Access

My research won't cost the organisation money, just an hour of the time of the people who've worked on a project the organisation has chosen to let me near. Some organisations tell me they're just about to start a new project - so doesn't that mean they've just finished one, and can't I come and listen to people talk about it? I won't take photos if they don't want me to. I'll not tell who they are and I don't need to know the data on the project. And they'll be contributing to knowledge of how to make projects work better. Aren't people proud of what they do?

Long documents in Word

Some of the final year PhD students complain that they can't get the software to do what they want. When you have a document of 80-100,000 words, Word isn't too good at handling it. I know you need to do things like have a main file that pulls in the other files as chapters, but there are headings, page numbers, contents and citations and references compatible with Endnote to consider, as well as how the appendices get numbered. Here is a helpful web site for all of Word. It includes a section on numbering appendices here.

I hope I can sort this all out in 18 months time.

Boundary complexity & management consultancy

There's a book out soon by Sturdy, Clark, Fincham and Handley called:
Management Consultancy: Boundaries and Knowledge in Action

I found this out because I was looking for their 2006 working paper on Boundary Complexity in Management Consultancy Projects. The reference was in Sheila Marsh's book, and cited a web site that's no longer available: www.ebkresearch.org. So I can't find the paper.

Anyone got any suggestions?

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MARSH, S. (2009) The feminine in management consulting : power, emotion and values in consulting interactions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

More Nvivo

We covered today:

• relationships
• hyperlinks
• models
• find
• queries

I've created a journal and I've restructured my database to catalogue my cases as cases. I'm all analysed out. My head is like an overfull sponge that needs some of its water wringing out before it can absorb any more.

Qualitative analysis & NVivo

We have a two day work shop on NVivo, and not how to use, but why to use it. It's proving very useful and interesting, and would have saved me three days of coding back in January if I'd known then what I learned today.

Next time I get a case study, my process will be:

• Transcribe - delegate
• Add time stamps
• Style. e.g. different styles for interviewer, interviewee, and questions related to my framework. Then autocode.
  
• Font - use a big font that's easy to read on a screen
• Anonymise so I can share with supervisors (will they want to look?)
• Import to NVivo
• Code

Coding will include importing as cases, which I couldn't get my head round earlier - I hope I can now. I will import cases, assign attributes and perhaps analyse relationships using the relationship node.

Sensitizing Concepts

My first case study demonstrates that it is worth using social capital as a sensitizing concept by which to explore engagement- same form of words as in the Journal of Intellectual Disabilities p22 2009 13 19

What's a sensitizing concept? See here and here.

OUBS research student day

We had a couple of useful seminars this morning. Sarah Robinson had lots of good advice on methodology and made me ready to rush off and start writing the methodology chapter now, but I've too much else to do, so I'll just have to keep my notes where I can find them.

In the afternoon we had the ten minute round table sessions, like last year, with four PhD students and an academic. The second academic, Emma Bell had to leave early, and was replaced by John Storey and Luciano Batista arrived too, so we had some useful voices. But it was still a bit depressing trying to explain what you're doing to people who aren't in your field and perhaps aren't very interested. John said I should take the 'engagement' out of my research question, but I don't know what to replace it with. Value isn't enough, and the NAO has already done heaps of work on value.

Nevertheless, it seemed a more constructive session than the session last year.