Cricket team

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.

OUBS blogs

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.

Cool opportunities

My fellow blogger, Minh, gave me some useful feedback on the blog I wrote for The Bottom Line last week, and asked,

How do you end up getting these cool publication opportunities?

I guess I'm lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and you make your own luck to be there by talking to the right people. I'd been on a media training course that I'd found out about through a routine circular email that went round the OU Business School. Later I'd discussed the experience with Les Budd, who usually does The Bottom Line blogs, and it went on from there.

They are cool opportunities, aren't they? Visiting the BBC, and watching a programme being recorded, listening to the experiences of people who do business is more interesting than getting some erudite paper into a learned journal that no-one reads, but that looks good on your CV, and gets you academic jobs because it'll improve the university research ratings.

Unfortunately, I haven't published anything erudite and learned and I don't know what sort of job I'll be doing when I finish my dissertation.

BBC Broadcasting House

"One, two, three, four .. eleven!"
"Don't count them!"

Eleven people were in a tiny editing room full of screens, editing equipment, script notes and head phones for just one radio programme. But this programme, The Bottom Line, is edited for four news channels, not just for Radio 4. The Bottom Line also goes out to

• World Service radio
• World News TV
• News Channel TV

Although located in a radio studio, it is also broadcast on TV. So the eleven people were involved in editing the programme for four different versions. This meant that for example the editor for the World News had the presenter reword a question about "high-street banks", a commonly understood term in the UK to "physical banks" (as opposed to electronic banking interfaces).

The host and presenter was Stephanie Flanders, standing in for Evan Davis, who is hard to follow because he is so experienced and well known. Not surprisingly, SF looked nervous at the start of the recording, as she introduced her guests, stumbling slightly over the unfamiliar names. On the retakes she was word perfect. In tone and body language, she gave the impression of knowing what she wanted to ask her guests. From the editing room, the editors prompted her with supplementary questions that arose from the conversation, not the script. She brought in the extra questions so fluently that no-one watching or listening would know about the prompts in her ear. Yet self critically she murmured afterwards that it would have been better if she'd had more to say.

After the main recording, they recorded one minute video blogs, one from SF and one from the Open University Business School representative, Leslie Budd, who also writes a blog for the programme. This is because the OU works with the BBC on The Bottom Line, as you can see from their shared Open2.net web site. The OU has provided funds for programme equipment, and in the radio studio I could see that equipment allowing the cameras to move smoothly around thus allowing the TV production as well as radio.

This is a great programme with three really interesting guests in a interesting discussion about mining, banking and music, going out on

• BBC Radio 4 tomorrow evening
• World Service radio
  
• World News TV on Saturday and Sunday
  
• News Channel TV on on Saturday and Sunday
  

Why was I there? Because next week, Les is on holiday and I volunteered to write the blog for him, then discovered they do the video blog too, so Les took me to see the layout, what happens, who creates, produces, and edits it. That's a lot of people:

• three guests and their minders
• one presenter
• three or four camera crew
• producer
• OU Broadcast and Learning executive
• and the eleven editors.

Useless efforts

Working at home, but electrician was here this morning, so couldn't use computer without risking losing power.

Switch on for the afternoon to find the OU VPN won't let me on. My email box has a vague message about OUBS servers not working.

I try to find digital theses from the British Library new EThOS collection, register but find I'm still not registered, so that was a waste of effort. I try a different web address, but although I don't need to register I can' t yet work out how to find any theses.

Email includes a notification to use a new form when proposing to attend a conference, and I sent off a couple of the old ones last week - still not heard back with approval.

Cheesed off now - I think I'll go and eat worms. [1]

---

[1] See Worm Songs

Open University Society of Entrepreneurs

OUSEN, or the OU society of entrepreneurs has just started, courtesy of two fellow students, Thuta and Andy.

Apparently, OUSEN is also a Japanese word that means accepting the challenge (stress on second syllable), so it is extra appropriate for a society of entrepreneurs.

We had several speakers, of which Brigid Heywood was the most amusing. She thought the society was a great idea as the OU is one of the entrepreneurial universities of the world. She admired the brand design and the fact that the organisers had got it designed and approved and ready in less than six weeks - that was inspirational!

Other speakers were Chris Dunkley, the director of the Milton Keynes Enterprise Hub, Prof Rob Paton and Prof Colin Grey.

Have a look at the video. You can see the inaugural meeting at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/webcast-ou/, but you should be logged in to the OU or there's limited access. I've also discovered that you have to have QuickTime to view it, and my new eee PC doesn't have QuickTime and I'm not quite sure how to install it under Linux.

Web words

I wrote some words for my page at the OUBS web site, but it doesn't display properly. What I gave the course secretary to upload has come out as one long unreadable paragraph.

Research so far

I am interested in:

1. how public sector authorities accounted for the use of consultants


2. how client-consultant relationships affected public accountability.

The media frequently accuse the public sector of profligate expenditure on private consultants. As a preliminary study for the Masters in Research Methods I examined public accountability for the management of external consultants looking for justification of use. The study applied agency theory to client roles and relationships to identify problems of different perceptions of accountability between multiple decision makers and stakeholders.

A social constructionist perspective was taken that led to a qualitative analysis of a single case study of the use of external consultants in a council service review project.

Emerging issues of public accountability included transparency of processes. Different perceptions of accountability revealed unconscious enactment and possible gaps. Findings confirmed the literature on accountability and began to extend research on some types of client-consultant relationships, suggesting public accountabilities in which managers of consultants account proactively and users account reactively. Further research might investigate the institutional pressures that influence client-consultant relationships and accountability.

Research to do

Different constructions of public accountability may come with different relationships; relationships may even prevent accountability. Some issues seem to be accounted for, but others are not. What influences the choice of what issues are publicly accounted for?

A culture may allow some ways of setting up and legitimising some accountability relationships but not others. The institutional context and culture shapes the micro-level of interaction between groups and organisations creating systems of meaning in a context of accountability. Accountability may be a function of institutional logic, or of organisational culture. So, for the moment I am exploring the literature on accountability more in order to refine the research topic and questions.

For my latest progress see my blog at: http://phd-ejh2.blogspot.com/.