Conceptual framework

Last autumn (here and here) I developed a conceptual framework from the literature. Now I've written up five cases against it, I'm pleased to find the data confirms my arguments for the framework.

I've incorporated a number of factors in the framework and grouped them into two dimensions, (dimensions because you can't have one without the other, and I'm mimicking Nahapiet & Ghoshal's term for describing social capital). The two dimensions are:

• communication
• knowledge-ability

Communication requires participants, an environment, something shared and negotiation of meaning.
Knowledge-ability (from {Wenger, 1998 }) requires expertise or skills, the ability to contribute expertise and the ability to adapt with it.

I think you need all these components to have engagement that eases the process of IT projects.

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WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Eighty percent of success is showing up

Eighty percent of success is showing up

That's what a Recently Successful Doctoral Student said to me when talking about research, citing Woody Allen. So I looked it up and found this blog, Persistence Unlimited that quotes Woody Allen. Showing up is what gets you going. I've shown up at:

• doctoral training workshops, even when they seemed a waste of time. They gave pointers to research issues I was likely to face.
  
• the Professional and Academic Communication in English (PACE) sessions, which trained me reading and writing for social science and business.
  
• OUBS seminars
• an NVivo workshop
• a BAM conference
• a systematic review of the literature workshop
• participative videoing workshops
• OU clubs - how do they help? I've met people who've heard me mention some of the issues OU post grads face and put me in touch with people who can help sort those issues.
• Teaching and learning conferences like the CETL conference this December
  
• Associate lecturer development days
• Landscapes of practice workshop with Etienne Wenger
• an Elluminate tutorial
• meetings of the Institute of Chartered Managers
• events run by the Institute of Business Consultants
• AIM workshop
• seminar with Derek Pugh on writing
• career development workshop
• a BAM template analysis course
• OUBS round table sessions once a year
• presentions to fellow OUBS post grads
• EPSRC introductory seven-week taught course on Mathematics for the Science of Complex Systems.
  

Recently Successful Doctoral Student used to come into the office often during her masters course and discussed assignments with colleagues. Being sat near them in first and second year of the doctorate, they'd supported each other, coming in, talking, but in the third year they sat in separate rooms and floors to be with their supervisor's section, with no fellow post grad to talk to. She missed that stimulus: "Talk to people", she advised.

The practice of moving third year students to different places has now changed. Third year students sit together. We can see each other when we come in and arrange to talk when we stop working. That's how we learn, said Lave and Wenger: we talk to learn. I can't talk to learn about my research at home; I have to show up and talk with post grads in the same situation.

Does that mean I'm 80% on my way to success? Watch this blog. My funding stops in September and I'd like to submit by then.

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Lave, J. & Wenger, E. 1991. Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press #1131.

Drivers and outcomes of engagement

I have a list of drivers of engagement and a list of outcomes of engagement, and sometimes they're the same. Or the way the authors write makes it difficult to distinguish between drivers and outcomes. I think drivers include:

• Trust, Commitment (Block, NAO 2006),
• Learning {Marcum}, Involvement {Marcum, Wenger}, Interest {Marcum}, Participation {Marcum, Axelrod, 2004},
• Dialogue {McMaster},
• Vigour, Dedication & Absorption {Schaufeli},
• Belonging, Being included, Negotiation Relations of mutuality Coming to the office {Wenger},
• Round tables {Block}
• Belief that people matter, Encourage collaboration, Foster participation, Create communities , Connect people, Embrace democracy {Axelrod, 2002}

I think I can combine these drivers with outcomes into a couple of dimensions:

• emergent knowledgeability
• communication

Then these various drivers and outcomes might make sense.

Post grads as legitimate peripheral participants

Legitimate peripheral participants are participants in an activity (Lave & Wenger, 1991), but on the edge of the activity, hence peripheral. They are legitimate when they are meant to be there, involved and usually learning. Post grads are in training in research so are legitimate and peripheral, but I'm not sure that they get to participate in research activities.
Research activities include:

• teaching,
  
• analysis,
  
• coding,
  
• perhaps interviewing and transcribing.

Open University post grads don't get training or any opportunity to teach, as I've previously mentioned.

The doctoral training workshop (DTW) sessions provide some training, but not learning by doing. For example, the DTW includes a session on interviewing, but not on transcription, or on coding of qualitative data. It's up to the PG to read up. And if you don't realise the issues, then you don't deliberately read up on the skills. Until I read Kvale (1996), and then Tilley (2003), I had considered transcription a chore, not a skill that required reflection. I believed I could create an objective representation of the dialogue that had taken place. But now I'm not so sure and have questions:

• where do I punctuate?
• was that remark a query or a statement?
• which transcript is more accurate - mine or that of the paid transcriber? For example, one of us heard "certain reviews" and the other heard "similar views".

As a legitimate peripheral participant, post grads could be learning from skilled teachers and researchers. For teaching, each PG should be assigned to an OU course with requirements to research relevant literature including web links and current news for the course team, perhaps also proof reading tutor marked assignment (TMA) questions and tutor notes. PGs could be trained on electronic asynchronous forums where they could moderate and be web masters for the course, They could learn about teaching through giving electronic tutorials - the OU uses Elluminate.

For PGs doing qualitative research, they need the chance to shadow experienced interviewers, observing how it's done. They could transcribe someone else's research, and then discuss issues arising from it, so having the experience to reflect on their own transcriptions.

I don't have enough experience to think yet what "sitting next to Nellie" experience a post grad following a quantitative approach would benefit from.

I suspect other universities not just the OU, fail their post grads on these skills, but if the PhD is really a training in research, then post grads must participate in research, and as trainees, they are peripheral. Universities that espouse learning, must legitimate that participation.

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LAVE, J. & WENGER, E. (1991) Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Kvale, 1996, InterViews: introduction to qualitative research interviewing
TILLEY, S. A. (2003) "Challenging" Research Practices: Turning a Critical Lens on the Work of Transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 9.

Landscape of Practices

One of the participants has set up an archive of the twitters here from the Landscape of Practices workshop.

There were two strands to work on: keepers of themes, and groups to discuss a particular problem, such as interprofessional communication, or parent-teacher-student boundaries. The OU Practice Based Learning Centre has a blog on the four keepers here and on ten working groups here.

Landscapes of practice workshop

About fifty people here. My eeePC is playing up - won't recognise my password sometimes. People are twittering. See the tag #oulop09. e.g.

#oulop09 Etienne Wenger talking about 'identity as curriculum'

We've had to explain twittering to some people who don't yet practise that.

Feel there is fundamental misunderstanding in the room ca. wikis, blogs & twitter - questions being asked are irrelevant to me! #oulop09
kind of just get frustrated when folk dont understand that practices are diff in web 2.0 space - thats kind of the point #oulop09

We have a blog (private) at Wordpress, and we're creating a wiki. Did you know that 'wiki' comes from a Hawaiian word meaning fast?

The morning seems a bit disorganised. We don't know quite what we're doing. This video's Etienne telling us what the first activity is supposed to be.

Landscapes of practice

I am attending a workshop tomorrow on Landscapes of Practice. It's being led by Etienne Wenger, he who wrote on Communities of Practice, and Legitimate Peripheral Participation. It's mentioned on the OU Platform, which warns me, to bring technical equipment. I'm packing eeePC, FlipVideo, digital recorder and camera. I've done my homework: mapped my professional landscape, and made notes on landscapes, professional practitioners and explaining my job to others.

What's it got to do with my research? I came on Etienne Wenger's work through reading the literature on engagement, which lead me to literature on collaboration, and hence to communities of practice. Of all the uses of the word 'engagement' I like Wenger's best - it means the way I understand engagement between different groups of people to mean.

Also, I think my research is about different practices of different groups, and how they overcome challenges of communicating between each other. To begin with there is the public sector meeting the private sector world of consultants, and perhaps of IT contractors. Each world brings its own culture, values and language. Then there are the professional groups that meet: IT professionals, whether programmers, analysts, testers or IT project managers with/ without PRINCE experience, and management professionals, and business professionals, whether librarians, social carers, teachers, policemen, employment advisors, immigration officials - all the businesses that you find in the public sector.

So this workshop must be worth my time out on Friday and Saturday.

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WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
J. Lave, E. Wenger. Situated learning : legitimate peripheral participation /

A significant contribution?

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

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

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

Knowledge and communities of practice

Wenger writing on knowledge transfer and communities of practice, argues CoP are “cornerstones of knowledge management" and suggests that there are three characteristics to communities of practice: domains, communities and practice. The combination of characteristics allows communities of practice to manage knowledge. It is their combination that enables CoP to manage knowledge.
He relates these domains to strategy.

• domain - you need knowledge to do what you want
• communities - you need people to have knowledge
• practice - you need experience to produce usable knowledge & what have we learned?

It seems to me that there is some overlap of these characteristics with the Nahapiet and Ghosal dimensions of social capital (structural, cognitive & relational), and Wenger’s description of these characteristics in relation to knowledge has given me other angles on questions to ask in interview.

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Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842
Wenger, E. (2004) 'Knowledge management as a doughnut: Shaping your knowledge strategy through communities of practice', Ivey Business Journal, 68 (3), pp. 1-8. 1051

Engagement undefined

Definitions of engagement are woolly and soft. People don’t say what it is but they work around it.

For Axelrod engagement is a “paradigm for change” (Axelrod, 2001)
For Block engagement is “the art of bringing people together” (Block, 2000)
For Buckingham it is “a journey of sensing and learning” (Buckingham, 2005)
For the NAO, engagement is “a critical element of a consulting project” (NAO, 2006)
For Robinson, engagement is a two way relationship between employee and employer (Robinson D, 2004).
For Smythe it is a management philosophy (Smythe, 2007).
For McMaster it is a “process of communication” (McMaster, 1996)
For Wenger, mutual engagement is a dimension of a community of practice that involves processes of community building (Wenger, 1998)

So engagement is:

• A paradigm
• A journey
• An element
• A relationship
• A philosophy
• A process
• A dimension
• An art

Can I reconcile all these metaphors?

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AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler.
BLOCK, P. (2000) Flawless Consulting: a guide to getting your expertise used, Jossey-Bass/Fpeiffer.
BUCKINGHAM, M. (2005) Chapter FOUR: 'Buy-in', not by-pass: the rules of engagement. Leadership for Leaders. Thorogood Publishing Ltd.
MCMASTER, M. D. (1996) The Intelligence Advantage: organizing for complexity, Butterworth-Heinemann.
NAO (2006) Central Government's use of consultants: Building client and consultant commitment. National Audit Office.
ROBINSON D, P. S., HAYDAY S (2004) The Drivers of Employee Engagement. Institute for Employment Studies.
SMYTHE, J. (2007) The CEO chief engagement officer: turning hierarchy upside down to drive performance, Gower.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Participation

I'm trying to distinguish between engagement and other concepts like participation.

• user participation for developing and testing IT projects
• dimensions of participation are: responsibility, hands-on activities, user-IS relationships (Barki and Hartwick, 1994 :423)
• "a set of behaviours or activities performed by users in the system development process" (Barki and Hartwick, 1989)
• increases bureaucracy {Axelrod, 2001}
  
• involves hearts and minds (Handley et al., 2007)
• leads to involvement (Hartwick and Barki, 1994)
• refers to a process of taking part and to the relationship with others that reflects the process, i.e. both action and connection, reserved for actors who are members of social communities (p56). It is not collaboration. It is a constituent of meaning so is broader than engagement. (Wenger, 1998)

Now that last point by Wenger, does sound important. Engagement is a sub-set of participation, whereas I'd been thinking of participation as something specialised, that meant users of systems had to participate (because management said so) but that management didn't do. Wenger's point concurs with Mike Hales findings that participation in design can work, but that strategic management has to do something too.

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AXELROD, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations. Journal for Quality & Participation, 24, 22.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1989) Rethinking the Concept of User Involvement. MIS Quarterly, 13, 53-63.
BARKI, H. & HARTWICK, J. (1994) Measuring User Participation, User Involvement, and User Attitude. MIS Quarterly, 18, 59-82.
HALES, M. (1993) User participation in design - what it can deliver, what it can't and what this means for management. IN QUINTAS, P. (Ed.) Social dimensions of systems engineering: people, processes, policies and software development. Horwood.
HANDLEY, K., CLARK, T., FINCHAM, R. & STURDY, A. (2007) Researching Situated Learning. Management Learning, 38, 173-191.
HARTWICK, J. & BARKI, H. (1994) Explaining the Role of User Participation in Information System Use. Management Science, 40, 440-465.
WENGER, E. (1998) Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.