Client Engagement with External Consultants

Open Research Online and new blog

2011-10-26T18:08:00.003+01:00

To pluck the fruit from the next tree, I'm looking for new opportunities and blogging them at http://carpediempostdoc.wordpress.com/.

Before I go, remember that I've uploaded my PhD thesis to the Open University's Open Research Online (ORO) repository.

Then continue here.

Moving on

2011-10-14T10:21:00.008+01:00

I'm starting a new and optimistic blog as a post-doc here. I don't know if I should be staying with Blogger or moving to Wordpress. It's easy to get content into Blogger but I've used Wordpress a little for my OUBS 'Winding Up' blog, liking some of its writing features, but more importantly, also liking reading other's Wordpress blogs - if it gets your more readers and hence more feedback, then it's worth the move.

I'll come back here to report progress of my colleagues here in the OUBS. For example, our EU colleague is back, up and running with his PhD. Hurrah!

Canadian colleague has to submit by the end of October or go part-time. Last year, someone else went part-time which cost around £1500 (per year), but for my Canadian colleague, as a non-EU student it costs even more - around £5000, so he is well-motivated to finish. Canadian colleague has been the enthusiast for others' success for several years now, arranging little parties and get-togethers over a celebratory glass of champagne. At last, his turn approaches and I look forward to celebrating with him and for him.

Blog finishing

2011-10-02T16:13:00.015+01:00

This was a blog for my PhD. New posts won't be about that PhD process, so I'll blog somewhere else. Shortly I'll put up the link for that new blog, the experience of post-doctorate - with or without the experience.

Of the four post-grads in the Open University Business School that started the full-time PhD in October 2007, three of us are successful. Here's what's happened:

I'm through and finished
Colleague who did the MRes with me has successfully passed her viva with corrections, and that means she is successful. Congratulations to her, despite her wanting no fuss :)
Canadian colleague is valiantly writing up. He registered a month later so he doesn't have to submit yet. The rules are that you must submit your dissertation by midnight of the last day of the four years, or none of it counts. You'd have wasted the four years. However, if you go part-time, then you have some more years before you must submit. The problem is, going part-time requires an expensive registration fee, and it means there are visa issues for non-EU students and Canadian colleague doesn't want to do that if he can help it. So go you, Canadian colleague. Get it written.
EU colleague cleared his desk - we've been told to clear our desks for the second year PhD students to move into. I don't know what he's doing, just that he's had problems.

In total, it's a comparatively successful year group in that half of us have submitted and got through, with the promise that 3/4 of us will be successful in the forseeable future. Several earlier year groups had students that didn't make it within the four years, perhaps because they got married, had a baby, went back to another country, went part-time, or returned years later to complete. So our year group is doing well. Why? Perhaps because:

we had good supervisors that directed our reading, gave rigorous and prompt feedback on our writing, encouraged our project management
we came with the new OU MRes, or with substantial research experience
the university supported us by providing relevant courses on research methods, academic reading and writing, presentation of work, networking.
we were lucky with data access
we worked 35 hours a week on our research

I know my colleagues will take issue with some of these suggestions. Over four years, you expect to have some bad luck and hurdles. In the year group that started the MRes with me, five years ago, some had to change supervisors, some had difficulty getting data access, some have been ill (I had cancer), one got married, another divorced, one had a baby, another's child was seriously ill. You can also have good luck, for example, like finding good access to data, choosing the right supervisor, living close enough to make the most of the experience, and enjoying academia. I had good luck.

New journey needed

2011-09-14T08:57:00.003+01:00

Having attended the graduation ceremony at Versailles, celebrated the achievement with kir, now I need a new journey. I want a post-doc research position, but unlikely to get it without publications, so the next few months I shall spend harvesting papers from my PhD research and submitting them to journals on the public sector, consulting, IT and knowledge. Cross fingers.

Wound up and finished

2011-09-12T21:15:00.005+01:00

With family, we went to Versailles for the degree ceremony. Why Versailles? Because the OU is so open that it has its students all over the UK, not on a campus, and it even has a fair number of students in Europe, particularly MBA students in Brussels. Therefore, its degree ceremonies can be in Portsmouth or Manchester, Dublin or Versailles. It took more effort to get to Versailles than to Milton Keynes, but it seemed like an opportunity for a real celebration - I'm not doing any more degrees - this was a special degree and a special place.

We stayed in a lovely hotel in the centre of Versailles, and ate a couple of memorable meals, with good wine. It was lovely to be there with husband, son and daughter and to be able to treat them a bit after their support for me the last few years.

I sent postcards to parents who've praised me for my late academic development and to my supervisors who encouraged me.

Lethargy sets in

2011-08-28T11:19:00.004+01:00

The part time job I've had since April finishes next week. My post-grad registration finishes next month. I've nothing to do and nothing to say, and I'm nearing the end of a dismal day and there seems to be nothing beyond. I wish something would fall into the pond.

See http://www.poetry-online.org/noyes_daddy_fell_into_the_pond.htm

Clear your desk

2011-08-19T07:31:00.004+01:00

New students are arriving in October.

I must find a new occupation, a new means of publishing, a new affiliation. I've been told to clear my desk so they can move the continuing post grads to it.

I must find a new desk.

Conferred

2011-08-18T14:49:00.005+01:00

The degree was conferred in absentia at the meeting of Congregation on 9 August 2011. I have the certificate.

Winding up

2011-08-07T10:18:00.007+01:00

There are several finishing points for a PhD:

submission - the biggest and most exciting hurdle
viva - the scariest hurdle
sending your corrections to the examiner(s)
receiving the examiner's feedback - have you met the academic requirements?
taking the bound copies to the Research School
having the degree conferred
attending the degree ceremony - the nicest and most fun with champagne to drink with friends, relatives and supporters

Tomorrow I take the copies to the Research School, and I'll contact some of the gatekeepers to my case studies to offer them copies too. On Tuesday, I'm told that the university has congregation at which they agree the award of degrees, and thus the degree of PhD will be awarded to me in absentia. Then the Research School will invite me to attend one of the degree ceremonies, which being the OU could be in the UK (Portsmouth, Milton Keynes, London Barbican for example) or in Dublin or Versailles. How nice.

But the winding up is a long process. It's taken six months since submission, six months of juggling other things in my life, including new paths - winding up one and looking for a new path.

A new path might be a post in the OU - I'd like that - perhaps I'll find an opportunity to develop research from my PhD, something to do with government IT perhaps stemming from last week's Parliamentary committee report. Now that would be exciting - a new start after a long finish.

Bound copies

2011-08-01T21:28:00.004+01:00

That's it then. I've just emailed my pdf format thesis to the printer for printing and binding so that I can deliver the copies to the Research School next Monday morning, just in time to meet the date for the next conferring of degrees next week. If all goes to plan, I get the title in just about a week's time.

End of an era. Bye bye to my thesis.

Met academic requirements

2011-07-29T10:59:00.007+01:00

I have an official letter:

"I am pleased to inform you that the University's Research Degrees Committee has confirmed that your thesis meets the criteria for the award of a research degree. You have therefore met the academic requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Open University, with effect from 27 July 2011."

Yah! Go me! I have to get bound copies of the thesis to the Research School in just over a week if I want the degree awarded in August, otherwise I have to wait till the end of September.

Publications

2011-07-26T10:34:00.009+01:00

Lecturer jobs require a publication record but I don't have a publication record, yet alone such a record in A* and B* rated journals. How do I get a publication record when I no longer am a research student and don't have a research job?

For the time being, I'm pootling around having fun as a user experience developer on a new OU network for learning, SocialLearn. Sadly, this is not a research associate position and doesn't officially provide the experience or skills that a lecturer needs.

I could:

make a participant study of relationships between users and contractors who are developing the web site. That builds on the business research I've done for my PhD
research the user experience - that builds on research studies in a different field

Corrections done

2011-07-08T12:21:00.006+01:00

I've given in the corrections. I hope the examiner is happy but I believe I've unequivocally addressed all the corrections that the list required.

I worry about my writing being too cryptic and consequently perhaps being misconstrued, but it wasn't worth taking any longer because the extra time was unlikely to improve my writing and content.

Another viva done

2011-07-07T11:56:00.006+01:00

Sophia is through her viva with minor corrections. Soon she can go home to her family in China where she has a little boy that she must miss so much.

The photo is of her with her internal examiner after the viva.

It has taken her many years of perseverance and effort to complete this PhD, including marrying, then going home when it was nearly written because of problems with the block of flats she lived in, having her baby, waiting some years and then coming back to England in November to finish the writing. She deserves the congratulations.

Cricket team

2011-06-30T09:26:00.006+01:00

Critical realism and cricket are topics PhD students have debated over coffee, though I must admit that cricket is of more interest, causes less angst and fills many more coffee breaks than critical realism. Perhaps this is because several of the full-time PhD students enjoy sport, especially team sports, and we have students from ex-commonwealth countries like Pakistan, New Zealand and Canada. Such students have enthusiastically got together a cricket team from the OU Business School (now called the Faculty of Business and Law),

Every year in the early summer there is an inter-departmental 6-aside cricket tournament in the OU. The website is here:
http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/b.m.cook/cricket/index.htm

The OUBS has entered a team, “Ne Plus Ultras”, for the first time this year, which has progressed to the final that takes place tomorrow. If you're on campus, you're welcome to come down tomorrow if you’d like to support the team, watch some cricket or just have some lunch in the sun. The Sports Pavilion bar is also open for food and drinks. The cricket pitch is by the sports pavilion on the north east side of the main campus, a minute or two from the central walkway.

I promise not to discuss critical realism.

Another student submits

2011-06-24T17:38:00.006+01:00

Another stalwart student of our year submitted today. See her relaxed and sunny beam.

Academic media video

2011-06-17T18:56:00.010+01:00

At last I've been given the link to the video I did about my research. Here it is.

Its subtitle isn't quite correct because:

First, I’m not a doctor yet, although I will be in a couple of months as I’m through my viva.
Secondly, the words refer to the OUBSS, not the OUBS – too many esses!

But it's heaps better than my attempts in 2010, and it does allow me to summarise my research. And I'm an extra in a maths video here.

Doing corrections

2011-06-16T21:31:00.007+01:00

Are these corrections to my thesis or amendments? I've corrected all the little bits, the details of references and cross-references, a typo here, or a missing couple of words from a quote. I've addressed the the bullet points in the examiners' report, and drafted a response to their list of corrections explaining what I've done,how I've amended the writing and the logic of it.

The process is that you send your thesis to the internal examiner with a table indicating what you've changed and where, so that it's easy for them to refer to. Then if they don't like anything they are able to tell you easily and you can have another go. I'm so nervous about my changes that despite already having had a go at them, I've not yet sent them off, but am rewriting my response.

Apparently, the examiners can ask you to do only what was in their report, so once I've persuaded them I've done, I'm through.

No award

2011-06-15T14:35:00.018+01:00

It transpires that I'm not eligible for the award after all. Like chocolate competitions say you mustn't be employed or a family of an employee of the company to enter, for this award I must not work for the Open University. Yet I work as an Associate Lecturer (AL) for the OU, and since I submitted my thesis, I've had a contract to work on the SocialLearn project in the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi).

When I think of all the times I've heard Open University post grads complain that they don't automatically get the chance be ALs so they don't get the teaching experience that the Joint Skills Statement requires of them, they'd not be impressed. (I blogged on their skills here. ) I don't think any other ALs would be impressed either. I've won the skills, but lost the nomination.

It's particularly silly because the HEFCE Joint Skills Statement of skills training requirements, now replaced by the researcher development framework, says that a post-graduate student should obtain teaching experience, which is just what I did through my AL work.

Director of research studies isn't best pleased because, she says, research students are encouraged from the start to follow the HEFCE Joint Skills statement which outlines skills expected of PhD students, including teaching. Opportunities for research students to gain the vital teaching experience needed if they are to get an academic job are very rare at the Open University. Other universities look for teaching experience in PhD qualified recruits. As such the OU encourages students to seek AL roles in order to augment their experience, and so they are employees of the Open University for their time as ALs. This is needed, is something required of them and yet AOUG apparently penalises them for taking this action. Furthermore, although I am currently working, I have gained that short term employment in KMi because of the strength of my completed PhD research.

As the award is for performance as a research student, current employment status is irrelevant and it's not like a chocolate competition.

Student award

2011-06-15T14:35:00.013+01:00

To my pride, pleasure and surprise the director of research studies has recommended me for an award from the AOUG, an award that goes to a final year student. She says it's due to my

recent recognition via conference papers,
constant engagement with social media and communication tools to speak to wider communities about your research,
service as an AL "alongside your studies and your active role in the programme".

I don't know what the award involves but I'm flattered to be nominated, especially given the struggle I had in the MRes year to write essays, and the difficulty I had to persuade the PhD interview board that I was a worthy candidate.

Management Consulting Division conference

2011-06-13T21:12:00.010+01:00

I have just spent some days in Amsterdam at the Management Consulting Division of the Academy of Management biennial European conference held at the Vu University, where I was presenting a paper, the first time I've presented a paper at such an august forum, so somewhat nervous.

At my viva, the examiner asked me where I could present my work and I mentioned this conference, but he seemed to think it a mere practitioners' conference and asked if I couldn't present at an academic venue. That floored me for a moment because I didn't realise that he didn't realise this was a branch of the AOM, the Academy of Management. You can't get much more academic than that, can you? and it's international. Fortunately, I had enough wit to point this out tactfully, and he seemed reassured.

It was the most stimulating conference I've been to because it was all so closely related to my research, and I've come home raring to finish my corrections and even with other ideas as to how I could have developed my research, or written the thesis.

Academics from Europe and America discussed consultancy, consultants, their relationship with clients, their identity, image, future and impact. As a profession, consultants seem a navel-gazing lot, but it is interesting to note that many conference participants were practitioners who wanted to know and understand theory in order to apply it in practice. Hence, many of them considered themselves as hybrids being both academics and consultant practitioners. However, this hybridicity emphasises to me that much of the research on consulting is from the practitioner’s not the client’s perspective, and there is a dearth of research on this perspective.

Remedying this dearth somewhat, Vu University’s Master’s students, taking the consultancy module, presented posters on the client-consultant relationship from qualitative data they had collected through interviews with clients in a Dutch public sector organisation. They’d identified an iterative process of the growth of trust in the client, finding that soft skills were important to the growth of trust in the middle phases of a project.

The conference seemed well organised, for instance, at the research-based sessions, the three papers presented seeming to slot together well.

I presented my paper in a session on consultants as sense makers, at which there were 14 or so participants including names you recognise from journal publications. Questions included

one on clarification of adapting behaviour. Did it cover adapting a mindset, which was something I hadn’t explicitly separated from physical adapting of project processes when I analysed, nor did I immediately have an example to mind.
the way I represented some cycles. I should probably change double headed arrows to two single headed arrows. As the questioner had earlier presented an applauded session on diagramming, I think I should take his advice. He did, thankfully, also comment positively on the model.
Finally there was a question on tensions, because I hadn’t clearly explained it was a normative model. I elucidated by describing an earlier scenario of an initially unsuccessful case that lacked interaction, and then adapted its conditions and behaviours.

A stream of papers that I didn’t fit in to my schedule was on the value of consultancy, something I think I could have developed more in my thesis, value of engagement and its relationship to value of consultancy. In similar vein, Andrew Sturdy gave a key note lecture on the impact of consultants, the tenor being that their impact is rather less than the industry itself argues for – a critical academic indeed. Wouldn't he have been an interesting examiner for me!

Dressed to present

2011-06-02T19:49:00.007+01:00

How should one dress to present at a conference?

Next week Management Consulting Division of the the Academy of Management is having its biennial conference in Amsterdam, where I'm presenting a paper written with my supervisors on my PhD research. I'm hoping not just to get good feedback on the paper, but new ideas on where to go next and how to develop it, something I can share with the supervisors in order to write a publishable paper for a quality journal.

For the viva, I wore in my best suit, hair freshly washed, makeup professional and under stated. At previous conferences I've been a student, but now I'm through the viva, shouldn't I dress professionally to present at a conference ?

SocialLearn team

2011-05-26T22:02:00.003+01:00

I'm working on a project called SocialLearn and am with a team of people again, not all alone, like the PhD researcher is. I had a few days off aftr my viva, and when I came back, I was sitting at my desk, watching people move around and thinking that perhaps they were all going to a meeting that I didn't know about when they all stopped round and gave me a card and a clap.

It's going to be a good team to work with. I'm looking forward to getting to know them well.

Minor results

2011-05-18T10:42:00.007+01:00

My viva yesterday resulted in PhD with minor corrections.

I followed the Ten Tips for getting through your PhD Viva more or less.

I had a good piece of work
my supervisors choose examiners who liked my work
I knew my arguments

One of the amendments is to put in the introduction some alternative ways I could have done the work - that's always awkward because there are a thousand different ways to discard and would make a thesis ten times longer, but I need write only a couple of sentences I understand.

An interesting question they asked was if I'd ever come across such a cyclic model of engagement from a consultancy, being as consultants are renowned for producing their own models, especially two by two matrices. But no, I haven't, and I doubt anyone else has because my model came from thinking about Nahapiet and Ghoshal's model of social capital, and was empirically developed from the case studies. I haven't fully explained it on this blog partly because I wanted to keep the details until I was ready to publish. Soon they will be published in

my thesis in the Open University library
the MCD conference paper.

After it all, we quietly celebrated in the office with fellow students, anyone passing by and a bit of bubbly.

Silver PGs

2011-05-15T16:57:00.006+01:00

Vitae has PGs blogging here. A recent blog there on Silver researchers - do they offer a contribution to the postgraduate community? has elicited over a dozen comments from older post graduates. As an older post-grad myself, I appreciate the blog and the discussion since I'd not thought of myself as too old to start the PhD when I applied because it was something I'd always wanted to do, wanting the process, the opportunity to research, and learn how to research better than I had done when I'd had other opportunities. I think I have contributed ot the post graduate community - in the OUBS, in the university and to the wider community through this blog.

However, it came as a surprise to me to receive career development training because I'd never had that before - perhaps why my 'career' has not ever taken off. My school didn't do career training. Girls were going to marry and be mothers, so they could go to university perhaps, or teaching, or if not bright enough for that, then nursing or clerks in the civil service. That was my 'career training'.

It'll be nice if I get a research job after this - I've enjoyed the PhD and would love to do further research. A career position would be a bonus.

Colleague submits

2011-05-14T12:15:00.006+01:00

My Chinese chum has submitted. This is special because she has had a baby on the way through her PhD journey, had to move back to China, wait for her baby to be big enough to leave with her relatives and then come back to England to complete her degree. She's rightly proud of her achievement.

Following hard on her heels is my Canadian colleague, who was much delayed in collecting his data, but is now analysing and writing up at speed. He'll be working right up to the last minute of the four year student registration. Go him!

Viva preparation.

2011-05-11T15:18:00.010+01:00

Preparing for a viva is a different task from preparing for an exam because you, rather than the examiners have set the syllabus, so you have to anticipate the questions, but it's the examiners who create the questions, and you have to anticipate what questions the examiners will create having read what you wrote. Is that complicated?

Amongst things I've done to prepare are:

found generic questions,
collected specific questions from my mock viva,
imagined the questions,
written answers to generic and specific viva questions
discussed with my supervisors,
reread my thesis,
stuck post-it notes in it
found and read papers written by the examiners
had a mock viva with some horrid questions about how I could possibly have used that theory without citing GuruWhatsisName, and how do I reconcile a philosophical perspective with how I've done the research.
identified the weak points in my thesis (I think, I hope)
learned answers by heart
listed corrections (I heard my examiner say at a speech to PhD students that he expected them to have a list of corrections so I'll have a short list of the typos if he asks )
presented to my fellow students
prepared a conference paper with my supervisors - a new experience from which I learned much

Help is available on the web at various sites:

Times Higher Educational Supplement
David Twigg on preparing for the viva
Tips for getting through your PhD Viva from jobs.ac.uk
The Final Hurdle - a blog that includes some links to other sites on vivas
Survive your viva - a Guardian article from 2003 with advice from Rowena Murray
vitae - one of the best for researchers

As the viva draws closer, I want to revise more, but also I'm fascinated by my new part-time temporary job researching the use of a new web site for social learning, and that work draws me in more each day as I get to know the job and meet people.

Revising and writing papers

2011-04-30T15:30:00.012+01:00

Phew! I just uploaded a conference paper "Cycles of Engagement", due in today!

Revising my work for the viva started with

reviewing generic viva questions,
then the more specific ones that came up in the mock viva.
A third approach is to write a paper for a conference, and that's been the focus of my work over the last couple of weeks.

Of course, this conference paper for the Management Consulting Division biennial conference has got my supervisors' names on it, and deservedly so. After speaking with someone from the MCD at the Academy of Management conference last August, I was encouraged to present at the PhD consortium, but once I approached the MCD they suggested I presented a paper at the full conference. I wrote a proposal, and they accepted it, to my surprise and delight. But I shouldn't be so surprised, because now at the end of my PhD, I know what I have to say, so perhaps I wrote a sensible and interesting proposal.

After the mock viva, my supervisors offered to help me to write this paper, and I'm glad they did, because, in the last few weeks, I've learned a lot from the way they write. One supervisor addressed the challenge of how to put all the richness and detail that makes a PhD study what it is - into just 8000 words, restructuring the original paper I wrote; the other has greatly improved the flow of the argument. Whenever am I going to learn to write like this!

Why write a paper before your viva? Because it:

helps you to identify the key points of your thesis,
makes you reread parts of your thesis,
helps you spot typos and mistakes before the examiner points them out to you

If the conference were before my viva, I'd also have practised speaking the points I'm learning by heart for the viva. But the viva is in May (probably) and the conference is in June. Look here for the paper if you want to read it because it's a good summary of my work.

I'll welcome constructive feedback, so do contact me through this web form.

Advanced academic media training workshop

2011-04-21T16:53:00.009+01:00

As a practice for my viva, and future activities, I registered on the OU's advanced academic media training workshop, having taken the initial workshop over a year ago here. I'd realised at the Bottom Line studio that a one-minute piece to camera with all the lights focussed on you is almost parallalisingly scary so I needed to improve. If you're logged on to the OU system, you can read about the training here.

In the morning we covered a two-minute interview with questions we'd anticipated and given the interviewer beforehand. Then we spoke "down the line". This means that you have a tiny earpiece, face the camera and respond to the questions you hear in your earpiece in an otherwise empty studio. The advantage of this set up is that if a news channel wants an Open University expert quickly, the OU expert can immediately work in this studio to answer questions from someone in another part of the UK, or Europe or anywhere in the world, without having to be in their studio.

Then we went out in the fresh spring air to produce our pieces to camera en situ. Mine was in a car park, and why a car park? Because I was talking about engagement, and some of the best engagement happens in unexpected places like car parks. It was only a one minute piece, and I'm prepared it, and learned it by heart, so took only three takes.

The first got chucked because I said 'good morning' and shouldn't, but it gave me time to learn to take a couple of steps before talking
The second got chucked because the last line was lame
When I get the link for the best take, I'll post it on this blog.

We also took the opportunity to put together a piece for an OU mathematics openings course where one of us explained what maths could do for understanding patterns in the world, like those in fern leaves, and the fun of learning together (I became a film extra).

After lunch, we practised auto cues, discovering its disadvantages and the consequence need to 'perform' , act up a bit and to read quickly. Then we planned a story board for a piece of media with a running order and shooting script. This was discussion and a bit theoretical but gave me ideas for something to do in my new research job, (the one I started part-time, temporary last week,) and the advice from our excellent trainer, Janet Summer, improved and extended our conception of how to tackle such a media piece. Also look out for:

Starting with maths from Katie Chicot
Easy Net Present Value from Jane Freckleton-Hughes

Justifying my methodology

2011-04-18T08:45:00.010+01:00

What's the relationship of realism to positivism and interpretivism?

thus asked my mock examiner. So I went back to reread Tsoukas (1994) on realist perspectives and have again sunk in the mire of methodological approaches, perspectives, philosophies and epistemologies.

This web site has a nice diagram of the overlap between the three approaches or perspectives or ontologies.

Realism overlaps positivism in that it accepts social structures have independent existences. "Like positivism, realism accepts social structures have some form of independent existence that is experienced as ‘external' to individuals. These structures act upon us - pressurising and constraining our behaviour."
Realism overlaps interpretivism in that what we regard as real is significant. "Like interpretivism, realism accepts that what we regard as real is highly significant. E.g. if I believe myself to be middle class, while every indicator of social class holds I am working class, this will have important consequences for my behaviour."

For my research on engagement,
social phenomena exist whether or not people are aware of them so engagement can be taken as a real phenomenon even if people are not aware of it. It still exists and affects their actions.

Critical realism is an epistemological (not a research or sociological) perspective that responds to critisism of the positivist perspective. "It's a response", says Mingers, "to the difficulty of maintaining a realist position in the face of criticisms" (page 380). My erudite supervisor tells me that

'the "critical" label comes from the associated idea that such "real" phenomena can however only be known through using conceptual frameworks, so our knowledge of these real phenomena is always provisional, or subject to challenge when new concepts come along. So knowledge of this real social world has to be held "critically".'

Critical realism is "a way of resolving or dissolving" issues around positivism and extreme constructivist positions {Mingers, 2004: 374}.

Mingers, J. 2004. Real-Izing Information Systems: Critical Realism as an Underpinning Philosophy for Information Systems. Information and Organization, 14(2): 87-103.
Tsoukas, H. 1994. What Is Management? An Outline of a Metatheory. British Journal of Management, 5(4): 289.

Where does my PhD sit?

2011-04-11T20:38:00.010+01:00

At this year's 2011 conference of the UK Association for Information Systems, the keynote speaker, David Wainwright of Northumbria University, presented a lecture on the PhD Odyssey: Information Systems, Adventure and Adversity by comparing the PhD journey with that of Odysseus, full of troubles, trials and tribulations, an apt analogy. One of the Odysseus' distractions was Circe, a villaneous and bewitching goddess who turned Odysseus' men into swine. Wainwright's argument was that a PhD student can be betwitched by the focus of the PhD. He presented a diagram, which from my notes I sketch here, where the implication seems to be that your PhD focus might be in any one of these blobs. It's an interesting diagram because it incorporates so much of the overlap between areas relevant to information systems, the central three being

Digital Media
Information Systems
Computing

My initial reaction was that my research sits in the business management blob, but perhaps it actually sits in the interaction between management practitioners and computing practitioners, because although I start from the use and adaptation of IS for organisations, what I'm really interested in is the relationship of people in different organisations on the same project, and such people include management practitioners and computing practitioners, often the computing practitioners being external. So my focus isn't in a blob, but in the interaction between blogs.

I acknowledge

2011-04-05T19:15:00.002+01:00

The journey to achieve a PhD is a marathon. Decades ago, I set myself this target and many people have helped me on the long way with practical and emotional encouragement.

The most recent support came from my two supervisors. They encouraged, berated and trained me through exciting and intellectual conversations. I enjoyed their realistic, enthusiastic support and their complementary approaches so that my research developed in ways I’d never have guessed.

I thank our erst-while director of research students for accepting my original naïve proposal for the Masters in Research Methods and then allowing me to continue onto the doctorate. What faith the man has! I thank our erst-while project assistant Shelagh for her practical help. I thank my fellow OUBS students for our coffee-time seminars where discussion has ranged from soccer to supervision, from cricket to critical realism. They’ve helped me get alternative angles on progress and research. I thank also Minh, LizT and other unseen commentators on this PhD blog for their electronic encouragement.

A big thank you goes to my anonymous participants for providing that all-important access to their organisations, for giving me their time to provide insights to their experiences of IT projects.

I set aside my domestic duties (not so sadly) to complete this research, so I thank Cherry for cleaning round me while I typed, my lovely husband for doing all the cooking and shopping the last few months, my brothers, my brother-in-law, and my son for reading and feeding back on earlier drafts of this thesis. I thank my late husband too – we used to talk about IT project management and the public sector client. To him I owe the original idea for the research.

Later, after the viva, you can borrow my thesis from the OUBS or OU library, or download from the ORO - assuming I pass.

Why is it important to focus on the public sector?

2011-04-04T10:00:00.007+01:00

My research looks at engagement on public sector IT projects, so

Why is it important to focus on the public sector?

This might be a viva question and I can say that I justify this focus in the literature review (page 14) where I've written:
IT projects are important to the public sector because they are a key means of implementing government policy requiring often rapid changes to how the public sector department functions and provides services.
But maybe I've justified only the focus on IT projects, not on the public sector. The public sector makes policy and implements it through IT. Examples of failures of such implementation are:

Libra system for the magistrates courts
the National id scheme with an initial budget of £3 billion that went up to £5 billion.
in 2003 the government introduced two credits: Child Tax Credit and Working Tax credit. The Inland Revenue's IT supplier created a new IT system for processing the tax credits, a system that went live in April 2003 with problems that took ten weeks to solve. Volumes were higher than expected and the testing window had been cut. Both suppliers and IR senior managers had to account for the fiasco to a Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee.

Public Sector IT continues to be problematic. The day after I submitted my thesis, a Public Administration Select Committee was interviewing IT expert witnesses on good governance and the effective use of IT (pd report is here). Witnesses pointed out that IS is there to implement government policy and government business change.

Hence, I see a need to focus on the public sector.

What do you mean by social capital?

2011-04-03T19:16:00.008+01:00

I use Adler and Kwon's definition of social capital:

"the goodwill that is engendered by the fabric of social relations"

but Putnam who also identified bridging and bonding social capital, conceptualised it as

"arising from a stock of networks, norms and trust"

My research draws heavily on Nahapiet and Ghoshal's paper, which refers to Bourdieu's concept of social capital as the actual or potential resources that can be accessed through networks of relationships, and that potentiality is important in a situation like a project where participants haven't yet interactedl, and social capital has yet to be mobilised.

Although there isn't one agreed definition of it, social capital theory is relevant to explaining relationships so it's relevant to what I've been researching, but social capital theory doesn't go far enough in explaining ab initio relationships where people have not yet interacted and exchanged social capital. To explain such new relationships we need a theory that extends on the theory of social capital.

Adler, P. S. & Kwon, S.-W. 2002. Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept. Academy of Management Review, 27(1): 17-40.
Nahapiet, J. & Ghoshal, S. 1998. Social Capital, Intellectual Capital, and the Organizational Advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242-266.
Putnam, R. D. 2000. Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York ; London: Simon & Schuster.
Putnam. 1993. The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life. American Prospect, 13: 35-42.

Why is engagement important?

2011-04-02T13:15:00.012+01:00

Engagement is important

to gain commitment
for influencing
for bonding
to lubricate the wheels of IT implementation
to align individual work with business strategy
for understanding
for feedback
for good communication.

and a common cause of government IT failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders.

I notice that the government has just had another Parliamentary Select Committee Enquiry on government IT: Good governance and effective IT. A hearing on 8th March is watchable here and the minutes of 15th March are here.

And that is since I handed in my thesis, less than a month ago.

OGC. 2002. Common Causes of Project Failure. London: Office of Government Commerce. http://www.ogc.gov.uk/documents/cp0015.pdf
Parliamentary Office of Science & Technology. 2003. Government IT Projects - Analysis of the Problem In POST (Ed.). http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/pr200.pdf

What attracted you to this project?

2011-04-01T22:00:00.007+01:00

I looked at the client-consultant relationship in the public sector because public sector clients were paying too much and not managing their suppliers. The evidence for this came from media and from a series of reports that the National Audit Office published in the mid 2000s. The evidence was that

IT projects were not being managed
consultants were not being managed.

I put the two together, identified an NAO report that said that engagement between clients and consultants was important to a project relationship {NAO, 2006}, but found no academic research to cast light on such engagement. So here was a project asking to be researched.

What piqued my original interest arose from my MBA research in the early 1990s when a consultancy firm asked me to research the market for selling their services in the NHS. I thought the NHS managers ought to know what they were paying for and how much they ought to pay.

NAO. 2006. Central Government's Use of Consultants: Building Client and Consultant Commitment, Vol. Supporting paper 1. London: HMSO.

Generic viva questions

2011-03-30T09:17:00.012+01:00

Rowena Murray provides a set of questions for the viva, both in her 2003 book and in this pdf file from Strathclyde. Supervisors sent me a copy of Andrew Broad's Nasty PhD Viva Questions, which you can find as pdf here.
Before my mock viva, I attempted written answers to all of these, which was interesting because of my initial and my thought-out reactions. For example:

What is the area in which you wish to be examined?

Er, no thank you. I don't wish to be examined. No! Start again.

In one sentence, what is your thesis?
My thesis is that engagement between people is a cyclic and self-reinforcing phenomenon that can be analysed in terms of six interacting behaviours and conditions that form cycles, that might be described as threads, banners or wedges.

But these were generic questions so not as useful as the specific questions that my mock examiner thought up after reading my thesis, like for example,

Why is engagement important to be studied in a public sector context?

I addressed such the question of why the public sector here two years ago, because of

"the conviction that government is given crucial work that society very much needs to have performed well"

Why is engagement important to the public sector? Because a common cause of project failure is lack of effective engagement with stakeholders (OGC, 2002) and in the public sector, engagement is “a critical element of a consulting project” (NAO, 2006a).

Murray, R. 2003. How to Survive Your Viva : Defending a Thesis in an Oral Examination. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
NAO (2006a) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment. IN NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (Ed.). HMSO.
OGC (2002) Common Causes of Project Failure. National Audit Office and the Office of Government Commerce.

Mock viva

2011-03-29T15:27:00.004+01:00

"I don't agree with you"

announced my mock examiner. Thank goodness it was a mock because I hadn't explained myself well enough, though I did have the argument in my thesis. So by facing a mock exam, I came to understand what they mean by 'defending your thesis'. My mock examiner was terrific at asking nasty questions, questions that I hadn't imagined, and none of her questions were on the list of generic nasty questions that I'd practised, but the practice helped me to articulate my defence.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to blog some of these questions, and my more considered responses. Blogging must help me to work out what I want to say, and if you readers think of any issues, do ask.

Exam panel

2011-03-15T17:42:00.002Z

Today the research school tells me that they now have the exam panel, so only today did they send off the thesis to the examiners. That means despite my giving two months notice that I was going to submit in February, despite my delaying till the 7th March, despite them having the thesis more than a week now, they sat on it and did not send it off immediately. I am not impressed by this useless delay.

Short sentences

2011-03-12T11:13:00.004Z

Your writing style is cryptic

advised my supervisor.

My fellow PhD student and Open University blogger, Minh, has blogged on writing for his PhD here and here, for instance. Now, Minh, like me, has an IT background and, like me, has a tendency to produce short sentences on the grounds that short is better, but his supervisor, like mine, has asked for longer sentences and dislikes the clipped style we go for. Of course, we follow our supervisor's advice, but wonder and grumble.

However, I've begun to be persuaded of the value of longer sentences. I like a short sentence. But that very shortness raises questions in my readers' mind, for instance:

Why do I like short sentences?
Under what circumstances?
And what do I mean by short?

My supervisor says to make it easy on any reader by answering those questions, and I can't answer them if I write short sentences. I could of course write a series of short sentences:

I like short sentences.
Short sentences give one idea.
One idea is enough to cope with.

But the problem with that approach is that it sounds dogmatic and unreflective, which is not what I want my reader to think, especially my examiner. It's a style that doesn't explain enough, focused (which I like) on one purpose, but suggests the writer is not considering alternative points of view, and considering alternative points of view is something that a PhD student must do and demonstrate the doing thereof.

So I'm convinced about the PhD needing a writing style that uses longer sentences, and my supervisor's comment:

"Your writing style is cryptic"

is now self-evident!

Submitted

2011-03-07T04:56:00.003Z

Submitted.

Implications for practitioners

2011-03-05T07:06:00.004Z

Busy day:

Computing tutorial given in morning
Go to campus to office to collect final print of thesis to read again on Sunday
Go out to black tie evening event

I get home between items 2 and 3 to have a phone call from a practitioner who's read my thesis, and has feedback for me. Wey hey! Am I pleased.

He tells me that I should use the six components of engagement to develop a checklist for specific actions on each component, so I get a set of ideas and develop practical guidelines in a handbook for practitioners. How cool is that? It sounds like a potential publication because he believes what I've written.

Now I just have to edit my thesis a bit in time for Monday.

I think I can, I think I can

2011-03-03T18:04:00.006Z

I think I can submit. I think I can submit.

The little engine that could was a story of a tiny train that struggled up a hill with a load of toys for children, puffing

"I think I can. I think I can. I think I can."

I read it to my children, and it inspires me too. Wikipedia reminds me of its last lines:

"As it neared the top of the grade, which had so discouraged the larger engines, it went more slowly. However, it still kept saying, "I--think--I--can, I--think--I--can." It reached the top by drawing on bravery and then went on down the grade, congratulating itself by saying, "I thought I could, I thought I could."

Light at the end of the thesis

2011-03-01T09:48:00.003Z

Just as this PhD student sees the light at the end of the thesis, a passing academic asks me:

Do you know what a bureaucrat does when he sees light at the end of the tunnel?
Orders more tunnel!

Don't tell my supervisor that.

See the Piled Higher and Deeper cartoon here.

Submitting

2011-02-27T20:52:00.006Z

I'm bored. I've done nothing for days, just waiting for feedback from supervisor#2.

I told supervisors and research school I was submitting in February, but supervisor #2 has offered to reread two chapters, and his comments are detailed and useful, so I'm waiting for his last feedback due on Tuesday 1st March, and I've delayed my submission until 7th March. Then it's go, go, go.

Unfortunately, this week I also have

two sets of assignments to mark
a tutorial to give
a lecture by Armbruster on consultancy to attend in Oxford
a seminar by a professor from Oxford to attend at the Open University Business School
other life to deal with

Between Tuesday and Monday 7th I must check off each comment from supervisor #2, squash Word's idiosyncrasies like document map bugs and print out three copies of my thesis for the research school, to hand in along with their EX13 form (done). I've dealt with my supervisor's comments before. I can beat the Word bugs. I can print the copies. I shall submit a week tomorrow.

Grades of PhD degree

2011-02-22T07:55:00.004Z

A doctorate from the Open University may ultimately be a pass or fail, but there are five grades given after the viva:

Award of the degree
Corrections and modifications
Substantial amendment
Major revision and resubmission for re-examination
Alternative recommendations for PhD candidates
Fail

Straight award with no corrections is rare. The most likely result is minor corrections and modifications, for which you get a couple of months to do them in. Substantial amendment is still a pass and you get six months to fix the deficiencies. With amendments you don't have to get reexamined. I am not contemplating the lower grades.

Social Networking pays off

2011-02-21T14:01:00.005Z

I have wonderful Facebook friends. Four years, a young fellow post-grad encouraged me to join Facebook, which I'd thought was for my children. Since then, I’ve been idling away my time on Facebook, seeing it as a transitional activity between useful academic and productive research work - an alternative to playing cards. Now it pays off.

A few months ago I broke my hand, and typing one handed on Facebook, I bemoaned the delay to my thesis whereupon several friends offered help. Last week I took up the offer from three of them, also post-graduate students – though in other places – to read my cross-case analysis, a chapter that I started writing last April, and have struggled with. Even my knitting was never as entangled and useless as this chapter has been – supervisors have read versions of it again and again until they can’t read it any more. My three Facebook friends agreed to read it against the brief:

does it flow?
has it said something sensible about each of the four research questions (with a comment on supervisors’ different perspectives)
any typos, grammar problems or missing words

My friends have responded very helpfully and encouragingly with comments mainly about where they got confused, but also where I’ve said something interesting that I could pull out more and how to do that. They've also picked out 'an' when I meant 'and' and 'temporarily when I mean 'temporally', so done some proof-reading too.

This has really encouraged me, not only that I’m writing so someone else understands, and that my research has interest but also that I now have a justification for using Facebook. Social networking isn’t idling away time but an important activity!

Word bugs - document map

2011-02-20T15:39:00.016Z

For a doctoral thesis you have to write a l-o-n-g document with several chapters, contents, appendices, so you need to use styles, but Word 2007 sometimes changes styles such as captions to a high level, which messes up the document map. I think I've found the trick solve this problem.

Go to Word options, then proofing, and choose the auto correct tab. Then AutoFormat As You Type. Untick 'Define styles based on your formatting'.

I've shown the relevant window in the picture.

However, you still have to unmess the captions. The quickest way to do this seems to be to select a piece of normal text, right click its style box, and choose update style to match selection.
Then watch your document map refresh itself back to what it should look like.

Examiner chosen

2011-02-16T16:00:00.002Z

They chosen my examiner, contacted him and they've accepted. They've yet to choose the internal examiner.

Numbering thesis paragraphs

2011-02-14T14:15:00.003Z

I'm writing this blog while my Word crashes. :(

I thought I'd try again to number the sections within each chapter, like so
2 Literature review
2.1 Introduction
2.2 public sector procurement

I found instructions at http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/numbering20072010.html
and followed them down to modifying the style for my second level headings, where it has crashed. BANG, WALLOP! Silence.

Oh, bother! I'd really like to list my headings like this because I think it would make it easier to work out where you are in the middle of a long chapter.

Conclusion

2011-02-11T14:27:00.001Z

In conclusion, this thesis provides useful insight that enhances understanding of engagement.

Advanced word processing

2011-02-11T12:10:00.010Z

My colleague's sitting next to me updating her references to her diagrams manually. She's checking each one and changing them in her 90,000 word long thesis. And she's writing up her contents manually. Yeuch. I showed her how to

right click any new diagram,
choose caption,
add it in and
check its style is 'caption' so it goes centre and with the required line spacing. Then I
use insert cross reference to refer to the figure, and
add the page number if it's a figure in an appendix.
A quick scroll page (using view document map) to the list of figures in contents,
right click and update. Yep - all forty figures fine.

But this is not the time to learn advanced features like this - learn them in third year and keep practising. Here's a link to a pdf from Durham University on "Creating Long Documents Using Microsoft Word 2007" - it looks useful, simple and short (20 pages).

I would like to learn and easily do chapter numbers in the way that I did twenty years ago with AmiPro. That was a nice word processing package.

My colleague says (tongue in cheek) this isn't all my own work - I've been too technology-assisted!

Final thoughts

2011-02-10T18:48:00.006Z

I want to write the final section that addresses the closing thoughts of my research. I can't! I'm just waffling, and I'm not allowed to write:

I've done enough. It's good enough. Just give me the doctorate!

Writing has been a struggle for me all the way through this process.

Research aims were achieved in that the researcher has developed and empirically validated a model that shows how participants engage on IT projects. The research aims have been achieved in that this researcher has written a heck of a lot of words.

By presenting empirical research with case studies of five IT projects, this thesis has detailed perceptions of how engaged IT project participants build relationships and get work done. By collecting and analysing my case studies (and thanks ever so much to my participants) I've got this model of engagement. It's quite neat really.

This thesis set out the findings that addressed the research question by developing a framework for engagement. Yes - that's what I meant to say above.

Engagement was seen to involve conditions and behaviours in a self-replicating system. That's the model I mean.

Suggestions have been made in this chapter as to how client management can manage the engagement process with their external consultants. But will practitioners believe me?

The results of this research fill a gap in the literature on understanding engagement. Like who cares anyhow?

By focusing on the process of building relationships rather than the outcomes and products of engagement, it identifies how engaged behaviours can produce value through exchanging and building new intellectual capital. I reckon that bit's new and clever and I'd just like to write it right.

This thesis has shown that the essential behaviours that emerge are sharing, sense making and adapting which interact and self-reinforce. Actually, I'd like to write about it being an autopoietic system, but I don't use that word much so bringing it in now in the last section is a bit of a shock.

and then bla, bla boring bla

This thesis provides useful insight that enhances understanding of engagement. It does.

I want to write this now. I've got other stuff to get on with, like life.

Progress

2011-02-01T16:02:00.005Z

We have progress.

The draft my supervisors have just read is the penultimate draft. I’m acting on their feedback, and getting the thesis to supervisor #2 in two weeks time, who will return his feedback by 1st March, aiming at small, not restructuring points so that I can submit within a week of that. Good.
We’ve discussed examiners and made a decision.
Finally and interestingly, we haven’t got a date for a next meeting – there won’t be any more. Howzat?

That means I'll have time to work on the paper I'm submitting to the Management Consultancy Division for their biannual conference in June. That's the first conference paper I've ever submitted.

Fourth year visa problems

2011-01-22T11:37:00.005Z

My fellow fourth year Canadian colleague is having visa problems. Knowing this PhD is funded for three years, he trustingly and naively requested a visa for three years, and it is now up for renewal, but of course, like most PhDs, the research is not completed in three years, which is why you are registered as a full-time student for four years. Regular readers may remember my Chinese colleague had visa problems here.

So CC spent the hundreds of pounds needed to apply for a renewal. Unfortunately he had misleading or contradictory advice so his application was turned down because he hadn't included bank statements, and was told there is no appeal! How can that be? CC went to the university research school for advice and he is now reapplying, but it's taking him days of effort when he should be writing his thesis, and it's making him very grumpy. I can hear him at the next work bay, '*!' 'whiskey' *%$!'.

Unfortunately, another final year student has similar problems. She should have completed around 2007, but in her fourth year had problems with her flat, and with a baby on the way went back to China. Last October she came back to complete her thesis, and went home for Christmas. Now she can't get back because of visa problems.

It can't be doing the university any good, and it's certainly costing the research school in time, and perhaps money. It looks like a university needs legal experts to lead its non-EU students through the visa application process.

It's a shame because the university has so many students from abroad. I share coffee time with a New Zealander, a Canadian, a Pakistani, as well as EU residents from Germany, Holland and Ireland, and that experience of different cultures is refreshing, an experience I benefit from too.

Monolithic versus heterogeneous engagement

2011-01-19T17:36:00.006Z

Monolithic versus heterogeneous engagement

It took me several attempts just to pronounce the words when I read my supervisor's comment. He points out that according to my data this is what the consultants seem to be doing. Monolithic engagement would be if you thought that all the key parties of an organisation behaved the same. A consultant varies his engaged behaviour depending on which parties he is working with, and that is heterogeneous engagement.

I don't think the words are quite opposites, but it's enough to give the idea that too much engagement with one part of the client system at the expense of another can be counterproductive because it can look like colluding, not being independent. And other parts of the client system may appreciate a degree of impartiality or detachment.

It's almost self-evident, and Czerniawska has written that one of the reasons for hiring a consultant is for the independent perspective, but that is not quite the same as being neutral with the various different key parties of the client organisation. That's rather interesting, isn't it?

NAO (2006) Central Government's Use of Consultants: Market Analysis, HC 128 HMSO, London. Accessed from http://www.nao.org.uk/idoc.ashx?docId=FCE46453-0541-412F-AF7A-6BC039849507&version=-1
Czerniawska, F. and Smith, P. (2010) Buying Professional Services : How to Get Value for Money from Consultants and Other Professional Services Providers, Profile Books Ltd. in association with The Economist, London.

Plasticine

2011-01-15T12:08:00.007Z

I've got 'O' level plasticine. We talk about dumbing down education now, but my education included 'O' level sculpture. I call it plasticine because rather than sculpting, for which we had few materials other than plaster of Paris, we used clay, which is only a grown-up version of plasticine. With clay, you can cut out a few bits here, and squeeze in a few bits there. I loved the feel of the clay on my fingers. That work required craftsmanship.

Editing a draft thesis requires crafting too. I am moving bits here, and putting something else there. Cutting and pasting. Adding sentences or paragraphs to improve my argument, and to address my supervisor's detailed comments. Maybe eventually, one day I shall look back with as much pleasure on the experience as I do on my plasticine days.

New pastures

2011-01-08T20:53:00.006Z

Yesterday evening, after work, a few of the post-grads met for a hasty reunion before we move on to pastures new. We were two from my year, two from the year ahead of me (second year when I started), and two from the year before, i.e., those who were my third years when I started. Two PGs from the year below me also came along, so it was a very good, collegiate atmosphere.

My two 'third year' colleagues, are now doctors. One has two jobs, a research job with the Open University and a teaching job somewhere else. The other, my Chinese friend, regular readers who remember the trouble had to get her visa renewed, will be as pleased as me to know, has a job in supply chain management at a well-known company in Swindon.

Both my 'second year' colleagues have landed pleasing jobs as senior lecturers in universities close enough to commute to, so can keep their families in the same schools and jobs. One is through her viva with minor corrections, and the other is still hanging in there on a part time basis.

Of my 'junior' PGs, I like the attitude of one who tells me he is going to go for a job in his discipline in the country of his choice, or possibly as a lecturer in that country. Here is a man who knows his mind and ambitiously chooses his options.

The grass of these new pastures looks green; it's time for me to head that way too.

Croquet

2011-01-07T15:00:00.013Z

Croquet is a game of strategy, in theory simple - you just get your croquet balls through all the hoops in sequence. In practice, it's vicious. Your opponent can use his balls to roquet yours away from the hoops, in totally the wrong direction. So you might be sitting there, complacently leaning on your mallet, just in front of a hoop that you're ready to go through on your next turn, and your opponent is already through it with at least one of his balls and should be ignoring you.
It's his turn.
He doesn't ignore you.
He uses his balls to hit yours, the one you were about to put through the hoop and he sends your ball in totally the wrong direction, forward of the hoop, far away, and it's going to take you ages to get back, and now since he's hit one of your balls, he's allowed another turn. So he can move forward and you're left way behind.

I feel like my supervisor has just roqueted me. He's read and commented in detail on my cross-case analysis chapter, which is great, and I'm really pleased, but he's seriously questioning my conceptual framework, which means I have to do a lot of rethinking, then set out my arguments to address the issues he's identified, and it's going to take me ages.

Am I done yet?
No, so write well, (which is better than "No, and the requirements have changed" so throw it all out and start all over (See http://xkcd.com/844/))

And it isn't really croquet, because supervisor's not playing PhD anyhow. He's already through all his hoops.

Critical

2011-01-06T18:31:00.007Z

I take a critical realist approach. Critical philosophy might be different. The "critical" of the critical realist is an answer to criticism of the totally positivist approach of a realist. Now I understand that my supervisor was telling me my approach is not philosophically critical. She's right, and I can still be a critical realist, can't I?

Critical realism is "a way of resolving or dissolving" issues around positivism and extreme constructivist positions {Mingers, 2004: 374}. "It's a response", says Mingers, "to the difficulty of maintaining a realist position in the face of criticisms" (page 380)

I understand that critical realism has strata: the real, the empirical and the actual, and I've tried to adapt Mingers diagram, above, to show how I think my research fits into these strata.

Yet Mingers addresses five criticisms of critical realism, and the fifth area is "the nature and extent of critical realism's claim to be 'critical'", which means "in the political sense of bringing about change in society" and that brings me back to my supervisor's argument that my work is not critical in that sense, the sense of challenging the status quo.

So oh dear! I'm arguing against myself. I have too little knowledge, enough to start arguing, but not enough to argue myself out of the spot my supervisor has put me in. Bother!

Mingers, J. and Willcocks, L. P. (Eds.) (2004) Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems, John Wiley.

Research perspectives

2010-12-28T12:54:00.006Z

Here's my justification for the perspective I'm taking. How does it read?

Research approaches require beliefs and perspectives of understanding how things are connected, and so the researcher’s ontological position determines what the researcher can claim to be valid evidence for the assertions the researcher makes about the world. The researcher needs to surface those assumptions about reality in order to understand the appropriate methods to acquire knowledge of the phenomenon being investigated. The best way to grasp that the researcher has an ontological position, to recognise it and its implications for the research, is to consider some different ontological perspectives (Mason, 2002: 14).

Ontology is the study of the nature of reality (Guba and Lincoln, 1989: 83), which means studying being; ontology informs the theoretical perspective for studying the nature of existence. Two ends of the ontological spectrum of ontological belief are represented by the positivist and the interpretivist perspectives. The positivist perspective has a conventional scientific belief system. Epistemologically, the approach assumes knowledge is only of significance if it is based on observation and reality.

IS research has been dominated by the realist perspective (Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991). The realist perspective takes the stance that things exist independent of human consciousness. An advantage of a realist perspective is that it fits well with the reality of an applied discipline (Mingers and Willcocks, 2004). A disadvantage is that different people make meaning together and separately, realising different and subjective realities that realism cannot mirror or analyse; realism cannot begin to explain these human situations.

The interpretivist perspective sees people and their interpretations as primary data sources (Mason, 2002: 56). An epistemological approach within the interpretivist perspective is constructivism, which asserts that the only world we can study is “a semiotic world of meaning” with symbols such as language that people use to think and communicate (Potter, 2006: 79). Rather than recognising an objective reality, constructivism perspective believes that a person subjectively understands the world, and has mentally constructed meanings of reality. People have signs and symbols for understanding what each is doing and use rich forms of conversations that are adequate for dealing with the complexity of social relationships. Thus, the relativist ontological position of constructivism provides the warrant to consider the views of project participants, as legitimate emic constructions not biased perceptions (Guba and Lincoln, 1989: 185). The relativist position assumes different observers may have different viewpoints (Easterby-Smith M et al., 2002: 32). A variant of the realist position is critical realism, which starts with realist ontology and incorporates an interpretivist thread (Easterby-Smith M et al., 2002: 33), thus by combining realist ontology with interpretivist epistemology (Crotty, 1998: 11) provides a compromise between positivism and interpretivism.

Crotty, M. (1998) 'Introduction: The Research Process'. The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, Sage, London.
Czarniawska, B. (2001) 'Is It Possible to Be a Constructionist Consultant?', Management Learning, 32 (2), pp. 253.
Easterby-Smith M, Thorpe R and Lowe A (2002) Management Research: An Introduction. , Sage.
Guba, E. G. and Lincoln, Y. S. (1989) Fourth Generation Evaluation, Sage, Newbury Park, CA; London.
Mason, J. (2002) Qualitative Researching, (2nd ed Edn), Sage, London.
Mingers, J. and Willcocks, L. P. (Eds.) (2004) Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems, John Wiley.
Orlikowski, W. J. and Baroudi, J. J. (1991) 'Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions', Information Systems Research, 2 (1), pp. 1-28.
Potter, S. (2006) Doing Postgraduate Research, (2nd Edn), Open University in association with SAGE Publications, Milton Keynes.

Qualitative analysis

2010-12-22T08:50:00.009Z

Not much gets written on how to do qualitative analysis, though there's plenty of people who write on the topic. Doing it is hard to explain. Miles and Guberman's text is helpful for its tables and overview of a lot of techniques, but as you get further into analysis, you need to know more. This web page explains something of content analysis. Braun and Clarke explain thematic analysis. Miles and Guberman touch on template analysis but you have to read King to know more about it.

Hence, not appreciating my explanation of my qualitative data analysis, supervisor #1 has pointed me at Dey's Qualitative Analysis for a discussion on linking, and connecting coded textual data. It would have been useful to have read it earlier, in my second year!

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2006) 'Using Thematic Analysis in Psychology', Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3 (2), pp. 77-101.
Dey, I. (1993) Qualitative Data Analysis : A User-Friendly Guide for Social Scientists, Routledge, London.
King, N. (2004) 'Using Templates in the Thematic Analysis of Text'. In Cassell, C. and Symon, G. (Eds.), Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research, Sage, London, pp. 256-270.
King, N. (2008) What Is Template Analysis?, University of Huddersfield, School of Human & Health Sciences Available from: http://www.hud.ac.uk/hhs/research/template_analysis/whatis.htm [Accessed 18 December 2010].
Miles, M. B. and Huberman, A. M. (1994) Qualitative Data Analysis : An Expanded Sourcebook, (2nd Edn), Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks.

Concluding

2010-12-20T18:23:00.003Z

I note that whatever you conclude, there's likely to be more that you can draw out later. Supervisors agree, and advise that over the next couple of years' research as you write papers that "you distill and distill". I hope so because I want to write a couple of papers to present at conferences after I've submitted.

Not sociologically critical

2010-12-18T11:24:00.016Z

Supervisor #2 reminds me about the Masters in Research Methods, course B852, where we studied a discussion of critical realism by Ackroyd and Fleetwood. I don't remember, then I realise that they published that difficult article on a metatheory of management by Tsoukas. My notes on it indicate how difficult I found it then.

Apparently I'm taking a critical view of the social world, not being sociologically critical and the "critical" refers to an epistemological stance rather than a theoretical or political stance. So that's all right then. I've changed my methodology chapter paragraph to read:

However, this research takes a realist perspective because, although IS projects take place in real objective spaces, each individual participant constructs themselves in a particular way in relation to the project setting. An advantage of such an approach is that “it maintains reality whilst still recognizing the inherent meaningfulness of social interaction" {Mingers, 2004:99}. Hence, engagement can be explored as a real phenomenon, whilst still recognising that IT project participants may be unaware of the phenomenon.

So I think I've kept what I said before, and now managed to justify it too.

Tsoukas, H. (1994) 'What Is Management? An Outline of a Metatheory', British Journal of Management, 5 (4), pp. 289.

Critical realism pondered

2010-12-18T11:24:00.005Z

I think the term 'critical' is about responding to criticisms. In IS philosophy, according to John Mingers (2004), critical realism seems to be a response to criticisms of an empirical and naturalist view of science. Mingers says that the original aims of critical realism were

"(i) to re-establish a realist view of being in the ontological domain whilst accepting the relativism of knowledge as socially and historically conditioned in the epistemological domain; and
(ii) to argue for a critical naturalism in social science."

In a context where research has been of machines, of software, of hard systems with less of a focus on people, I can see how there might be a realist approach that was closer to positivism, and I'm finding it a fine line to distinguish between positivism and realism. I had the impression that critical realism was a step further away from positivism, and a compromise between positivist and constructionist approaches. I find support in Mingers' statement

"The major advantage of a critical realist approach is that it maintains reality whilst still recognizing the inherent meaningfulness of social interaction."

I like the idea that critical realists "want to get beneath the surface to understand and explain why things are as they are, to hypothesise the structures and mechanisms that shape observable events. "(p100) because that's the way I thought I was working, so I thought I was using a critical realist approach.

Mingers, J. 2004. Real-Izing Information Systems: Critical Realism as an Underpinning Philosophy for Information Systems. Information and Organization, 14(2): 87-103. at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W7M-4C47BCF-4/2/873a061fe87e6979e71a48c3fe922ddd

Critical realist or realist?

2010-12-18T10:25:00.006Z

Having pondered my methodological approach, supervisors are happier with this second attempt at the chapter. I've written:

A reason this research should use a constructivist approach is that project participants construct each other’s behaviours in the context of a project and shape each other’s understanding. Examples of this approach discussed in the literature review include Schein (Schein, 1997), Bovens’ (Bovens, 2007) constructions of client models, Wenger’s communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), the importance of space and time for understanding projects (Maaninen-Olsson & Müllern, 2009). However, this research takes a critical realist research perspective because, although organisations’ IS projects take place in real objective spaces, each individual participant constructs themselves in a particular way in relation to the project setting.

Supervisor #1 says that I should say it's a realist perspective, not a critical realist perspective. I'm not sure about this because I thought there was a difference that mattered, and isn't realism close to positivism? Or does the term 'critical' apply when research seeks to identify practices or structures in order to highlight inequalities or injustices, in which case, I should remove it, because I'm not attempting to highlight such inequalities. If I remove the word, then everything else I've written still holds, but if I leave it in, then I'm open to queries about my perspective.

I'll ponder.

Draft reviewed

2010-12-16T20:00:00.007Z

Supervisors and I met to discuss my first full draft.

Apparently I'd written enough in my last two chapters for them to be able to tell me what my conclusions are. As they seem to be happy chappies, I'm happy. I'm surprised by their reaction because although I knew that I'd

written enough,
shown I'd done enough for a PhD,
got a contribution,
made a good start at integrating theoretical concepts and developing the model of engagement throughout the draft,

my usual experience of supervision is to feel good when I hand something in, and deflated after we meet. This time I feel something closer to elation than deflation. Yes, there's work to do yet, but I have a feasible submission date and we're talking examiners.

Minor problem now is my urge to work every moment available at it over the next three weeks and we've got b* Christmas in the way! Bah humbug!

For non-English culture readers - "Bah humbug!" is a reference to Dickens Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Listen to it here, or read it here.

Ode to research

2010-12-02T18:06:00.013Z

Supervisors, not impressed by my six minute presentation of my research in a pecha kucha, warned me last month that I should be able to summarise my thesis in a minute and a OUBS academic recently FaceBooked that you should be able to summarise your thesis in a limerick. I haven't had the time to try this yet, and my son has beaten me to it. He writes:

There was once a lady called Liz,
Who studied how people do biz.
With consultant's engagement,
...And client en-rage-ment,
It got everyone into a tiz.

Her persuasive persuading persuaded,
Case studies of projects created.
But when time came to publish,
Supervisors said, 'Rubbish!
'Your methodology's completely outdated!' (no they didn't!)

'Begin with some Adler & Kwon,
'They really are second to none.
And though you think 'finished!',
Your work's not diminished.
In fact you've only begun.'

So she read and she drafted and wrote,
And filled up the house with her notes.
On what kind of ontology
Made up her philosophy,
Until one day, her doctor said: 'Don't.'

'You've damaged your wrist!
'So I must insist
'That you sit still and not write or drive.
'Just give it a rest! You've now done your best.
'And you're beginning to break out in hives.' (No, I'm not)

There's more to add, but that'll do for now.

This is what I get for asking him to read my draft chapters. There was an old joke about teachers

If you promise not to believe everything your child says happens at school, I'll promise not to believe everything he says happens at home

So I hope you'll take what is written above as poetic licence.

Full draft done

2010-11-30T19:01:00.001Z

I have sent my supervisors all the chapters, with humble apologies for lack of articulateness on the conclusions, but reporting that I'd got someone else to read at least some of it to check for the cryptic clippedness that supervisor#1 dislikes in my style. My style has so changed, and I didn't realise until one reader said he'd had problems where I'd used 'combinations' as a noun. I had to go back to the theory I was using to check those authors also used the word as a noun, not as combining or combined. It is now so clear to me, but I've read that particular paper many times.

Supervisor #1 has come back all cheerful and praising that I've got it done to the time we'd agreed (took me three 60 hour weeks) and says not to worry about the conclusion as it usually takes a few iterations. Now I have to wait three weeks for their feedback.

Am I on the last 385 yards of this marathon?

Qualitative resources

2010-11-29T17:28:00.005Z

Here is a a whole list of resources for a research student to use to get to grips with methodological approaches. The list includes a link to a video of Alan Bryman talking about conducting mixed methods research; it has helped me get a better idea of how people use the word 'paradigm' in the context of methodology.

I've now made the arguments that I want to make in my methodology chapter, though I daresay my supervisors will have plenty of critical comments to make. They can only be helpful to sorting out my confusion of terms. I shall submit a full draft of the thesis to them in a few hours, and then must wait three weeks to get their feedback.

But hey! a full draft!

Ridiculous confusion

2010-11-25T08:45:00.008Z

All I have to write is a couple of paragraphs about different ends of the belief spectrum of enquiry (ye wha'?!). Belief system - how you believe reality. It's about what you believe is real, what your assumptions are. It seems reasonable to surface those assumptions, because they influence what you believe you know, and therefore how you go about researching, and I need to explain why I researched it the way I researched it, to justify it.

Except, the belief spectrum of enquiry is full of paradigms, perspectives and isms.

Positivism
Realism
Constructivism

And on top of those there's post-positivism (don't ask me if there's a negativism), critical realism and constructionism. I don't know the difference between constructivism and constructionism. I had thought my approach was constructionist, but now I'm confused and it might be that my ontology is constructionist and my methodology hermeneutically dialectic, though I thought this research was taking a critical realist research perspective because, although the organisation’s IS projects took place in real objective spaces, each individual participant constructed themselves in a particular way in relation to the project or programme setting. Which is they constructed themselves, so aren’t I working to a constructionist philosophy?
Now I have all these different terms to work with:

approach
ontology
methodology
perspective
philosophy

This bit of my methodology chapter is never going to get writ.

Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions and emerging confluences. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3 ed., Vol. 3). Thousand Oaks ;London: Sage Publications.

Philosophical stance

2010-11-23T20:43:00.004Z

Like a horse at a big jump, I'm stalled. For over a day, I have not written the ten paragraphs I want to write about my research philosophical stance, in my methodology chapter but have considered

realism
constructivism (what's the difference between constructionism and constructivism?)
positivism

I had argued myself into believing I was taking a constructionist approach because I was seeing my informants as constructing themselves in the context of an IT project, that they constructed their relationships and how they engaged with each other. But now I think I'm taking a critical realist research perspective because although the organisation's IS project development took place in real objective space, each individual participant constructed them selves in a particular way in relations to the project or programme setting. That is critical realist, isn't it?

Editing and writing and editing

2010-11-22T12:25:00.008Z

The second draft of the methodology chapter is under way as I restructure it because it was not meeting supervisor's approval. Supervisor #1 wants something written on other approaches as well as the one I've chosen - but so many academics have already writtenon these, and much better than me so why write an essay on comparing research methods?

I'm off to compare other PhD theses methods and methodology chapters.

As I research qualitative approaches, I discover that 'quality' is next to 'qualm' in the dictionary. Quality ' the degree of excellence' is next to qualm, a 'momentary faint or sick feeling'. I have qualms about my writing, about the excellence in my writing, about the logic of my arguments. I don't feel good.

OUBS blogs

2010-11-19T17:37:00.007Z

Some OU Business School new blogs are available from

Marketing Talk our marketing specialist who markets marketing
The Sceptical Economist our economist, the one who does BBC Radio 4 the Bottom Line blogs too

I am also supposed to be blogging there at Winding Up, as I said I'd post my final progress on the OUBS web site. But I said I'd post only once every couple of weeks. It's funny but I find that the more I have to write on my thesis, the less time or interest I have in writing my blogs.

Free consulting

2010-11-15T12:13:00.003Z

Here is a review of research that looks at the value of consulting. It really looks, and measures it, a positivist approach I think. And so unusual that it is noted in the FT, by an economist.

The pdf paper is downloadable from Bloom's web site here.

Slowing progress

2010-11-15T11:39:00.002Z

There's been a hiccup in work. I've damaged my left wrist & can't use both hands to type. Bother! Wouldn't it be nice if I could hand write all my thesis and give it to someone else to type.

Stuck in cross-case analysis

2010-11-11T13:30:00.006Z

I've got to rewrite chapters 2 and 6 - well edit them. They are the literature review and the cross-case analysis.

The literature review edit is fairly straight forward and supervisor has helped by reading it thoroughly and giving me over sixty comments in writing. Is that critical or helpful? I think it's helpful supervision because I know the problem and what I have to do to solve it.

The cross-case analysis on the other hand has been difficult for months, and despite listening to my supervisors for an hour and listening again on the recording, I don't know how to tackle it. Until I have the cross-case analysis in my head, I cannot write it down, so in the meantime supervisors can't comment constructively - just say that they don't understand the abstractness of my writing in chapter 6, and beat me up.

Supervisor #2 suggested I was filtering out stuff and to brainstorm, but brainstorming is a group technique, not a really a one-PhD woman job. However he did also suggest I use a technique called EIAG which stands for

Experience
Identify
Analyse
Generalise

The idea is that I know/see/feel and find the experiences from my research and then identify them. The next two steps seem easy enough but I'm still stuck on the experience bit. For instance, at supervision, I pointed out the cycles and feedbacks on the engagement model that I've developed, but I haven't actually written these loops down anywhere and explained them, because I filter them out and yet they are important - because lose the loops and you lose engagement and also lose the evidence that engagement is continual. It was filtering out this idea from writing yet bringing it up in talking that made my supervisor think of EIAG.

Now what do I do? Stuck again in cross-case analysis

I'll go and edit the literature review.

QDAS

2010-11-10T09:18:00.005Z

I have NVivo, and am very happy with using it. It's a tool, and I'd no more worry about using it than about using a pencil or a spreadsheet. It has its limitations, but because it allows me to keep track of a mass of data, it saves me time and allows powerful analysis, keeping everything in one place.

Finding training on how to analysis qualitative data is more difficult than learning how to use software. There are training courses on QDAS that tell you what it does, but Gregorio tells you how to use it and how to do qualitative analysis - there's a difference.

Qualitative Research Design for Software Users Silvana Di Gregorio (Author), Judith Davidson (Author) 2009 978-0335225217 at Amazon

Same place

2010-11-05T15:16:00.007Z

Nearly two weeks ago I blogged that I had only this and that to complete. But I've still got only this and that to complete.

I've been working on this darned methodology chapter all week, yet I don't think I've produced anything worth showing anybody yet because it's still so higgledy-piggledy. I still have the conclusion to write, having concluded that I was nowhere near writing it, despite my hopes two weeks ago.

I seem to be in the same place. Why?

Fellow Post-Grad student has the same question. Six months ago FPG had the whole thesis planned and was going to finish in September. I wouldn't say that I'm competitive but I see no reasons why I should be lagging behind her, and so if she could expect to finish in September, then so could I. Neither of us are lazybones - we put the hours in. But FPGS hasn't submitted yet, and doesn't understand any more than I do why six months ago it wasn't obvious that we weren't going to submit yet.

At the last supervision, a supervisor commented that progress seemed slow. Yes - it seems slow to me too, but I don't need to be criticised for slow progress. Hey! It is progress. So with that slow progress in mind, this week another FPGS grilled a long memoried academic here on when a post grad last completed within the three funded years. The answer after much thought and wriggling was never in memory. So to be where we are, FPG and I are making progress, and it might not be that slow. It's just not as fast as we expected or planned.

So perhaps I'm not quite in the same place as two weeks ago, but just a fraction further.

Plagiarism

2010-11-01T13:25:00.005Z

Plagiarism is

"if you submit an assignment that contains work that is not your own, without indicating this to the marker (acknowledging your sources), you are committing ‘plagiarism’ and this is an offence". See OU plagiarism policy statement.

To my horror, I found I'd plagiarised something in my literature review. I had a sentence that said something like "X urges y to a b and c", but I couldn't identify which of X's papers I was citing. I went over all of them and couldn't see what I was on about. In the end I googled the phrase, and discovered someone else had exactly the same words about X, including the urging. How on earth had I found this phrase before and had copied it word for word into what I was writing? It was fortunate that I was checking my sources so carefully. Suppose the examiner had recognised the quote that I hadn't! Aghast!

Connections

2010-10-25T15:58:00.004+01:00

Writing the final bit I think. I think I'm writing the final bit.

And that's how it goes, writing and rewriting it a different way, with a bit more detail, and a few more connections. Connect the literature review to the methodology, connect the methodology to the case studies. The last couple of weeks have been exhausting and exciting as I make the connections.

But the polishing remains. To do:

write the conclusion better (after my supervisors see and give me feedback)
sort out the jigsaw that is the methodology chapter
write the introduction.

When I finish

2010-10-25T15:53:00.005+01:00

When I finish, I'll get out to the new big wild field and have to market myself for work. Here's advice on marketing yourself from a new OUBS blogger, Terry.

Double the work or double the fun

2010-10-20T15:19:00.004+01:00

Today's PhD comic is just where I'm at, after my supervisor commented two weeks ago that progress seemed to be slow. So:

I'm thick, or
I'm wading through research sludge, or
I'm doing the wrong things, or
I'm not doing enough things.

I am doing enough PhD work. Like fellow PhD blogger, Minh, here, I think and talk about my PhD so I'm well not happy to progress slowly. I want to submit this year.

So what do I do? Double the hours? Do double the wrong things?

Shell shocked

2010-10-06T13:40:00.006+01:00

I always come out of supervisions feeling slightly shell shocked and unable to do anything for 24 hours. It is slight consolation that supervisor had the same feelings when she was doing her PhD.

However, my Facebook friends console me.

Informatics Friend: Once you recover, do you find the content was useful and usable?

Me: I do something different as a consequence, so the content is used. But these discussions are so mind challenging that it takes time to use the content.

IF: Being stimulated is good :-)

Psychologist Friend: Know what you mean.

Me: In summer I wrote 5 case studies, and sups said don't structure the thesis with these 5 chapters, rewrite them as four chapters, analysing across cases by addressing four developing ideas. I gave them those 4 chapters last week, but they don't like it done cross-case like that and they want a different structure - more like the first effort.

IF: Which I hope you've got saved somewhere.

Successful OUBS Phd Friend: That is so annoying. Don't they realise you haven't got endless time to indulge their whims!

Me: And the final comment was, "you don't seem to be making much progress". So I don't think I'll be able to submit before Christmas

IF: Which do you think is the better structure? Would there be any value in just outlining it and trying to get some quick reactions rather than going through the pain of writing several chapters to have them 'not liked' again?

I know all this is ahead of me, but I guess there is something in this around who actually owns your thesis and the structure of it - and whether you are happy with changing/conflicting advice.

Good luck!

Me: Outlining is what we discussed, now I have to implement it. I can see where they're coming from, but until I'd written it this way, they, none of us could have seen that it wasn't going to work. Now, it's clear that it doesn't read well that way, so I have to write it another way, and just slightly different from what I did in summer. The slight difference also means that it will integrate more with the methodology, and lead to the conclusion. I see them every four or five weeks, which gives me 3-4 weeks to get stuff to them, then they're very good at reading and commenting. Their changing/conflicting advice is because they're moving on in their understanding of my research as I write it - and I do write and give them stuff, which is why I'm upset by the comment about my progress as if I weren't working.

IF: If they could have said something like - it must feel as if you are not making much progress, but actually it is because of all the work you have done that the way ahead is becoming clearer...

I guess they were wanting to encourage and empathise but it came out all wrong - lessons in this for all of us who try to mentor, tutor or teach!

Are you able to edit your previous work rather than having a major re-write - and are there other chapters you can work on in parallel to draw out that integration?

Me: Oh yes, IF- that's the way it could have been said. It's a major edit rather than a major rewrite because I've written it all before, and filed discards in a discard folder. What will take time is editing the drawings that I use to show the thread through the thesis. So it's like

in spring I had skeins of wool and didn't know what I was going to knit,
by summer I'd started on a pullover,
but in autumn, now I realise it should be a cardigan, and the sleeves are too short, so I have the right colours and know what who has to fit, but need to unpick, redesign and knit more.

PF: Yes, you need to look at the positives and try not to worry about the negative. You have made progress - you've started knitting and now you have a better idea of the final garment

Master of Research degree

2010-10-05T12:49:00.005+01:00

New research students start this week, the PhD students and the MRes students. I was asked to speak to the year's cohort of seven MRes students to give them a retrospective assessment of the MRes experience and its worth to the PhD.

It's worth it. After one year, you have a degree, whether or not you go on to a PhD in the OU, elsewhere or never again if you realise research is not for you. If you go on to a PhD, you start at a run, which means you can take six months to hone other interesting skills in other areas.
MRes students may feel like second class citizens; they are not. You have to join in and remind people that you exist and want to learn.
Take each step at a time and enjoy the process rather than worry about the big thesis at the end of the year. I told them three stories from my MRes year. The first was about writing essays and what an awfully low mark I got on my first assignment, and how I learned better. The second story was of my supervisor's encouragement in June. The third story was about the Friday before the thesis was due in, when I'd already printed three copies, and received a letter one of my participants withdrawing permission for me to use anything she'd said. Aagh! The first question the director and my supervisor asked when I ran for help was: "Did you get ethics approval?" Yes - the MRes doctoral training workshops had trained us on ethics. The point is that a research process is about planning, and constantly adapting to cope with problems.

Several academics who run the MRes course presented and I listened to it all, including what would be covered in their advanced qualitative module, which I couldn't do because my faculty requires the MRes students to do a business module. What was interesting is that the advanced qualitative module includes details of interviewing, analysing transcribing and analysing interview data and the use of qualitative analysis software - all stuff that I have needed and used, teaching myself by reading or getting on other workshops. Had I realised its value, I might have asked to join as an unofficial participant on the advanced qualitative research module in my first year PhD. Some people did that to gain the advanced quantitative skills, and now I'd advise a first year OUBS PhD student who intended to research qualitatively to negotiate access to that module.

There are only five OUBS MRes students and only two of them were at this morning's general session. Tomorrow we OUBS students meet the new OUBS PhD students, and on Thursday we meet the OUBS MRes students. The two I met were surprised to realise they have a desk waiting for them, with a cupboard, a pedestal, a phone and a brand new PC. We get well supported here so I hope they all turn up to use the support.

Progress

2010-09-28T19:58:00.006+01:00

I gave my supervisor several chapters today. To my surprise, she commented on them being 'chapters'.

"but you told me to write chapter 4 two months ago, and the others just followed on"

I printed them out for her since we were both in the office and handed them to her in an A4 ring binder, which pleased her (and me) because it begins to look like a real thesis at last.

However, she and supervisor #2 could still say to analyse it a different way and set me back months. A fellow post grad had her supervisors do that. FPG'd prepared qualitative work, but when some number crept in, the supervisors suggested some statistical analysis as well, which set the work back two months. Then they realised that there wasn't enough data to get statistically significant results - well duh! Why couldn't they all have realised that a bit earlier instead of messing around?

Nevertheless, it's a week of progress because Sanjukta is through her viva and another OUBS research student will be submitting this week.

Hurrah!

Sanjukta's success

2010-09-27T13:51:00.010+01:00

Sanjukta is through her viva with minor corrections. Hurrah and congratulations to her. Her subject was acquisitions and mergers, her title being the Market for Corporate Control and European Utilities.

We celebrated quietly with cake and tea.

Congratulations!

Engaging progress monitoring reports

2010-09-26T14:39:00.004+01:00

She's very clever, supervisor #1. I've been asking supervisors' advice about potential examiners for nearly a year, and in my March progress monitoring report I wrote that this had to be considered. Whereupon, being as I had now raised this issue, supervisor #1 delegated me the task of logging potential candidate examiners for my supervisors to consider, and recorded it on the PMR.

The interesting thing is that the PMR acted as a material boundary object for supervisors and student to share a discussion that otherwise had been going nowhere, meaning that there is an advantage to doing the PMR, provided that all the participants share its creation and negotiate its contents.

I still can't see who uses its output though. I think it's just a bureacratic safety net.

Progress Monitoring Reports

2010-09-24T09:15:00.007+01:00

It's time for PMR - the six-monthly chore when we have to complete our Progress Monitoring Report. So it's timely that in today's Higher Times Education Supplement Tara Brabazon writes here:

Motivated students and experienced supervisors build a successful doctorate. Any obstruction that separates students and supervisors slows academic progress. This is not a radical statement. It is obvious. If students attend meetings with administrators rather than academic specialists, or submit forms about their progress rather than progressing their scholarship, then their time is reduced for research.

Yes - waste of my time. My fellow third year was worrying about it:

"I have to update my training record and it's taking me ages."
"So why do you have to do it for the PMR?" I asked.
"Because there's a question on the PMR" she reads it out "Is your training record up to date?"
"Oh that! I just put 'yes'."

I got cynical about the PMR's worth the time the office forgot to send them out and a student had to ask for them. If only a student notices them missing, who are they for? If you go to the effort of creating something, and maintaining it but no-one or nothing else ever uses it then it is worthless, an inefficient use of time. Don't do it.

End of three years

2010-09-23T09:54:00.007+01:00

At the end of September my three-year scholarship ends. The end of my scholarship means the end of my funding, so no more conferences, outside workshops, transcription, or travel will be paid. I need to finish unpaid, unwaged, unfunded.

Fellow students are fretting, excitedly and worriedly arranging to submit.

My fellow third year has registered her intention to submit in the next three months.
A fourth year student has submitted and awaits her viva next week.
Another fourth year student has just taken her thesis to the printers.
Another fourth year has gone part-time.

At the end of four years you get deregistered and if you haven't submitted or gone part time, that's it. Done. Cut off. NO degree. Nothing. And a waste of four years with nothing to show for it, but if you go part time before the cut off date, then you have several more years as a registered part-time student. That costs over a sixteen hundred pounds, so not the route you want to take if you think you'll submit in only a few more weeks.

At this end stage, when things are getting desperate, you have to manage your supervisors' expectations. If they think you're going independent and you will submit anyhow, then they support you - that's my observation of my senior students' experience. But if you bow to their experience and wisdom and hesitation, then you're going to take longer. Supervisors who've given you other tasks that delay you, land you with problems so make sure the supervisors know the regulations too.

I finish unfunded, but I shall finish well before 30 September 2011.

Presenting a pecha kucha

2010-09-16T17:42:00.005+01:00

In a pecha kucha I presented all my three years research this morning. My fellow students came, watched, listened, and then asked questions.

A pecha kucha (pronunciation here) is presented in twenty slides of twenty seconds, i.e. 400 seconds so six minutes 40 seconds. You have to set the slides to move on automatically. This provides a discipline of

not too much on the slide, and
knowing exactly what you want to say and saying it in no more than 20 seconds.

I benefited from having to limit my research to the important points, demonstrating a thread through it from the initial problem, to a conclusion that showed I'd answered the research questions.

The consequent questions made it clear to me that I should change one of my research questions, because I was answering something else. My colleague students also drew my attention to some usefully relevant literature. Thank you to them.

I recommend any third year PhD student present a pecha kucha of research so far.

Problem
Literature
Research questions
Theoretical framework
Methodology
Five case studies
Preconditions of engagement
Environment & participants
Knowledgeability
Emerging behaviours
Sharing
Sense making
Adapting
Connecting behaviours
Actions for sharing/ sense making /adapting
Self reinforcing behaviour
Client-consultant interactions
Value
Template for creating engagement
Conclusions

If you want to see the timed show, contact me here.

Thesis structure

2010-09-08T16:05:00.004+01:00

Thesis contents
1. PROBLEM
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
3. METHODOLOGY
4. Case studies description 4,500 words
5. Case studies discussion 15,000 words
6. Case studies emerging behaviour 9,000 words
7. Findings 10,000 words
8. CONCLUSION

And it will be done! I'm polishing chapter 7 (or rewriting it entirely), and have still to write the chapters in block capitals.

Findings

2010-09-04T11:39:00.003+01:00

I've written something about findings - I'm a tad excited about this (in a British sense - like I'm really excited but understating it). Findings has to be the last chapter, so now I can write all the proceeding chapters because now I know what I'm aiming at concluding with.

And it's not exciting. It's not at all exciting, because what I find is like everyone else has been saying for years, and all I've done is collect the information in this particular format and use this particular model that's my own, to model the same as everyone else.

And I bet when my supervisors read it, I'll be deflated again.

Systems conference

2010-09-02T18:26:00.008+01:00

The UK Systems Society have the annual conference at this time of year, and being interested in systems thinking and its application to business, I took the opportunity to go this year - my funded studentship finishes this month, :( so if I want to do something that costs, this is the last month to claim it. It was worth it because I met and talked with lots of interesting and knowledgeable people about systems, got to know of aspects of systems I'd not heard of before (like Connant-Ashby) and used systems thinking that I'm familiar with.

Systems thinking is a niche with few practitioners, a few small journals with low Research Asssesment ratings and little academic recognition. John Martin from the systems department of the Open University suggested that systems thinking is used in other non-specifically systems and published in other journals, but we don't have the evidence. So systems thinking isn't obvious in the academic literature, but may be applied in practice because we had a number of practitioners at the conference, and a couple of practitioner speakers: John Seddon of Vanguard consulting, and Hoverstadt.

Hoverstadt works in the sort of public sector areas that are relevant to my research, so we had an interesting conversation. His book, The Fractal Organisation, is one that I've been recently reading. He writes clearly, and explains the viable systems model much better than Stafford Beer does. He tutors one of the OU systems courses, and is running a systems workshop on VSM at the OU this month. I'm going to squeeze that in to my last month's funding too.

Friday's findings

2010-08-27T12:54:00.004+01:00

Writing up what I should have written before going away to the AOM conference, and struggling to create a coherent paper that:

moves my research forward
I can send to my supervisors soon

I need to explain how the emerging behaviour arose from the pre-conditions, and how the emerging behaviour created value. And I can't remember what I thought two weeks ago. :(

Positive bias

2010-08-17T22:13:00.003+01:00

The type of case studies I have show a positive bias. People and organisations that are interested enough to agree to be case studies tend to engage with each other on their IT projects, and to perceive their projects and their relationships with their consultants and suppliers as successful. Those that don't engage, or don't perceive their projects or consultant-client relationships as successful, have not participated.

Squaring the circle

2010-08-17T21:10:00.010+01:00

I'm delighted to receive feedback from a research participant to whom I sent a case study write up. She hadn't seen something the way I had and welcomed my feedback, telling me what she could have done, things I hadn't thought through, and thus useful feedback, because I'll incorporate it.

One reason that research participant hadn't seen things that way was because she was the sole primary client, rather than sharing the client role on a project board, so she had no one to bounce ideas off. In another case study, where a contact client saw something one way, and the consultant who was the project manager saw things in a different way, the consultant was able to share his observations with others, and thus bounced ideas off a fellow consultant on the project board. He in turn worked with someone else on the project board to get done what had to be done.

Of course one of the things when you write up a case study is worrying that perhaps you'll show a research participant in a bad light, so I worry in that second case study that perhaps I'm showing the contact client as worrying too much about detail, but then I don't know that perhaps he was right and in fact the people on the project board didn't have enough information to make informed decisions. On the other hand, it is the job of project board members to have the vision, and the contact client's job was to know the detail, so there's no criticism of anyone.

Indeed, what I've got is the variety of perspectives that I set out to get. And the variety shows me that when some participants can't make the connections that afford engagement, engagement via two other connections can square the circle to get the job done.

Engagement - answer to Mollen and Wilson

2010-08-12T15:55:00.015+01:00

I try to "pin down the much discussed but elusive concept of engagement" in the context of public sector IT projects, (elusive indeed) whereas Mollen and Wilson attempt this in an online context. Mollen and Wilson analyse engagement's relationship to constructs of telepresence, flow, commitment, but my approach doesn't use these constructs (although commitment seems analogous).

Mollen and Wilson attempt a definition; I don't. I tried - see here. But they attempt a definition of on-line engagement, which is not what I'm looking at. Why do we have to use the same word for something that's not quite the same behaviour!

Mollen and Wilson write "engagement is a volitional commitment by the customer" but that definition applies only to their on-line context and implies a one-way commitment to a brand - there's nothing in there about commitment by the supplier. They write that the customer commitment is "to an active relationship over time" but don't say who the other parties to the relationship are. How can you have relationship with a thing? Aren't relationships between people?

I checked the references section, and although I recognise some references, such as the 2006 paper by Petre, Minocha & Roberts, none of the other references match what I'm using, because she is looking at marketing, advertising and on-line engagement whereas I am looking at engagement in the public sector, on IT projects where there's IT development and interactional behaviour.

With this sketch I think I can see some similarities. They are:

the web site context, ie telepresence is the materiality and the website provides the context in which to work and interact
consumer experience is the knowledge available. consumers, like participants in an IT project some with knowledge and experience to contribute to the interaction.

But it's one sided, and if my research were of how clients got consultants to engage on a project, then it would be equally one sided because there'd be no mention of how clients engaged with people, clients with clients, clients with consultants.

I've looked at concepts analogous to engagement as participation, motivation, commitment, involvement, collaboration, using engagement literature that includes Huxham, Schaffer, , Saks, Marcum, Schaufeli, Axelrod, Barki, Huxham, Hartwick. And this literature does not coincide with Mollen's work at all.

Mollen is now developing an engagement scale, (Schaufeli has developed a questionnaire to measure work engagement (blogged here), but Mollen doesn't mention Schaufeli's work), which suggests that she's looking for a way to measure customer engagement. I am looking for

how people engage
the value that rises from engagement, - so a way to measure that value would be persuasive in influencing public sector clients who do not see the worth of investing time and effort to engage with suppliers. For the public sector IT context a metric for engaged behaviour is of less use than a metric for the value arising from engagement.

The literature that Mollen uses from the e-learning fields is more interest to me than that from the advertising field because in an IT development, there is learning, so the e-learning literature on engagement might have something transferable. The suppliers and the consultants learn how the business works, and the business clients learn from the suppliers' behaviours and material outcomes (e.g. reports, or new software). However, Mollen is using the electronic learning literature rather the learning literature per se.

Anne Mollen's preconditions are similar:

participants (customers but not suppliers)
knowledge (experience)
environment (web, on-line)

but the emerging behaviour is different. I find

sharing - not possible if participants are single individuals, and if the supplier is not involved as well
sense-making - maybe
adapting - customer behaviour

I conclude that Mollen's theory of engagement is insufficient to help understand how clients and consultants/suppliers engage on IT projects, and secondly, her work doesn't indicate what value arises to whom in a way that I can transfer to the IT project context. (She refers to "optimal consumer attitudes and behaviours").

However, what I'm working on is broader and may be helpful to on-line advertisers who are happy to take a more holistic view of engagement.

The interesting concept that both our approaches must share is volition.

Mollen, A. 2010. Engagement, Telepresence and Interactivity in Online Consumer Experience: Reconciling Scholastic and Managerial Perspectives. Journal of business research, 63(9-10): 919-925.
Saks, A. M. (2006) 'Antecedents and consequences of employee engagement', Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21 (7), pp. 600-619. 938
Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B. and Salanova, M. (2006) 'The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study', Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66 (4), pp. 701-716. 835
MARCUM, J. W. (1999) Out With Motivation, in With Engagement. National Productivity Review (Wiley), 18, 43-46.
HUXHAM, C. (1993) Pursuing Collaborative Advantage. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44, 599-611.
NAO (2006) Good governance: Measuring Success Through Collaborative Working Relationships. National Audit Office.
SCHAFFER, R. H. (2002) High Impact Consulting, Jossey-Bass.
AXELROD, R. H., AXELROD, E., BEEDON, J. & JACOBS, C. D. (2004) You don't have to do it alone: how to involve others to get things done, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use. Management Science, 40, 440-465.

Academic blogging

2010-08-12T15:51:00.016+01:00

The AOM conference included a session on using blogging as a tool for bridging research, teaching and practice, with speakers who'd used blogs in these various ways.

Brayden G King
Teppo Felin
David Levy
Karim R Lakhani
Maxim Sytch

Maxim spoke first of how his university (Michigan) had worked for a year with the Washington Post hosting a blog site for the MBA class. The students had tasks to post and to comment on posts, not unlike what our OU students have been doing since 1996, but these were public postings, and members of the public could also join in. The blog became journals of participation, with 26 questions set by the academics and over 200 participants. Reading all that sounds a lot of work for the academics to mark and assess, but students, like our OU students had to cut and paste their own contributions into their assignments.

Karim, at Harvard started his blog as a doctoral project for his work on the open source software community and also twitters with his students. He made a boo-boo on his Phd blog, commenting that an important paper was not seminal, and incurring comments. Consequently, he has now deleted that blog, and advises not blogging when you're a doctoral student because potential employers could see what stupid things you've written! I'm going to carry on this blog, so I can if I've improved, and so that I can get feedback and encouragement from my readers.

David Levy writes http://climateinc.org/ on sustainability issues, and has invited bloggers. To get exposure he trawled related blogs and left comments that linked to his blog. That sounds like trolling, and a bit rude, but it depends on what sort of comments he left. Sensible comments I would welcome, but leaving comments like "Great blog - see mine at xx" I would call trolling, and delete. So David's advice on getting exposure generated some debate.

Teppo Felin writes at orgtheory.wordpress.com and why blog? Because

it's fun
to exchange ideas
for access to invisible colleagues
for feedback

Yes! I blog for those reasons too. He gave us a couple more slides of advice on blogging.
Why not blog?

You can look like at idiot
Worries - what if no one reads it
Tenure and career issues
Waste of time?

Successful blogs have

content
mix
"voice"
emergent
guest bloggers

Daniel Beunza from London School of Economics writes on socializing finance - what a wonderful idea! He writes on the sociology of finance, and has done ethnological studies of financial institutions.

It was a great session because so interesting, and encouraging to bloggers, of which there were several in the room. Consequently, people are emailing contacts and web sites for each other's blogs. Look also on the AOM OMT blog.

Here are some other bloggers to know about:

Bret Simmons Positive Organizational Behavior http://www.bretlsimmons.com/
Bob Sutton Work Matters http://bobsutton.typepad.com/
Terri Griffith Technology & Organizations http://www.terrigriffith.com/blog/
Michael Roberto http://michael-roberto.blogspot.com/

CV Harquail writes
These four bloggers are great examples/ role models. While obviously nobody can be Bob Sutton, he's got the biggest blog going and hosts a terrific conversation. Terri exemplifies a senior scholar putting her theory into real life situations, and Michael shows folks how to be timely, topical, theory-relevant, and to-the-point all at once. Brett's blog and online activity is exemplary-- he is theory based (rarely about a current news topic) and very approachable.

I'll blog more about blogs another day, after I've had time to explore them.

LOVE - passion and compassion

2010-08-12T15:50:00.006+01:00

Do you remember, if you know, in the UK in 1995 a head teacher was murdered, stabbed to death outside his school, as he attempted to protect one of his pupils from another 15-year old? He left a widow with four children to bring up on her own. The story was in the papers again a few months ago, when the culprit finished his prison sentence and was free to stay in England, despite being born in Italy because he had lived in England since he was five. The culprit argued that it would be against his human rights to return him to Italy because he didn't speak Italian. How sad that his single mother did not give him the gift of bilingualism, his school did not provide him with Italian lessons, and even in prison he could not learn the language of his home country.

A similar scenario played out in Montreal in 1993 when a 14-year-old lad stabbed a man to death, but his widow, not burdened with four children, saw the lad as much a victim as her husband, because he'd come from a single mother, and a difficult background. This widow set up an organisation for such youngsters, called Leave out Violence (LOVE). It aims to raise awareness about youth violence and make youth part of the solution. LOVE is also a media arts programme that teaches youth the skills to become part of the media, skills like writing, photography and video. They become reporters on youth culture and feature in exhibits, radio shows, events and their own newspaper. They can continue onto leadership training, learning more about producing media, and how to be leaders in their schools.

This LOVE organisation has a compassionate approach, so much more hopeful than the UK media outcry about the released non-Italian speaking culprit - but good news makes no news.