Influences on engagement

This doodled influence diagram might help me work out where I'm going, what my research is showing.

Power

If power is an important element for collaboration (as someone has argued to me), then how does it fit in with engagement?

You can't have collaboration with unequal power. And how does power fit in with social capital?

The power-influence matrix is one that consultants use to analyse their key stakeholders, though I find little evidence that clients are aware of this, or do it themselves. Who consultants make the effort to engage with and how, depends on the results of their analysis of power-influence. Therefore power and influence must come into any model of engagement. But is power a facet of communication or of knowledgeability, or is it some separate dimension?

Power could be in:

• contacts and connections (could be strong social capital)
• dominant norms or cultures (including physical, and norms are included in the relational dimension of social capital in Nahapiet & Ghoshal's model)
• informal networks (social capital again)
• control and information

Etzioni 1975 writes on power, as do Pugh et al 1989. They say power comes in one of the following forms:

• coercive (physical) power
• remunerative or utilitarian (material)
• normative or identitive (symbolic) like the way someone dresses I suppose. See {Kaarst-Brown, 1999 #91}
  

An old OU MBA unit (B800) diagrammed overlapping forms of visible power: position, expert power, personal power and dependence.

• Expert power comes with knowledge and skills, and is, I believe, part of engagement
  
• Position power influences who has to be engaged in relationships.
• Dependence power could be held by lower levels in the management chain who also have expertise.
• Personal power comes with people, like someone I heard called "a friendly sort of bloke".

Power is negotiated, isn't it? So are all these types of power negotiated somehow? Something doesn't quite fit in the context of client-consultant relationships. I remember Sturdy (1997) wrote about the insecurity of the consultant so how does that insecurity work with power? Can't consultants make managers feel insecure too ? {Ernst, 2002}.

These cogitations imply I've got more work to do to answer my own questions.

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ETZIONI, A. (1975) A comparative analysis of complex organizations. IN PUGH, D. S., HICKSON, D. J. AND HININGS, C. R (Ed.) Writers on organizations. 2 ed. New York,
Harmondsworth, Penguin Modern Management,
The Free Press.
KAARST-BROWN, M. L. (1999) Five symbolic roles of the external consultant: Integrating change, power and symbolism. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 12, 540-561.
STURDY, A. (1997) The consultancy process - an insecure business? Journal of Management Studies, 34.
ERNST, B. & KIESER, A. (2002) Consultants as agents of anxiety and providers of managerial control. Academy of Management Proceedings. Academy of Management.

Story of an open plan office

I like being a research student in the OUBS. The first and second year and the masters students sit together in an open plan office, half of a wing and there are 4 wings to each floor. We each have:

• a desk top computer,
  
• a personal drive on a central server where our work is automatically backed up,
  
• office software,
  
• any specialist software that is relevant such as Endnote, Nvivo, SPSS and
  
• a cupboard for our files and books.

The director of research degrees programme (DoRDP) has an office in the corner with a permanently open door, literally and figuratively, through which we can hear him sneeze, groan, swear, snort or bleat about whatever email or paper has just passed beneath his glance. He is quick to answer any question we have, and is very supportive.

Students support each other too. One has helped me with a proforma for an ethics application. Someone else is expert on using Endnote, and another has the extension number for the IT technican. So we talk.

Most mornings we break off for coffee and meet together. Discussion is often about sport or families, but also about our research, so it is a supportive and safe environment to start PhD studies.

The third year students leave this home base to sit in their own research area. At least that is the theory, assuming that the student's research area has space. But this year the research areas had no space for the five rising third year PhD students, so DoRP had to work out how to fit in 3 new MRes students and 7 new PhD students. In the end, a couple of students who come in less often got hot desks on other floors, anywhere there was space, and three students together got put in the emptiest research area.

And there arose a small problem because three new people came in together already knowing each other to an office where there are existing standards and expectations. And open plan offices need common agreements on noise and activities. Within almost minutes of arriving the students found that they were talking too loudly for the floor. By the second week, one had been told not to use the phone for more than two minutes, which was patently absurd as work requires you to talk to people on the phone while looking at information on your screen.

What I like is hearing the story of the settling in from different people, the students, those already there, managers and others. Each narrative comes out with a slightly different angle on it. From some it might sound like a power struggle, from another it is just a case of getting on with it, and another might make a comment on a personality. They are all organising their experience and telling the story is part of learning, asking for interpretation of the experience. And relates to where I've got to on reading Czarniawska's Narratives, watching how the stories are being made. By narrating this story, I'm trying to make sense of it myself.

I wonder where they'll put me next year.

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Czarniawska, B. (2004) Narratives in social science research, Sage, London. 892

Assumptions about knowledge

• Knowledge transfer is good
• Knowledge transfer happens when people engage
• Knowledge transfer is a requirement for an effective project, assuming that is is more than a one-off decision.
• Knowledge is an undefined form of intellectual capital. It could be a discrete focused subject (Czerniawska, 2002 p91) or one-off or needing updating, or something people will read: scope, type of communication, length of time required. See Czerniawska's figure: the 3 dimensions of access to intellectual capital
• Knowledge is an aspect of uncertainty along with power, but central to management and consultancy (Fincham, 2002)
• "notion of “knowledge transfer” represents the main prescriptive definition of consultancy." (Fincham, 2002: 70)
• asymmetrical between management and consultant
• constructed by some process
• embodied in some expertise
• disseminated somehow

So sometimes I'm assuming and sometimes I can find some academic (like Fincham) who's mentioned aspects of knowledge.

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Czerniawska, F. (2002) The intelligent client: managing your management consultant, Hodder & Stoughton.
FINCHAM, R. (2002) The Agent's Agent. International Studies of Management & Organization, 32, 67-86.

Mini-viva

The mini-viva happened. It was okay. They didn't rubbish my research question, nor tell me my literature review was pants, nor that the scope was impossibly big. But they did query what I meant by social constructionism and told me that I was defining it in terms of itself. Now I come to think of it, attempting to define something is being positivist, isn't it? So the concept of social constructionism must be constructed.

They also pointed out that I'd mentioned power, but all but dismissed it, when it is very important in engaging with people. They're right. But I thought and wrote about power months ago, then decided it wasn't important enough to make a big thing of it in the viva.

Lukes on power

Supervisor #1 suggested I look at Luke's work on power. He was a philosopher who wrote a conceptual analysis of power, publishing this thin little pink book[1] before Foucault was writing on the topic.

Lukes discusses three views on power, describing them as one, two and thee dimensional views. Despite being possible paradigms for behaviour study of decision making power the first two views he argues, lack sufficient depth.

The 1-dimensional view is pluralist, but can generate non-pluralist conclusions. This view involves a focus on "behaviour in the making of decisions on issues over which there is observable conflict" of interests. This seems to me to be related to agency theory so perhaps is applicable when consultants enter a public organisation. The 1D view involves conflict of interests.

The 2-dimensional view, he quotes from Bachrach & Baratz who claim power has two faces:

1. power is totally embedded and fully reflected in concrete decisions so a person who "creates or reinforces barriers to the public airing of policy conflicts" had power


2. 'power is exercised by confining the scope of decision-making to relatively "safe" issues'

The 2D view involves control over the agenda of politics. But Bachrach & Baratz confuse the issue by having a typology of power:

• compliance: threat of deprivation
• coercion: threat of sanctions
• influence
• authority
• force
• manipulation

Non-decision making may be what happens when there is no accountability for consultancy work that does not visibly impact on the public. Non-decision making that thwarts the power of others, is power and an enacting of power.

The 3-dimensional view of power critiques behavioural forces and allows for "work in which potential issues are kept out of politics" through:

• operation of social forces
• operation of institutional practices
• individual decisions.

There may be latent conflict between the interests of those exercising power and the real interests of those excluded.

The 3d view summarised is:

• critique of behavioural focus
• focus on: decision-making & control over agenda, issues, conflict and interests

Lukes (p28) quotes Arendt that power "corresponds to the human ability to act in concert" Hence, consultants have power because the clients that they work with, as a group, give power to them. I think there's further evidence for this, perhaps from metaphors such as in Kaarst-Brown's paper.

Finally,Lukes compares the three views. The 1D view of power

"cannot reveal the less visible ways in which a pluralist system may be biased in favour of certain groups..."

He states that the "exercise of power" and "exercising power" is problematic; the words both connotate individual consciously acting, and conceal ambiguity.

The problems of the 3D view are:

1. inaction, non-events lead to inactions which lead to further non-events
2. unconsciousness: unaware of the motive of action or unaware of how others interpret action or unaware of the consequences of action.

Lukes (p56) states that

"the attribution of power is .. the attribution of responsibility for certain
consequences."

which seems to me to relate responsibility with accountability, so the attribution of power makes accountable for the consequences of using that power.

So far that gives me to work on: power, decision, issues, conflict, interest.

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[1]Lukes S. 1974. Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan.
[2]Kaarst-Brown, M. L. 1999. Five symbolic roles of the external consultant: Integrating change, power and symbolism. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 12(6): 540-561.

What it's about

My research is about public accountability for the use of external consultants in the public sector.


The aim is understand how public organisations express accountability for the use and management of consultants. Do relationships with consultants influence the expression or do requirements to account influence the relationships?


A question that arises concerns what issues become visible thus eliciting demands for accountability. This relates to hidden dimensions of power: the power to decide which issues are discussed, and which aspects of those issues become visible.

I'm trying to write only 300 words about what I'm researching and it seems hard. Why is it that whenever I have to write, I have a blank mind?