======= Date Modified 26 May 2011 11:00:00 =======
Since referencing, citation and writing are important to you, I my advise the following.

Peg Boyle Single's "Demystifying Dissertation Writing: A Streamlined Process from Choice of Topic to Final Text" - although this book could be much shorter it offers the best system to organize your references, citable quotes and final product in an integrated manner. Most of all the author's I read address these subjects (perhaps to the exclusion of writing) but fail to integrate them. Using Peg's system your dissertation will be written almost by it self. She uses EndNote, which is ok if you have an institutional license, but personally I advise on using Zotero (gold tip: create a tag for interactives and a tag for citables - make one note for each citable) *I believe this tip is worth the entire post*.

Christopher Hart's "Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination" - Although very much focused to sociology, anthropology et al, it is a very good book, but somewhat less practical. Although you may find ideas good about mapping the literature, and how to review papers, among others.

By the way, I've at least read other less valuable books, but specially went it comes to how to take read papers and take notes on them it becomes very valuable the extra time you spend doing this!!!

I'm sure others' will be able to contribute with good references on this.
HTH

======= Date Modified 26 May 2011 09:10:46 =======
======= Date Modified 26 May 2011 09:09:47 =======
Welcome and congratulations!

Yes it is possible to do it under 3 years. This varies a lot depending on the fields. According to some US stats (http://www.phdcompletion.org/) which I accessed through a secondary source the humanities and social sciences fields are the ones with the longest completion - the humanities completion rate is of only 3% in 3 years time, and social science is 7%. However, I feel this numbers could be very different if in general guidance was of higher quality. In general I believe that completions under 3 years leave much to be desired as students are most likely missing the opportunity to put in a little more time on learning and developing research skills, time which later on will be scarce. So sooner is not necessarily better. Also, very pragmatic students (although a time comes we all must be pragmatic) are also logically likely to be in the 3 years group students. But pragmatism, is to some extent at odds with a inquisitive knowledge hungry mind.

That being said I believe, too much is assumed of the doctoral student, that may not be true. Personally I scorned about "PhD guidance books". My mistake! My advice would be buy or request from your institutions' library some good books, on the following categories:
* General (Doing a PhD, PhD Project Management)
* Literature Review
* Dissertation writing
There will be overlap, as all tend to touch some areas (like lit review or managing your commitee). However, there is quite some variation in quality. Some books also offer very little info on qualitative projects.

Unless you have *truly mastered* reference and citation management in your masters, this is paramount and you should get this down before you start working. This investment up front will save you gazillions of time later on. So go ahead and spend an inordinate amount of time on this. Trust it will pay up! By the way, some advisers feel this is so obviously simple that they will push you to start producing (? no kidding it happened to me), reading, writing, or whatever they think it's best. Don't get me wrong most advisers obviously have a clue. However, none will know what skills you are really  missing. Take responsibility, manage the adviser and get your dearly missing skills.

Hours a week.
Is your program part-time or fulltime? Are you working professionally as well? What other responsibilities will you "have" to keep (professional, familiar)? Do you have an area of interest or will you need to shop around before you find something you are willing to invest in 3+ (most likely more than 3) years of research and study?

HTH - Hope This Helps

You should give the forum your reasons for feeling so, or at least what you honestly think is the main problem. If not it will be very difficult for people to help you in anyway. Rest assure, nevertheless, that the majority of PhD students think about quitting at some time or another during their programs. The reasons are plenty - lack of proper personal support, guidance in writing, lit. review, research methods, time,... The real benefit of a forum like this one is that if your post gives enough information about your situation you are likely to get a reply from someone who had a similar experience or has something relevant to tell you. Please go ahead a tell us your problem :-)

Regarding the value of a PhD, you should not underestimate it. Not only will it increase your skills like Treefrog mentions, it will definitively open-up opportunities that would otherwise be completely out of your reach. That said, this is a peoples world, not a game of solitaire, so you are not exempted from networking and the responsibility of carrying your own weight.

HTH - Hope This Helps

I'm a management student focusing on the birth of dynamic capabilities (strategy process research). I've just started data collection. I'm taking a case study approach. At this moment I've managed to negotiate access and have made some preliminarily interviews with project managers (studying engineering firms). My goal is to study how they develop the know-how and tool themselves to bring new services to their customers. I'm facing with the decision to:

1. Take the usual stance of management case studies: which could be characterized of taking reality as it is and then develop a model that explains observations and meanings.
2. Choose a sociological perspective.

I'm favoring the sociological perspective. But, I would not want to miss collecting data that would be important for conducting analysis under the selected perspective. However, I have at best cursory knowledge of some sociological theories. Thus, I might be missing an obvious well suited perspective. I'm obviously interested in a micro-perspective but both interaction and meaning are expected to be significant to developing an understanding of the cases.

Although my is clearly inductive, there are a limited number of aspects that might prove important, namely understandings people make of the situation, resistance to change they may display due to job or role changes, learning new skills, or having their interests threatened, etc. Project managers typically manage units between 5 to 30 people, and they might have a boss or be the boss.

I wonder which theories might be a good fit. Would you please also suggest a good reference on the fundamentals of the theory and perhaps a good exemplar/reference of methodological application.