Share the experience of a Ph.D. from a Peking University doctor.
Dear readers, hello everyone. Today we will use an example to illustrate the difference between a work report and a Ph.D.**.
Many of my students are part-time PhD students, so they often apply the ideas of the work report to the writing of the Ph.D., and I have had similar problems.
When I communicated my research question with my supervisor, I expressed it like this: There is a problem in our unit now, and we have just built an internal self-question and answer platform, similar to an internal Zhihu, but everyone does not participate in the question, so the problem I want to solve is how to improve everyone's participation.
So, I plan to structure the problem by first explaining the essence of the problem, then organizing research to find out what is causing the problem, and finally providing a solution.
However, my supervisor told me that if I wrote in this way, I would only write a work report, not a Ph.D.
He said that the solution I came up with only applies to our unit and not to other units generally. The object of study of the Ph.D. ** is not a specific unit, but the whole of humanity.
Therefore, what we need to study is not the specific affairs of a certain unit, but the expansion of this problem into a certain type of social phenomenon.
In other words, the solutions I have come up with should not be applied to just one specific unit, but to this type of problem. When other units face the same problem, they can also use our ideas and solutions to solve it. Therefore, the first thing we need to do is to transform the practical problems in our work into academic research problems, and then organize the problem research in an academic way, and finally form a universal theory or model.
So, how do you turn a real-world problem into an academic problem in the first place? In my own case, the problem I want to solve is how to get employees to actively contribute their knowledge to the company's internal training platform.
We must first expand this specific problem to a certain social phenomenon and define a field or field of study. So, I elevated what I called an in-company training platform to a concept called a virtual community for corporate education.
Which question am I going to look into? What I'm looking at is how to get people to contribute more and better knowledge. Contributing knowledge is actually an act, so we need to look at the factors that influence this behavior.
But it's not enough to stop at the influencing factors, we also need to know which factors directly influence behavior and which factors indirectly influence behavior. This is not only about the influencing factors, but also about the influencing mechanisms.
Through this analysis, we are able to transform what was originally a practical question into an academic research question. My topic was "Research on Knowledge Sharing in Corporate Education Virtual Communities", or "Research on the Influence Mechanism of Knowledge Sharing".
This process realizes the transformation from the individual to the general, from the concrete to the abstract. Next, let's look at how to organize the research, i.e., what is the structure of the writing of a Ph.D.**.
First, we'll look at whether anyone has done a thorough study of the issue. If someone else has already done a comprehensive study, we can just use their conclusions, and there is no need to conduct this study again, this is a literature review.
Through a literature review, I found that other people's research only focused on public open education platforms, not within organizations. At the same time, other people's research only emphasizes the role of the platform, and ignores the research on employee engagement. Therefore, it makes sense for me to conduct this research.
So, how do you conduct this study? If I want to find some influencing factors, I can't imagine them out of thin air, and that's where theory comes in handy.
The so-called theory is actually the content of research ideas and frameworks that have been studied by others. Using someone else's theory, I first found a few influencing factors.
However, other people's theories are primarily applicable to mass platforms, not training platforms. I first borrowed this theory as a starting point and developed an interview outline based on this theory.
In the course of the interview, I discovered some new influencing factors. Based on the results of the interview, I developed a questionnaire.
Why do I need to take this questionnaire? Because with this questionnaire, I can analyze the results quantitatively, that is, do statistical analysis. Through statistical analysis, problems ranging from individual cases to general ones are solved.
The role of statistics is to infer the population from the sample. If the statistical results prove that my model is significant, it means that the factors I identified and the model I built can be applied to all similar phenomena.
Today our company has successfully motivated employees with this model, and tomorrow your company can also be bold to try, because the statistical results show that this model is universal. That's what our study concluded.
The process just described is our experience in theory selection, research framework, study design, and study execution. Some** will be accompanied by a strategic recommendation that corresponds to the solution in our work report. However, there is a difference between the two.
The solution in the job report needs to be very specific and feasible, such as giving employees bonuses to motivate them to actively participate in training.
But in Ph.D.**, you can't write like that, because your company may have such a bonus system, but another company may not.
Therefore, the strategic recommendations in Ph.D. should be closely related to the research conclusions and have universal applicability. What we are providing is not specific policy advice, but a strategic approach.
For example, taking bonus distribution as an example, in the abstract, we want to point out that the essence of bonus behavior is actually external incentives. Other companies that have grasped this idea will not necessarily give out bonuses, but may offer opportunities for promotion, which is also an external incentive. Therefore, our workaround is universal.