Annotated Assignment

Assignments Four and Five are inter-related: Assignment Four is, in essence, laying the ground work for Assignment Five. As a consequence, both assignments involve:

• A topic in management

• A case study of an actual organization in which that topic is at issue.

For example, the topic of succession planning or the topic of executive retention are both topics that could be found as an issue in the American Red Cross, on which much has been published in scholarly publications.

Both of these – the topic and the case – must appear in both Assignment Four and Assignment Six or else you will not receive full credit on those assignments.

For Assignment Four:

1. Pick a management topic that is of interest to you.

2. Find a case study in the UMUC virtual library that involves that management issue. A published case study is any article that discusses in sufficient detail the issue facing an actual organization and how that organization addressed that issue. Some of the databases in the virtual library allow you to search using “case study” as a criteria. However, just because the term case study exists in the title of the article may not mean that the article actually gives you enough information to work with; you have to make that judgment. Two of the best sources of articles – ABI/Inform Global and Business Source Complete – don’t allow for searches using case study as a criteria, so you may have to do some digging. Generally speaking, a published case study should be between 10 and 15 pages in length to give you enough information to work with.

3. Find and read at least five articles in scholarly journals in the UMUC library databases that discuss that management issue. Develop an annotated reference list (see Additional Information in the Syllabus for discussions about both annotated reference lists and case studies), including the UMUC the library database where the article can be found and the date your retrieved it. For any other sources on the...