Writing up

"Are you writing up now?"

is a typical question asked of a third year PhD student. The term "writing up" implies the research is done, collected, analysed and the student now knows the findings and needs only communicate them in writing.

But I don't know what the findings are until I write them. I don't know what I think until I write it. Writing itself is a form of analysing and finding what the findings are. I am therefore grateful to Laurel Richardson for pointing out:

"Writing is a way of 'knowing' - a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it.".

She argues that the "writing up" approach where you don't write until you know what you want to say is a static writing model that

1. "coheres with mechanistic scientism and quantitative research" and
2. is a " sociohistorical invention that reifies the static social world imagined by our nineteenth century fore parents".

There are some difficult long words in there - I had to read it twice - but it sounds wonderful when you read it aloud.

Writing about qualitative research is a method of discovery so must itself be research and therefore fun. Like research is fun, writing is fun.

Oh er! Until I wrote down my thoughts on Richardson's paper, I hadn't ever realised that writing is fun, let alone found an argument for it. thus does writing release discovery.

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Richardson, L. 2005. Writing: a method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, Vol. 1370: 923-949. London: Sage Publications

Dangerous paths in writing

A recent Academy of Management paper on writing, {Pratt, 2009 }, includes advice that my supervisors have already given me, especially dangerous paths:

1. telling about data not showing it
2. showing too much data and not interpreting it
3. using deductive 'short hand'
4. quantifying qualitative data
5. inappropriately mixing inductive and deductive strategies

Having the feedback from my supervisors is so much better than reading about what I’m supposed to be doing, even in an excellent paper like this.

To find better paths he advises:

1. make sure your methods section includes 'the basics' (like discuss why this research is needed)
2. show data - in a smart fashion
3. think about using organizing figures
4. think about telling a story
5. consider 'modeling' someone whose style you like who consistently publishes qualitative work (who might I pick?)
   

Not sure I can do this writing right yet, but I keep practising.

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PRATT, M. G. (2009) For the lack of a boilerplate: Tips on writing up (and reviewing) qualitative research. Academy of Management Journal, 52, 856-862.

Graduate junction

I've spent the morning browsing the Graduate Junction, because there are several papers in there on writing and how to write. One set of papers comes from students, and another set from established academics. I recommend joining the Graduate Junction if only to get the chance to read such advice. Go to the page on writing at http://www.graduatejunction.org/wows.

Glum: how it feels not to be able to write

Write about how it feels not to be able to write. Scott Berkun says:

It’s sneaky, but damn, it works. The voice in our heads is always saying something, so get it down. Writer-weenies call this free writing, implying something unfortunate about other kinds of writing, but I find it easier to think of as listening. Imagine yourself as a recording device, writing down the radio broadcast of some other person who happens to live in your head. If you think this is weird, write about why it’s weird (See: you can’t win. There’s always a way). Eventually your mind will hit thoughts on the topic itself and, presto, you’re on your way.

But when I write badly, then I feel glum. When my supervisors say they can't understand what I've written, then I feel glum. It's not, not writing that's my problem. It's writing badly. It's not that I don't get the apostrophes in the right place, or split infinitives or misspell. It's writing the right content in the right way to say what I mean and say it so that readers understand, and so that readers find it interesting.

Glum.

Can't write

I'm stuck writing with many thoughts but not on paper, starting with getting a structure to write up one case study fully. Supervisors want at least one case written in the next month, if not two and it's hard because I can't get the structure right, though I do have the beginnings of an idea. I'll start with:

• setting
• characters
• structural dimension of social capital
• relational dimensions of social capital
• cognitive dimensions of social capital
• relationships between the dimensions

Still stuck.

EURAM rejection

I'm glum because my proposal to the EURAM doctoral colloquium has been rejected - it could be the first of many. However, the reviewers sent feedback. The rejection may be because the proposal didn't mention the IT literature from journals like Organization Science and Organization Studies (my first interest was in the consultants and then I specialised in IT consultants) which the reviewers found "surprising and problematic". But they suggested that I also look at literature on occupations and roles by authors such as Bechky.

I emailed my supervisors with the glum news, and they're being consolatory and practical, attaching papers on

• IT by Robey
• workplace artifacts by Bechky.

So I plod glumly onwards and onwards.

Analysis paralysis

Paralysis is what happens when you come to qualitative analysis. It's the weakest part of what they teach you - how to analyse qualitative data. As I work my way through with

• coloured pens,
  
• tables from Miles & Huberman,
  
• a data accounting sheet and
  
• diagrams to compare case study relationships with what I wrote about Peled's findings,
  

I think it all feels as qualitative an approach to analysis as the data that I'm analysing. And the analysis is only another layer on top of what is already there - it's my view of the interviewees' views.

I think I learned a more about analysis of these sort of soft systems when I was tutoring systems (T301) years ago. Checkland's approach included identifying climate, process, facts, structure and queries, but it was the climate and process that revealed the issues. Even Miles and Huberman have picked up on those two.

So I have a framework that gave me my interview questions from which I've elicited data, and the main thing now is to explain how I've found these themes, or found any findings. I have to make the links back and that's the hardest bit - writing coherent and logical links. Perhaps it's my writing that is paralysed.

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Miles, M. B. and Huberman, A. M. (1994) Qualitative data analysis : an expanded sourcebook, (2nd Edn), Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks. 758
Peled, D. A. (2001) 'Outsourcing and Political Power: Bureaucrats, Consultants, Vendors and Public Information Technology', Public Personnel Management, 30 (4), pp. 495. 475

Authoring

A student has submitted his final thesis and waiting for his viva, next March, which is horridly far off. So he's got to keep his research in mind for six months, waiting for the examination. He spoke to us about his experiences getting this far, and gave us some advice:

• warn your supervisors when you're going to submit
• get your examiners sorted out early
• read Dunleavy's book "Authoring a PhD"

This book, he says, is worth £100 because it radically helped him to sort out his ideas when he had a mass of data and wondered what to do with it. So I tried to put it on my wish list, but Amazon tells me it's already there. I think someone might have got it for me for Christmas. :)

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

Free writing

I'm always writing blocked - anything seems more important, but there's a fun blog at One Minute Writer that gets at least a minute's worth of writing out of you - perhaps a better transition activity (what you do between doing things that you should be doing) than jigzone or playing cards.

However, as I wrote a month ago I need to write as inquiry so I need a load of prompts that are relevant to what I'm researching, like:

• engagement,
• knowledge management,
• Foucauldian analyses,
• trust,
• power
• transaction costs,
• collaboration.
• social capital
• communities of practice
• intellectual capital
  

But I don't have relevant prompts that are also easy to write freely about.

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Transition activity: what you do between doing things that you should be doing

Writing as inquiry: an experiential workshop

The last session I got to at BAM was on writing, run by Daniel Doherty. It was called an experiential workshop, which seems a bit of a tautology to me, as I assume that workshops will involve gaining a bit of experience - hence the work bit of workshop. He started by quoting

"How can I know what I think until I read what I write"

or something like that, perhaps from Richardson. I understand this and that's why I need to talk to people about my research because otherwise I don't know what I'm thinking. I don't know what I'm thinking until I hear what I say.

Then he gave us a 10-minute free writing exercise with a starter of

"My writing garden of Eden is when ..."

Free writing is when you just write, and keep writing for a predetermined time, disregarding spelling, grammar, punctuation and legibility. You write, even if you get stuck and have to write, "I'm stuck, stuck, stuck and don't know what to write, and why is everyone else writing so much and I'm just dribbling on and on and on".

After ten minutes, we stopped and discussed. I've never read my writing out to people before and no one else in there had done free writing before. I think the exercise surprised some of us. Some were initially shy, but eventually more of us volunteered to read our work. It revealed an insecurity that seemed surprising for such competent academics. They described earlier experiences of literature and teacher expectations. One said that at school she'd been reading a novel, when a teacher told her:

"You won't need novels where you're going!"

Another, going through some difficult times at home was reading "Grapes of Wrath" and realised that it spoke to him, despite being decades earlier in the 1930s, resounded with his experiences of mines closing and unemployment in his town in the 1980s.

We had a few minutes for another exercise, starting from

"As I write my physical/emotional responses..."

I found this harder, perhaps because I couldn't visualise in the same way as with the first starter, but also when we read back, I discovered that people responded better depending on their styles. One wrote how the feel of the pencil and its sound going over the paper mattered. And that initiated some discussion on preferences for hand writing or typing at the computer. There's advice here on using the computer for free writing.

Dan gave us what he promised - an experiential workshop.

Perhaps readers of this blog could try their own 10 minute responses to these two prompts. I'll put mine up another day.

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(Laurel Richardson and Elizabeth St. Pierre). 2005. Pp. 959-978 in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of Qualitative Research (Third Edition).
Also see Richardson's book here.

OUBS research week - publishing

Dave Wilson talked to us about writing and publishing in international academic journals, both in a general context, and from a PhD.

The first depressing thing he said was that publishing in highly ranked journals improved the perceived quality of a business school, which gave rise to pressure to publish in top journals, which would want high quality business schools to write for them. It sounds cyclical - at least that's how I sketched it. He referred to Barley (2006) who wrote about "transgressive papers" (slightly misquoted) that get normalised by a process that stifles innovation. Citation clubs exist to boost their own publication rates (Cynic). The lesson is that you should cite.

Advice:

• submit to special issues
• write with others to demonstrate you can work in a team
• write for A and B rated journals
• have a theoretical or methodological or empirical core message
• address the "so what?" question "This work is important because .."
• be able to describe your PhD in 4-5 sentences
• match the subject to the journal
• don't try to rush it! (this was so depressing because you may not publish till four years after your PhD)
• use your conclusion of your first draft as an introduction to your second draft
• if you get a "revise and resubmit" response, that's a reason for champagne-opening!

The greatest buzz is when you get cited!

Writing dialogue with reader

The PACE session this week, run by Sarah North, was about the dialogue with the reader, and started with an analysis of some out of sequence sentences from Jean Aitchison (1989) The Articulate Mammal. There were questions in the extract that performed an important function by signalling to the reader what was coming next.

Questions and their answers may be nested. So the main and first question comes not with an answer, but raises another question which must be answered before the main question can be addressed. You have such a situation when perhaps you are discussing whether or not to go to the cinema:

Q1: Do you want to come to the cinema?
Q2 What's on?
Ans2 Let's look it up - oh x is on (but that leads to another question...)
Q3 What time is it on?
Ans3 Here's the timetable .... decision on timetable
Ans2 (completed): decision on whether or not to go and see x
Ans1 Decision on whether to go to cinema.

I shall look for the questions, and perhaps this sort of structure in the next few papers that I read.

I need to think of the questions that my research will answer, and at this stage think especially about what the literature will answer. To create my argument, I must anticipate what the reader will be thinking and persuade the reader.

One of the hypotheses behind my research is that
public sector managers find it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the consultants that they bring in.

What could be the queries or doubts or objections to this hypothesis? I guess:

• Where's the evidence of the difficulty?
• Why the public sector in particular?
• What's evaluation?
• What do you mean by effectiveness?
• Should anyone bother to evaluate consultants? Why should public sector managers? Why not someone else?
• This assumes that consultants are managed. What evidence is there for that?
  

If you're reading this, please do comment and tell me if you have a query, doubt or objection to this hypothesis.

Concise writing

Had a supervisory today. Supervisor #1 commented that you could see I had a mathematical background because I was too concise!

I'd given them about 4000 words to read on accountability, institutionalism and competing logics and also on client-consultant relationships. Too much! Too curt! Although I was particularly interested in Peled's paper that looked at the pyramid of bureaucrat-consultant-outsourcer, I had written only a couple of sentences on it.

Successful supervision - I've got a steer towards a general question about the evaluation of effective use of consultants in the public sector, and want to look especially at IT consultants because that's the biggest sector that UK consultants work in. It also fits in with an interview I have next week with the VP of a big IT company.

Practised interviews this afternoon in the participatory video workshop.

Need to practise less concise writing...

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Peled, D. A. 2001. Outsourcing and Political Power: Bureaucrats, Consultants, Vendors and Public Information Technology. Public Personnel Management, 30(4): 495.

Academic writing

What is academic writing?
That was the first question we had to consider at the Doctoral Training Workshop on academic literacy run by Theresa Lillis.

Answers included:

• formal writing beyond reports
• e.g. essays, thesis, dissertations, conference abstracts & papers,
• very exact, saying precisely what is meant
• argument laying out reasons for a position
• referenced, structured, a particular genre and style
• emotionally detached in the sense of being objective
• coherent
• a process

Another question was
What do I feel or think about academic writing?
Personally, I worry, don't like arguing and fear I lack opinions, but also that if I don't lack opinions that someone will attack my opinion, identifying its flaws, that my arguments won't stand up to scrutiny or that I'm using the wrong words, too many words, and being imprescise. Other students mentioned dense or long winded writing and unfamiliarity. That sounds to me like reading academic writing whereas I was thinking about writing academic writing.

Nevertheless, on five minutes free writing, I was delighted to find that I had thoughts to put to paper on an idea related to my current thinking on accountability. I know writing is hard work, but it is very satisfying when you produce something.

Here are some useful texts on the topic:

• Potter, S., (ed) 2006, Doing postgraduate research, chapter 6 on Academic Writing
• Swales, J., & Freak, C., 2004, Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills,
• Writing down the bones, Natalie Naimark-Goldberg

This last one is not necessarily about academic writing, but perhaps more creative and one that I read some years ago, but I noticed a colleague at the DTW had a copy and said she liked it, so I intend to reread it.