On Generic Macro-structure of Empirical Research Articles: A Management Discourse Community Perspective

Abstract

Commercial books on research article writing are normally designed to address a wide range of readers in various disciplines. A cursory look at some of them reveals that the conventional Introduction-Method-Result-Discussion (IMRD) framework has been considered as a default blueprint of RAs written in various disciplines. However, this default structure needs to be empirically verified in each and every discipline. Hence, this paper attempted to manually extract the structural patterns of 132 empirical RAs randomly selected out of 22 ISI journals in management. More than 9 structural patterns emerged from the analysis of the results in this study and yet, oddly enough, the IMRD framework was not among them. Findings of this study can shed some light on the path of graduate students and novice scholars who strive to publish their scientific achievements in reputable journals so that they will be accepted as new dwellers of management discourse community.

Keywords

• academic writing
• empirical research articles
• management discipline
• conventional macro-structures
• graduate students