Collaboration and social capital

There's quite a lot of literature on collaboration in organisations {Delbridge, 2007 ;Franco, 2008 ;Huxham, 1991 ;Huxham, 2003 ;Huxham, 2000 }

Siv Vangen and Chris Huxham have particularly researched a lot on collaboration in the public sector. What surprises me is that they cite nothing, zilch, on social capital. They just don't use any of it, not Bourdieu, not Coleman, not Putnam. I pointed this out to a supervisor, who suggested that it is because the collaboration literature doesn't take the past into account. That's interesting because Huxham and Vangen {Huxham, 2003} do mention the past in that expectations about the future of collaboration:

"will be based either on reputation or past behaviour or on more formal contracts and agreements"

but they don't recognise expectation, reputation or past behaviour as social capital.

So there's this massive gap, where the current theory and practice of collaboration doesn't apply social capital theory.

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DELBRIDGE, R. (2007) Explaining Conflicted Collaboration: A Critical Realist Approach to Hegemony. Organization Studies (01708406), 28, 1347-1357.
FRANCO, L. (2008) Facilitating Collaboration with Problem Structuring Methods: A Case Study of an Inter-Organisational Construction Partnership. Group Decision & Negotiation, 17, 267-286.
HUXHAM, C. (1991) Facilitating Collaboration: Issues in Multi-Organizational Group Decision Support in Voluntary, Informal Collaborative Settings. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 42, 1037-1045.
HUXHAM, C. (2003) Theorizing collaboration practice. Public Management Review, 5, 401-423.
HUXHAM, C. & VANGEN, S. (2000) Ambiguity, complexity and dynamics in the membership of collaboration. Human Relations, 53, 771-806.

Stuff to do

It may be Saturday but I have a busy week:

• Making connections conference Tuesday & Wednesday
• Voluntary work Wednesday (that stops me going to the conference 2nd day)
• read literature on collaboration (I read in the car as I am driven to visit relatives for the weekend).
• write up my reviews of that reading (I'll edit my Endnote research notes)
• write up a case study chapter for supervisors
• follow up some leads for more case studies
• mark assignments for one course I tutor
• plan and give a day school for another computing course I tutor
  

If I'm busy doing this much now, and it's only half way through, how busy will I be when I'm writing up the final dissertation?

Transaction costs

Transaction cost is a concept that our director told me to think about. I’ve been struggling to understand how it could relate to what I’m doing, so am happy to find the concept referred to in Sturdy et al’s new book {Sturdy, 2009 #1132}.

“McKenna describes consultants as ‘pre-eminent knowledge brokers’ on the basis of their ‘status as outsiders’ and the ‘economies of knowledge’ this brings compared to insiders – they have flourished .. because they have remained outside the traditional boundaries of the firm’”(p9).

Sturdy et al say this view is founded on transaction cost economics whereby ‘the very reason why clients hire consulting firms is the fact that consultants have the ability to gain experience, expertise, methods and tools in one industry or organization and then apply them in another, thereby saving the client the costs of developing them in-house’ {Armbrüster, 2006 #1150}.

"But this view is also evident more generally. Consultants are seen to bring either technical or process expertise from the outside.”

There are so many theories reflected in the literature: neo-institutionalism, social embeddedness, actor-network theory, and dramaturgy are some they list, but they stress:

“much of the prescriptive literature reflects some of the assumptions of transaction cost economics.” (p23)

They note that boundaries have received growing attention and that

“boundaries are a particular contemporary concern in relation to three road areas: variations of the ‘make or buy’ decision inherent in transaction cost economics (TCE)…” (p28, my italics)

That's an aspect to consider - whether or not to buy, though I'd thought of it as opportunity costs rather than transactional costs.

The next paragraph describes criticism of TCE that emphasises concerns with efficiency. Perhaps I've paid little attention to efficiency. Do I need to?

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STURDY, A., CLARK, T., FINCHAM, R. & HANDLEY, K. (2009) Between innovation and legitimation - boundaries and knowledge flow in management consultancy. Organization.
Armbrüster

Unit of analysis

What's your unit of analysis?

That was the coffee time question posed by our Resident Questioning Student. He often starts interesting discussions. I'd naïvely thought it a simple answer, but the more he posed questions, the more complicated the answer became.

The unit of analysis fits in with and stems from your research question. It governs the way you then design your research because it governs what kind of information you seek. That information builds up to give a central picture. I have a systems understanding of the unit of analysis; to me a unit of analysis must have a central focus, a purpose that all its components contribute to, and a unit of analysis consists of a number of components, any one of which, if it were removed, would create a different system. For example, RQS's unit of analysis concerns a process (a campaign) that takes input and outputs x or y, and along the way, there are regulatory processes, decision making processes and ethical processes that influence the outcome. If you took away the regulatory process, you'd have a different system (like the UK MPs could have a different expenses system if their regulatory process was different).

The B852 course that we did for the MRes gave us some useful readings on unit of analysis, especially the Block I papers by Michael Crotty on the research process, and the Bryman & Bell paper on research designs.

RQS is writing his methodology chapter, and warns us that it is pivotal to all your research, which is probably why my third party monitor suggested I start writing it now, this year.

My thesis is original in that ..

IN what way is my thesis original? I will count the ways:

1. quality of engagement is little researched
2. engagement is a waffly term, an undefined concept used muchly with little agreed understanding of the term
3. people have not looked closely at how consultants and clients work so closely together that the relationship could be called engaged
4. people have written about organisational collaboration in the public sector but not about engagement
5. UK government sees value in social capital and my work seeks to find engagement through the use of social capital. This approach is original.

Aim of my research

The aims of my research are manifold:

• to get me a PhD
• to learn to write - more than writing because communication includes presenting research
• to find how (good?) clients engage with external consultants
• to argue the value of using consultants

What is my research? I chose the public sector, partly because I'd worked in it, partly because I knew there was a good supervisor whose strengths were in the public sector, partly because I know something of the consultancy world and partly because the media is so interested in the public sector and demands it be accountable. One area of public accountability is the use of consultants. They are expensive and perceived to be a waste of public money. So my research is examining, not that perception, but what value consultants do provide the public sector.

The public sector uses consultants in many different areas: IT, management, legal, construction, training. As a large proportion of public spending is on IT, and because I have a background in IT, I chose to focus my research on II projects.

IT projects draw in different types of people: consultants, developers, users, managers, third party suppliers of hardware, software and of contractors. Contractors may come with particular development skills. So a project may be made up of civil servants and consultants who consider the civil servants as their clients, but also made up of contractors, who work alongside the civil servants developing IT projects. Such a plethora of roles implies a variety of relationships and it's the relationships that my research's focusing on. How do these relationships start, grow, get maintained but particularly what are the relationships between client and consultants?

For work to be effective in leading to a finished project, the NAO exhorts clients and consultants to engage. But it is unclear what engagement is - just that it's something expected from both client and consultant doing something together.

Engagement is not the same as collaboration, which is an organisational arrangement.
Engagement is not user participation in IT testing, which might be part of a job role.
Engagement seems to be of hearts and minds: enthusiastic intrinsic motivation to get a job done well, and consultants can oil the wheels to give that flowing engagement between people. That means consultants mediate and it's the mediation that enhances engagement that leads to effective working on a project.

But are all consultants mediators? Some mediate at a strategic level, influence strategy, others mediate between project members (as does a project manager) influencing tactics and relationships. But if they get it wrong, consultants may deter engagement, not encourage it or even prevent it. Which leads to another question: how can the public sector best engage with consultants to engender engagement.

Engagement creates engagement. Yes - there's research evidence from psychology that suggests that recursion and queries it: which comes first, engagement leads good relationships, or good relationships lead to engagement? And what's best? That might be where I need to bring in Habermas to find a spectrum of engagement.

More questions; more research; more questions.

Pugh - How to get a PhD

Derek Pugh spent the afternoon with us, advising us on how to get our PhDs.

Degrees - what they have been, what they used to mean:

• Bachelor - indicated you'd had a general education
• Master - gave you a licence to practise. The world expects you to know how this specialism works. It was originally a masters in theory and allowed you to practise as a priest
  
• Doctor's degree - a licence to teach in a university. i.e. you know your field and you are capable of adding to it.
  

So to get a PhD you have something to say that your fellow professionals want to listen to.

We discussed what this meant, and so also what examiners look for in a PhD. (see Derek Pugh's web site for suggestions on aims, knowledge, skills and values). Then we went on to discuss what to write and when to write - don't think about it - it's no good saying, "it's all in my head", just write it, then refine it. He gave writing us a task there and then, to write for twenty minutes on the aim of our research. And despite poor handwriting and cramped fingers, we all diligently wrote. What he hadn't told us, was that we would then swap our writing with a colleague and critique it, giving critical feedback that would help us make progress. It was a useful exercise that made you feel you could write.

There's a web site called The One-Minute Writer, that gives a prompt every day, and a timer for sixty seconds. Derek's exercise was a bit like that, but academic and twenty times as long.

Try it.

Other theories

I'm using social capital as a framework to analyse my case studies and today we had a lunch time seminar from Dr Rob MacMillan who suggested four theoretical aspects to use to theorise areas of the third sector:

• social capital (Bourdieu)
• discursive institutionalism (Hay)
• capabilities and resilience (Sen)
• club theory (Jordan) and homophily (an interesting new word)

I know only about the first area - social capital, though what Dr Macmillan said about club theory sounded interesting. However, my recently doctored colleague suggested that Bourdieu's work could apply satisfactorily to all four areas that Macmillan's interested in:

• competition and collaboration
• sustainability / entrepreneurship
  
• challenges, response and support
• class and participation

I agree with my colleague, but if you know a theory then you can see lots of applications for it.

Poster competition

There is a research poster competition, including a web competition so I've uploaded my poster there. If you can log in to the OU site, do look here and vote for a poster (preferably mine). And details of the competition are here.

Voting will open at 9 am, Friday 29 May and will close at 12 pm, Thursday 4 June. You can only vote once and you can't change your vote.

The poster competition is on Friday 5 June, which is a bit of a bother because that afternoon I have to be in London for something more important than playing with posters. After all my effort to get the photos edited right, I'll not be in the room to explain my research to the poster judges. Mind you, it's a Friday, so I doubt there'll be anyone else on campus to come and see the posters any how.

A significant contribution?

I worry that my research is not going to make any significant contribution, that my research questions are not worth answering. The more I read, the more I realise how much other people have already done. For example, reading something on Etienne Wenger's web site, shows that he has researched the use of boundary objects in communities, which is useful stuff for me to use, but how does it take my research any further?

I don't ask questions for which I know the answers but others don't. I do some voluntary work on an appeals tribunal. Yesterday, one of my colleagues asked a question of the authority representative, a question for which I already knew the answer, so hadn't thought of asking it. My more experienced colleague however realised that the score of appellants in the room didn't all know the answer, so by asking the question, she shared that knowledge.

So I need to identify the questions with answers that are obvious to me, but not to others.

PhD theses I've read

Pugh says in order to find how to write a thesis, a student should aim to read two or three theses a year. So far I've read:

• Diana White on a systems view of project management for how she used systems theory, and because her supervisor told me it was a good thesis.
• Kirstie Ball on surveillance for her structure because she wrote on several case studies as I do (or hope to have)
  
• Lupson on accountability because his PhD was filling a gap in the literature on accountability in the public sector
• Someone on consultants, which was a pain to read because I could only get a microfiche copy
• Marsh on the Feminine in Consulting because she wrote on consultants. But in fact it's not her PhD I've read, only the contents, because I'd have to go to Lancaster to see the original in the library; it's not available electronically. pooh! But she's written a book from her thesis and it's very readable. so I got the OU library to get a copy and that's what I'm reading.

Writing your thesis

Writing your thesis was the title of a PG seminar today. The format was simple: four post grads sat at the top table and explained how they'd got this far.

1. One PG had just submitted and not yet had her viva. She advised keeping notes whenever you were formulating ideas. Discuss your ideas, do posters, join research groups, talk with fellow students. Network with fellow researchers, such as the OU network here. Her end problems had been with Word not coping with long documents that held Endnote references, but crashed or printed in hieroglyphics. It might be worth adapting the project plan to allow 60 hours a month for writing in the last six months, and allow a month for supervisors to read each draft.
   
2. Another had got through her viva with minor corrections a few months ago. She waved her handwritten research journal at us. She had tabs and markers all over it, said that she would go back to it for ideas, and to see how how her ideas had developed.
   
3. A third had finished, had her viva some years ago, but had been given major corrections. She had had to remove all phrases, 'It could be argued...', as well as restructure whole chapters. She was allowed a year, and had to email the chapters to the external as she made the changes, so had to keep a record of what version she was using. She also had an emotional reaction to the criticism, hated the examiner, but she said that in the end she had a better piece of writing.
4. The fourth speaker - I don't know when she'd done hers, but her theme was for students whose first language was not English. She recommended a book for students to get: 'Supervising post grads from non-English speaking backgrounds'.
   

Question: What's the examiner looking for?
Answer: See the OU research students handbook. This link goes to it if you can log into the OU intranet. For a PhD, it says:

"A thesis for the Doctor of Philosophy must be a significant contribution to knowledge, worthy of publication and giving evidence of your ability to undertake further research without supervision."

Finally, an academic spoke - said he was there to defend the supervisors. He'd done his PhD so long ago, that he'd handwritten it, given it to his mother to type, and there was no software to struggle with, or to use for references.

Then there were questions.
Question: something about the literature
Answer: Keep up with the literature and draw in from widely different journals and areas.

Question: Is learning to use Endnote worth the effort?
Answer: Yes, because a) you'll have all your references in one place, b) you need only press a button to change the format, e.g. all the titles to italic, c) you don't want to be proof reading references. (I had a problem of that with minor corrections to my references in my MRes.)

Question: How do I get to start writing a chapter or a paper?
Answer: This was an interesting answer because successful PG #2 leaped up to the flip chart and sketched a circle on it. You start with the question(s) you're trying to address, make your claims, bring in the evidence you have available then evaluate. But this is an iterative, not a sequential process. You can then bring in the concepts from the literature that inform your claims, and use qualitative or quantitative evidence that you've collected as part of your research. She advised evaluating using Dunleavy's advice. I've mentioned him before, here and here but I don't know what he has to say on evaluation.

This was a seminar that provided much food for thought, so was worth going to.

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Dunleavy P. 2003. Authoring a phd : How to plan, draft, write and finish a doctoral thesis or dissertation. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke ; New York.

Hands of helpful students

My fellow students have helped me to create a poster of my research by allowing me to photograph their hands.

Nice things, unknown people

A nice thing happened to me this morning. A lecturer greeted me saying,

"I've been waiting to see you, to congratulate you!"

I quickly disabused her of the notion that it was me who'd passed her viva last week. But isn't it nice that our director had sent round an email announcing Linda's success, so that people can congratulate Linda when they see her. Director wrote:

"I send my warmest congratulations to Linda Wilks who had her PhD viva on Friday and passed with just typos! Her thesis explored how social and cultural capital shape and is shaped by individuals’ attendance at music festivals."

Linda's success is also announced in the Dean's digest this week, but lecturer said that was too difficult to read over the intranet from home, so the email was the way she knew. Anyhow, we're not sure that the Dean knows us. Lecturer says he doesn't know what her team do. He's never ever, in two and a half years, come and said hello to us lowly students. He's an unknown to us.

Burt and networks

At lunch, fellow PhD student introduced me to his supervisor, Mark Fenton-O'Creevy. This professor not only supervises financial research but also has an interest in social capital. He suggested I look at Ronald Burt's work, because of the mediating effect of bridgers of structural holes. He suggested that consultants might act as bridges. {Newell, 2004 #1109} did some interesting research on bridging in a project team. They used a case study to show the extent to which ERP team members used their social capital bridges for the collective public good of the project versus their own personal good.

"First, in this particular ERP project team, the individual members did appear to be using their social capital, but more for their own personal good than for the public good of the project. The reason for this appeared to be linked to the insecurity of the project."

Another interesting issue related to the bridging, which is where they cite Burt.

"Bridging occurs where ties between people are ‘weak’, thus providing brokerage opportunities within the social system (Burt, 1992). Within the context of an IT project team, there is a need to develop and use external linkages because these bridging relationships are necessary for access to knowledge and information that is dispersed across the organization."

Both bridging and bonding are necessary for knowledge integration. I see in my first case study much bonding within a development team, but I see also bridging through the contractors accessing and sharing knowledge with clients on the team. But it's a two-way thing; clients give the contractors knowledge too.

Burt's written a lot. His 2000 paper on network structure of social capital is looonnnggg.

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BURT, R. S. (1992) Structural holes : the social structure of competition, Cambridge, MA; London, Harvard University Press.
BURT, R. S. (1997) The Contingent Value of Social Capital. Administrative Science Quarterly, 42, 339-365.
BURT, R. S. (2000) THE NETWORK STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL. Research in Organizational Behavior, 22, 345.
BURT, R. S. (2001) Structural holes versus network closure as social capital. IN LIN, N., COOK, K. S., BURT, R. S. & DE GRUYTER, A. (Eds.) Social capital: theory and research. University of Chicago and INSEAD.
BURT, R. S. (2004) Structural Holes and Good Ideas. American Journal of Sociology, 110, 349-399.
BURT, R. S. (2007) SECONDHAND BROKERAGE: EVIDENCE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL STRUCTURE FOR MANAGERS, BANKERS, AND ANALYSTS. Academy of Management Journal, 50, 119-148.
BURT, R. S., HOGARTH, R. M. & MICHAUD, C. (2000) The Social Capital of French and American Managers. Organization Science, 11, 123-147.
NEWELL, S., TANSLEY, C. & HUANG, J. (2004) Social Capital and Knowledge Integration in an ERP Project Team: The Importance of Bridging AND Bonding. British Journal of Management, 15, 43-S57.

Methodology chapter

Walsham (p166) refers to Guba and Lincoln's fourth generation evaluation. It's worth using this evaluation idea in the methodology chapter. Their proposed approach is "characterized as measurement oriented, description oriented and judgment oriented." Then Walsham says the key to this approach "the key dynamic" - what's a dynamic? - " is negotiation". He states that the approach is interpretive. What's the difference between an interpretive approach and the constructionist perspective that Guba and Lincoln think it to be?

"they take a position that evaluation outcomes are not description what things are or really work, but instead represent meaningful construction that aid an individual to make sense of situations."

Walsham also states that actors value shaping sense making and that power relationships are also important.

These ideas all feed into a practical methodology.

See Guba and Lincoln's twelve steps (p185) for how to use them to rationalise or justify an approach.

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GUBA, E. G. & LINCOLN, Y. S. (1989) Fourth Generation Evaluation, Sage.
WALSHAM, G. (1995) Interpretive case studies in IS research: nature and method. European Journal of Information Systems, 4, 74-81.

Nvivo updated

I'm following Silvana di Gregorio's advice on anonymising my data in the analysis files so I shall soon be able to share the data with my supervisors, which will be interesting. I wonder if they'll look as closely at such electronic files as they do my writing.

I've also worked out how to attach memos to transcripts, but done so too enthusiastically as I hadn't realised where the links should be to annotations. Now I can annotate transcripts so each particular point that I want to comment on is linked to the particular annotation. It's really useful because as you read a transcript, ideas come to mind, ideas that may not require coding, but just thinking about and perhaps talking about with someone eventually, something to follow up later.

The other useful thing I've learned is to create an analysis journal under memos, with the time stamp against what I've done (cntrol shift T). This is useful to remind me how far I've got in anonymising, and what codes I might want to look at in future (like code against history or pre-conditions).

Viva - the last hurdle

In the post-viva euphoria phase, our successful PhD student points out this link to me. It starts by referring to the excitement of submitting the final draft, but then the dawning realisation that the viva formed another chapter. There is so much written and spoken about the viva, that it makes me nervous in anticipation, and I'm only half way through the process. There are web pages like "Nasty PhD Viva Questions", or PhD Viva or Tips for getting through; chapters in PhD books like Potter, 2006 or Marshal, 2004; whole books on just the viva, like Murray's, and a blogger .

How can what should be an academic discussion, become such a nightmare? I cannot imagine how I'll cope because the uncertainty of the months waiting beforehand mean I'll be a nervous wreck when I get to the room, so highly unlikely to be able to answer simple questions, let alone have a sensible discussion.

Fail at the last hurdle.

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Potter, Stephen, 2006, Doing Postgraduate Research
Marshal, Green, 2004, Your PhD Companion
Murray, Rowena, 2001, How to survive your Viva: Defending a Thesis in an Oral Examination

Case study chapter drafted

My supervisors have given me feedback on the chapter I've written on the first case study. One comment they made was this first case study might not be a typical project. They're right I suspect.

They also suggested that when I write up the next case study I include under each dimension of social capital a paragraph on pre-conditions. That's interesting because projects when run under PRINCE2 for example, don't consider pre-conditions and history of team members. Methodologies are so formal compared to what social capital is.

Case study 2 write up is next - onwards and upwards!

Perhaps.

Practicalities

Getting access to organisations who will let me talk with its people, and the consultants it uses is is a practical difficulty. Today I'm attending a seminar:

"Doing Qualitative Research: practical approaches".

I hope it gives me some ideas of how to get another case study.

Engagement as mediation

Value comes from the accumulation of knowledge being practised. Consultants that provide discrete knowledge deliver, I argue, less value than consultants that provide a new way of thinking and cumulative knowledge.

Where's the mediation?

Thoughts to journal

I need to write a research journal so I can use its reflections in my methodology chapter, or maybe in appendices. Some things you can't and mustn't write in a blog, and I don't just mean personal comments on other people, but when you're researching you may have agreed with people not to reveal names of individuals or of organisations. So you can't blog them.

Viva done

Colleague's walked in from viva - she's passed!


Here are the hopefuls lining up to find how she did it, so they'll follow on in a year or two.

Viva today

The atmosphere is tense, and our research director is nervous. Her first supervisee is, even as I type, undergoing her viva.

Why do this?

Why? I'm stuck in the middle of the PhD, half way through 3 years of funding, only 18 months to go, but it feels like there's hardly any time left, because I've done two and a half years, being as the first year was on the Masters in Research Methods. Of my colleagues, I know some of them are struggling. We lost a couple during or after the MRes. Some of them have had problematic relationships. Some of us are not happy with the way we work with our supervisors.

Supervisors are so important. We are unhappy when they criticise our writing, but as a colleague on Facebook recently commented

This would be so much easier if my supervisor wasn't stunningly correct about 98% of what she says.

What other opportunities do we ever get for someone to talk to us so intensely about our work? I'm rather lucky to be here.

Reviewing a conceptual paper

How do you review a conceptual paper? Our training is good on reviewing papers about research. For example, here's the first part of an assignment question from B852:

Critically review some journal article:
(a) Explain the purpose of the research, any research questions or propositions, and how it relates to existing theory and/or practice.
(b) Describe and discuss the appropriateness of the research methodology employed, highlighting any particular strengths or limitations.
(c) Summarise and critically assess the findings of the research and any conclusions drawn from them.

There are an awful lot of conceptual papers, and not so many research papers but I've got hold of an interesting and relevant paper that's about to be published. I'd like to share it with my supervisors, so need to prepare something in mind to tell them. If I write it, they'll read it because they're good like that. So how do I structure a review of a conceptual paper?

Access

My research won't cost the organisation money, just an hour of the time of the people who've worked on a project the organisation has chosen to let me near. Some organisations tell me they're just about to start a new project - so doesn't that mean they've just finished one, and can't I come and listen to people talk about it? I won't take photos if they don't want me to. I'll not tell who they are and I don't need to know the data on the project. And they'll be contributing to knowledge of how to make projects work better. Aren't people proud of what they do?

Long documents in Word

Some of the final year PhD students complain that they can't get the software to do what they want. When you have a document of 80-100,000 words, Word isn't too good at handling it. I know you need to do things like have a main file that pulls in the other files as chapters, but there are headings, page numbers, contents and citations and references compatible with Endnote to consider, as well as how the appendices get numbered. Here is a helpful web site for all of Word. It includes a section on numbering appendices here.

I hope I can sort this all out in 18 months time.

Boundary complexity & management consultancy

There's a book out soon by Sturdy, Clark, Fincham and Handley called:
Management Consultancy: Boundaries and Knowledge in Action

I found this out because I was looking for their 2006 working paper on Boundary Complexity in Management Consultancy Projects. The reference was in Sheila Marsh's book, and cited a web site that's no longer available: www.ebkresearch.org. So I can't find the paper.

Anyone got any suggestions?

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MARSH, S. (2009) The feminine in management consulting : power, emotion and values in consulting interactions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.