Supervision - literature review

All three of us managed to meet for about half an hour yesterday for the first time since I started on the PG programme.

Agenda included:

• PhD skills audit
• my scribbles
• ethics committee feedback on MRes, a summary and an issue that arose
  

PhD skills audit

My scribbles

These scribbles connected my ideas from reading on organisations and accountability. They linked the intangible recommendations of consultants to the invisibility of recommendations that were not taken up and the undiscussability of decisions to implement recommendations or not. These ideas built on readings from Mullins, Thornton and Argyris with reference to concepts of institutional logic and power.

Criticism is undiscussable, or consultants come up with recommendations that are ignored. I have stuff about how aspects of a consultancy and issues that arise are undiscussable so how does accountability work there, so single & double loop processes are being challenged. there are issue in my research about defining the context.

• What does it mean to use consultants and
  
• What might accountability mean in those contexts?
  
• What happens if we've hired consultants to change the way we think? which is what institutional logic & double loop learning is about, throwing up in the air the criteria used. There might be conflicting logics in play.
• what is legitimate, what's discussable?
  

There are ways of setting up and legitimising some accountability relationships and not others. You can have a culture that allows some and not others. The institutional context & culture shapes the micro-level of interaction between groups and organisations. The mental models take place within an institutional context. Supervisors suggest that where there are challenges to Argyris' double loop learning, then issues of context matter. There are systems of meaning in a context of accountability at a micro level with mental models. They recommend that I explore accountability more, e.g. what happens when organisational templates change? You import an institution to make an organisation out of. The organisation is the enactment of the model. you What does it look like when you have different institutional loyalties in play? what's the process of transition like? Thornton looked at something like this- a tradition called institutional theory.
Follow up Hinings & Royston Greenwood, 1998, Mayo & Rowan, DiMaggio & Powell, Michael Lounsbury.

Concepts in the accountability literature that I had read:

• institutional logic
• performance measurement - is an institutional kind of logic, imposed by audit & inspection regimes
• participation - pressure on councils to consult, part of the institutional environment
  

Literature review

This is to be on:

1. accountability
2. new institutionalism

My task before Christmas is to write something about accountability giving a sense of where the literature on accountability now is and then to move on to anything promising about institutionalism. Also I'm going to look at one or two theses.