divide what you do to complete a dissertation into two interacting and intertwined parts—(1) developing a deeper and more sophisticated understanding of the topic you have decided to study, and (2) conducting a research study on that topic. In this chapter we will focus on the first activity—increasing your understanding of the topic. This is traditionally accomplished by doing what has come to be called a literature review. However, we want to argue that in professional practice dissertations the concept of a traditional literature review may be too narrow. A broader concept may be needed because the sources of knowledge and perspective are broader that just the formal literature on a topic.