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
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