Assessment of project management processes in Scholarly Book Publishing in Ghana
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Date
2021-06-15
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Abstract
Scholarly books are essential materials for teaching, learning and research purposes.
Over the years, the writing and publishing of scholarly books in Ghana have seen
improvement in the midst of challenges that militate against scholarly authors and
publishers. People across Africa consume scholarly works in excess of production and
this reinforces the application of project management processes to enhance the quantity
and quality of scholarly books published within schedule, cost and scope. The sampling
technique adopted was purposive sampling to gather rich data from the sample size of
fifteen respondents. The research was purely qualitative which used semi-structured
interview; case study was the design framework adopted and the data were analysed
with narrative and content analysis. The study aims to explore project management
processes in enhancing the traditional processes of scholarly book publishing in Ghana
and addresses three objectives: to establish traditional processes of scholarly book
publishing; to identify inherent barriers and to develop project management
methodology to mitigate against barriers in the processes. The study begins by giving
a background to the subject and the understanding of thesis was advanced with an
empirical, theoretical and conceptual review of literature on traditional processes of
scholarly book publishing and project management processes. The study shows the
traditional processes of scholarly publishing which constitute manuscript acquisition,
editorial development, acquisition of ISBN, production and marketing. It identifies
major barriers which constitute acquisition of substandard manuscripts and limited
number of quality manuscripts, funding for scholarly book projects, expensive nature
and delay of peer review and editing, lack of publisher’s control over contents and
difficulties of marketing, distribution and sales which involves poor marketing of
scholarly books leading to poor sales and the emergence of systemic problems or lack
of synergy among scholarly publishers, authors and lecturers; unidentified target
readership; the expensive nature of intensive marketing/ selling strategies of scholarly
books in Ghana; lack of interest for most bookshops/ booksellers to take stock of
scholarly books and sell and duplication (photocopying) and use of smart phones to
capture scholarly books by students tend to pose some limitations on the publishing of
scholarly books in Ghana. The study develops project management methodology to
mitigate the identified challenges that inhibit the effectiveness of the traditional
processes and to introduce predictability into the publishing of scholarly books.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Department of Construction Technology and Management,
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the award degree of Master Of Science in Project Management.
Keywords
Scholarly publishing, scholarly books, traditional scholarly, publishing processes, project management processes