Contribution to practice

What contribution to practice does my research make?

This research identifies factors that enable or hinder engagement, like environment, participation and knowledge, which are factors that people already know, but in addition my research reveals how these factors together allow mutual sharing and sense making. Mutuality and negotiating that sense is what creates engagement, and that answers my how question, how do people engage? They share in order to make sense of what each other has.

Three factors enable:

• environment
• participation
• knowledge

By enabling interaction, those factors allow:

• mutuality
• negotiation of meaning

Viva tension

Today our Chinese colleague has her viva. She says she's memorised answers for around a hundred questions. For each question she's learned a one minute answer and a ten minute answer. She knows what her contribution is to methodology, knowledge, and theory and she looks happy, ready and anticipatory.

This is the Chinese post grad who's renewing her visa (see here).

Findings: how people work well

Good relationships add value. Business relationships where you work informally but in a business like fashion are helping projects to achieve their aims. How?

• People work together
• People agree their language.
  
• People perform.
• The right environment affords the right relationships.
  

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.

Proposal for probation

I have my proposal ready - thanks to bright idea of supervisor #2.

It will be a qualitative study of engagement between consultants and clients in the public sector with the aim of finding how engagement adds value to a consultancy project.

Data collection will come from 5-6 case studies with around 6 interviewees per case, the unit of analysis being a project. The framework for the questions will come from Nahapiet and Ghoshal's framework for building intellectual capital from social capital.

Analysis will be using discourse analysis of interview data together with relationship analysis (SNT) gathered from interviews and questionnaires.

The contribution will be to

• academia - the findings on engagement
• practitioners - how relationships influence value

How does this sound?

---

Nahapiet, J. and Ghoshal, S. (1998) 'SOCIAL CAPITAL, INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL, AND THE ORGANIZATIONAL ADVANTAGE', Academy of Management Review, 23 (2), pp. 242-266. 842