Karthik Iyer Case

After talking to his father Afzal, an MSc Student, had decided to research an aspect of

companies' valuations of intellectual capital and was very keen to get started. His father

had told him it was an important issue in his own company and that the findings would be

of practical relevance providing a solution to particular business problem. Afzal began by

contacting the five largest UK accountancy firms asking if they had any publications on this

topic, and was pleased when three responded by sending material very quickly. One of

them was interested in his research findings. He spent two full days in the university

library where he searched the library's online catalogue and the Financial Times archive

on line. He also used the Internet search engine, Google, but he found over 700,000 hits

relating to intellectual capital and realised that it would take years to read them all.

At the same time, Afzal read his research methods textbook and decided that he would

undertake an interpretivist research strategy and that he would like to carry out interviews

with key personnel the company accounts department. However, his father was not keen

and suggested that this would not be scientific enough to generate useful data. He decided

to discuss this with his supervisor.

He arrived for his supervision meeting with the file of material that he had collected as the

foundation for his literature review. This comprised photocopied extracts from some

textbooks on financial reporting, the reports he had received from professional

accountancy firms and copies of articles from the Financial Times. Afzal showed his tutor

his literature review. This summarised everything he had read so far in chronological

order of publication,