Business Schools and Business and Management Departments in Universities are increasingly under pressure to increase their research output both in terms of quality and quantity. In addition these institutions are under some pressure to provide research training for their staff as well as their Masters and Doctoral students. At the same time, in the modern labour market, i.e. the 21st century knowledge society, research training is no longer seen as being only – or even primarily – for access to academic or university careers. With these developments in mind it was decided to establish a conference addressing all aspects of business and management research thereby providing a forum for researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds to meet and have the opportunity to discuss their research ideas and practices.

In April 2002, some 70 people – academics, doctoral students, consultants and practising managers – from all over the world and from a wide variety of disciplines met at The University of Reading to present and exchange ideas concerning their research approaches and methods. These exchanges concerned both philosophical arguments and methodological issues related to the different paradigms that exist for conducting both quantitative and qualitative research. There were also a number of papers related to the detail of a variety of research tactics.

In addition to several traditional streams the conference also had a critical research track.

At the end of the conference it was decided that an electronic journal would be useful as a vehicle with which to publish papers from the conference as well as from other contributors.

This first issue of the Electronic Journal for Business Research Methods (EJBRM) includes a selection of papers presented at the conference. These papers reflect the challenging nature of undertaking business and management research and include issues such as research design, sampling, data collection, measurement and scaling, analysis, and interpretation of findings – to mention but a few of the challenges. In addition, it is hoped that the chosen papers will result in an appreciation of the variety of interesting approaches to doing business research as well as a better understanding of what constitutes good research practice. Please do note that the focus of this journal is on the research methods employed across the whole field of business and management studies.

We welcome papers from anyone who has interesting empirical, theoretical or critical work, which they would like to publish. We are also pleased to have case studies, reports on action research was well as reports on working in progress. All papers will be double blind refereed.