Structuring a PhD
Thesis Series #2
My PhD research was anchored around one proposition:
Companies that align their strategies with external drivers of transformation can achieve market dominance.
To investigate this proposition, I first needed to define:
1) Market dominance
What do we mean by ‘market dominance’, how do we calculate it, and what firms meet this threshold?
2) External drivers of transformation
Specifically, what drivers of transformation are firms facing, and how could we organise them in a framework to make them accessible?
To structure the research, I arranged it across three research papers that created a cumulative argument:
Research Paper 1:
Quantified market dominance and empirically demonstrated that firms can be identified as dominant within their industry. This established the existence of market dominance as a measurable phenomenon.
Research Paper 2:
Used a systematic literature review and sentiment analysis to develop a structured framework for external drivers of transformation. This provided the conceptual tools needed to understand how firms interact with their environments.
Research Paper 3:
Combined the prior insights by conducting content analysis of 20 years of annual reports of six firms to examine whether strategic alignment with external drivers of transformation distinguishes dominant firms from their peers. This connected the existence of dominance with the conditions under which it can be achieved.
Each paper took roughly a year to complete, processing vast amounts of data and seeking meaning in them.
Next week, I will dedicate my posts to the first research paper in which I coined the term ‘Superfirm’ and defined market dominance. The findings are very interesting (well, I would say that..).
Be sure to follow me, Dr. Ian Hallett, so it shows up in your feed.
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This post is part of a series of notes I am writing about my PhD thesis, to share how I approached it and what I learned. You can see the entire series in my previous posts here on my website