Media climate change reporting and environmental disclosure patterns in the low-cost airline industry in the twenty-first century
Question/Answers:
Q 1) Do you think that Emma is right to restrict her project to only low-cost airlines, rather than the whole industry or a comparison with another sector? Give reasons for your answer.
Someone who is not experienced cannot simply start with megaprojects. It is neither easy, not recommended. In addition to it, there is a lot of uncertainty. Anything can happen. Emma is quite right to restrict her project to low-cost airlines because carrying out research of the whole industry is a very top-level work and it will definitely burden Emma. In addition, the progress in this part of the industry was also being increased; the number of airlines was multiplying. Above all Emma worked at this level so it was easy for her to work in her own domain. The idea of interviewing people for her research project would have been easier at the low-cost airline domain rather than the whole industry. Working at a place and having the knowledge of handling things at a specific domain helps a person and the person can become an expert in this context. So in this case, Emma knew what she was doing, firstly the conference helped her, and she had a clear vision of what she had to do. Explaining the change over a period of passing years was easier for her because she had access to that information, and limiting her knowledge area to the low-cost airlines was feasible for her own self and for her research project too. A large scope in this project i.e. the whole industry would have been difficult to handle. Therefore, Emma has made the right decision.
Q 2) Do you think Emma was correct in her decision not to carry out interviews? Give reasons for your answer.
Emma was of the opinion that as she had access to the company’s personnel for interviews in order to carry out her research project, so she decided to carry out interviews. However, when she had a meeting with the tutor, he raised these questions in her mind that what was the actual need for interviews in her research project. She was just excited about the access she had in the company. She found an alternative by researching and accessing the online database for new stories about the global warming and environment affects. After this, she thought that interviewing was not necessary for her research project; her most of the work was available online in the company’s database. Therefore, her decision to omit the interviews of the personnel came out to be right in this whole process. As the main research, area was related to the past stories of the effect of accounts and finance on the environment so interviewing on this topic would not have helped that much as compared to the related knowledge of the company’s history and database files.
References
Gray, R.H., Kouhy, R. and Lavers, S. (1995) ‘Corporate social and environmental reporting: a review of the literature and a longitudinal study of UK disclosure’, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 47–77
Murray, A., Sinclair, D. Power, D., and Gray, R. (2006) ‘Do financial markets care about social and environmental disclosure? Further evidence from the UK’, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 228–55.
Saunders. (2007). Formulating and clarifying the research topic. In: Mark Saunders Philip Lewis Adrian Thornhill Research methods for business students fifth edition. 5th ed. London: Pearson Education Limited. 50-54.
