Rushed apologies

• Bite size seminar on knowledge transfer
• Presentation on pensions
• Talk on software development

When?
All at lunch time today!

Preceded by

• Public meeting where interesting people are
• NVivo training course
• Student to student presentation on organisational fit with cake from our director
  

I can choose two of these six events to attend. I need to go on the NVivo course. I'd love to go to the student2student session and get people to borrow my new video camera and film us. But I'm signed up and committed to the lunch time seminar and I'd planned to go to the public meeting two months ago. I've sent my apologies. Maybe someone else will take a photo.

Collecting data

My head's spinning with data I've been collecting from a couple of projects. I've got loads of transcribing to do so will take ages before I get to analysis. But I'll jot down immediate impressions for supervisors and myself. Later, I think I'll use the Nahapiet and Ghoshal paper to identify initial codings, because first impressions suggest existence of various dimensions of social capital.

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Nahapiet J, Ghoshal S. 1998. Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review 23(2): 242-266.

Career development workshop

It seems a tad late in my life for anyone to give me career advice - I don't remember getting it at school, or college, or though my OU studies. Nevertheless, it is now the thing to do, and I duly signed up for a career development workshop.

The most interesting and useful thing I think I've learned as that I need to rewrite my CV for an academic application. I've been writing it for AL posts, and keeping to one page, but apparently if I apply for research posts I should be using a couple of pages and putting my education and qualifications near the top, whereas it had seemed to me, that you should put your work experience near the top, and education wouldn't be so relevant later on in life.

I've got the chance to rewrite and get feedback on it. I'll do that and see what the trainer suggests.

Videoing coffee

Here's a video that a colleague and I made of students sharing coffee time.


I got myself this tiny little video camera for £79, (flip video) so this is a first experiment. I meant to splice this film together with another of hands and coffee cups, but haven't worked out how to do and upload it. I can upload, and I can mix the two movies, but I can't create a mix that I can upload.

Axelrod on engaging with clients

How should a consultant engage with clients?

Axelrod says through

• widening the circle of involvement
• connecting people to each other
• create communities for action
• embracing democratic principles

I shall look for these activities in my research. But will it be the consultants or the clients who do these?

His advice to create communities is interesting because it suggests the communities of practice that Wenger writes about.

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Axelrod, R. H. (2001) Terms of engagement: changing the way we change organizations, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco. 936
Wenger, E. Communities of Practice: a brief introduction. Available from: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/communities_of_practice_intro_WRD.doc from http://www.ewenger.com/theory/ [Accessed 8/08/ 2008].

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

Huxham & collaboration

Chris Huxham has written loads of stuff on collaboration. Collaboration is voluntary cooperation between organisations, so I'm not clear how much of it relates to organisations that have a business relationship like that with consultants. Is that collaboration?

In the public sector, there's the need to manage relationships between organisations such as suppliers and consultants involved in delivering, for example, advice and IT software or hardware or both. Huxham (1993a) calls that capacity and readiness to collaborate "collaborative capability". There are lots of conditions that facilitate collaboration (Huxham 1993b) such as participants sharing commons sense of mission, strategy, set of values. They also have to share power and decisions and resources as well as agree values of collaboration. I wonder if that's where consultants and clients might not agree - value of collaboration.

And I still wonder how collaboration works with social capital and how it increases intellectual capital.

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Huxham, C. (1993a) 'Collaborative Capability: An Intraorganizational Perspective on Collaborative Advantage', Public Money & Management, 13 (3), pp. 21-28. 1043
Huxham, C. (1993b) 'Pursuing Collaborative Advantage', Journal of the Operational Research Society, 44 (6), pp. 599-611. 838