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.

Consultancy track: 2 papers

The consultancy track has only one session, but there are two full papers:

• Experts or Organizational Witchdoctors from Peter Graham and Steven Brammer
• The pervasiveness of Liminality in the lives of independent co-creatives from Daniel Doherty
  

Graham's paper is relevant to my research because he's been studying aspects of power in the client-consultant relationship from the consultant perspective in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) . He's done 39 interviews in 28 consultancy firms. The witchdoctor thing in the title is because he's comparing the traditional model of consultants with the critical model that Tim Clark writes about. Woodworth calls consultants witchdoctors but it is probably Fincham who is better known.

The traditional model is where the client is in charge, controls key elements and evaluates the quality of the project, being able to stop payment.
The critical model is where the witchdoctor-like consultant seems to be in control, managing the clients' anxiety. It involves building up trust, but with a problematic relationship (anxiety, defensiveness) and poor thinking from the client. The metaphor 'witchdoctor' elicited a strong and somewhat negative reaction from a South African member of the audience, who drew our attention to how some cultures perceive a witchdoctor to be extremely powerful and dangerous. Perhaps it was the SA who suggested reading "Management Decision" but the OU doesn't get this journal.

Graham discussed these models and aspects of power. He suggested that expertise (in CSR) mattered less as the relationship build up, then more collaborative relationships developed (which matches the engagement stuff saying that one engaged employee contagiously got others engaged). This is something that I want follow up .

Graham hadn't separated out the types of client that consultants worked with and suggested there was a need for research from the client perspective was needed, particularly in case studies. And that suits me.

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The second paper was presented in an unusual manner, which involved singing Martin Carthy's "Christ made a trance", and then a dialogue read between two people. Daniel Doherty explained liminality with reference to Sturdy. Liminality is about work that happens really in the liminal spaces, the betwixt and between spaces, e.g. the car park. I suppose that in the sense of being temporarily in an organisation, consultants are liminal beings, and they face ambiguity being part of their consultancy firm and of the client organisation. They are chameleons who match shapes and colour in the environment, who tie between academic and practice boundaries. He mentioned Kitay's paper on consultants being outsiders in a firm.

I wonder how that compares with the theme of Pirendello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author", six people with six perspectives on one story, or six different narratives of one event.

I found Doherty's paper a bit difficult so have to think more about the concept of liminality.

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Clark, T. and Fincham (Eds.) (2002) Critical consulting: new perspectives on the management advice industry, (1 Edn), Blackwell, Oxford. 39
Fincham, R. (2002) 'The Agent's Agent', International Studies of Management & Organization, 32 (4), pp. 67-86. 500
Kitay, J. and Wright, C. (2003) 'Expertise and Organizational Boundaries: The Varying Roles of Australian Management Consultants', Asia Pacific Business Review, 9 (3), pp. 21-40. 462
Sturdy, A., Schwarz, M. and Spicer, A. (2006) 'Guess who's coming to dinner? Structures and uses of liminality in strategic management consultancy', Human Relations, 59 (7), pp. 929-960. 900
Woodworth, W. and Nelson, R. (1979) 'Witch Doctors, Messianics, Sorcerers and OD Consultants: Parallels and Paradigms', Organizational Dynamics, 8 (2), pp. 17-33. 253

Employee Engagement at BAM

I've been to a symposium on
Employee Engagement: The links to performance across cultures and generations
with 3 fascinating presentations on engagement, but using one definition (Schaufeli) and not going into various constructions of engagement.

1. looked at work engagement using Schaufelli's definition: "a positive work-related state of fulfillment that is characterized by vigor,dedication, and absorption." This study used on-line questionnaires (over 190 Dutch principals and 190 teachers) to rate performance quoting Demerouti 2001 that engagement leads to better performance, client satisfaction and engaged colleagues. The more personal resources there are, the more people can engage - something similar to the concept of psychological capital.
   Results suggest
   
   • job resources are related to work engagement "because they enhance employees' resiliency and self-efficacy beliefs"
   • An engaged and productive leader enhances engagement.
   • Work engagement is positively related to performance.
   Practical implications for empowerment of job resources, empowerment of personal resources, role of engaged leader - is this the first study that brings together leadership and engagement? (Despoina Xanthopoulou from Erasmus University, Netherlands. See http://www.c4ob.nl/)
   
2. looked at the cross-cultural nature of employee engagement, getting 13 companies across the world to design and execute the study. They concluded "the engagement level of the sampled population was very consistent across the globe with four universal drivers: variety & challenge of the work, interpersonal relationship with immediate manager, shared values with company, career growth opportunities. (John Gibbons, The Conference Board).
   
3. looked at work engagement differences in new generation employees and employees from prior generations. (Jim Westerman, Appalachian State), suggesting that the new generation is less engaged.
   

But they assume engagement is real and measurable, whereas I'm tending more to a construction of engagement being something similar to collaboration. In that sense, research that explores engagement as collaboration is needed. Perhaps that sort of engagement does link to performance.

The discussion did include the thought that engagement needs a landmark paper that sets it out coherently.
Problems

• confusing the drivers of engagement with the concept of engagement, so you cannot relate engagement to performance. You confuse the outcomes.
  
• Engagement is not satisfaction nor organisational commitment and engagement can change over time even within a day, but longitudinal research on it doesn't exist.
  
• Stability of engagement - if an engaged employee works with others they become engaged, so how stable is the concept? Studies in Finland suggest it is stable depending on how you measure it.
• Contagious: engagement crosses over from one employee to another. The study showed the more engaged trainees were, the more engaged the trainees became, therefor e look for this in the UK public sector IT projects.
• Wall Street Journal concludes that perhaps engagement may not improve performance, but since consultancies are selling their brands of engagement, research that finds engagement is useless would not get published. That doesn't augur well for my research.

People recommended Luthan's work on psychological capital.

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Schaufeli, W. B., Bakker, A. B. and Salanova, M. (2006) 'The Measurement of Work Engagement With a Short Questionnaire: A Cross-National Study', Educational & Psychological Measurement, 66 (4), pp. 701-716. 835

Professors galore

Heaps of professors are here! Imagine a heap of professors - what's the group noun for professors? I've decided it's a heap. I guess there are around four or five hundred people here.

Lots of rooms, tracks and special interest groups (SIGs) but tracks seems to be the same as SIGS. Most are from British universities (it is the British Academy of Management), though there're a few from Canada Hong Kong, New Zealand and South Africa.

A PhD student, Andrew Schuster, from Cranfield, was timetabled to present an interesting developmental paper in the Transformation, Change and Organisation Development track. It was to be on Exploring the Development of Project-based Organisations in the Public Sector. But he didn't turned up, unfortunately. I was disappointed but maybe I've found it here in PowerPoint so without the explanation that goes round it.

If you want to know about the conference, look here.

Conferences

Next week I'm attending my first conference as a post grad. I'm going to the BAM conference in Harrogate. I'm not presenting a paper - they had to be in by around April this year and there was no way I was going to have anything ready. I'm just going to look and listen. Here are the details of what to expect.

I've been to conferences before, such as the UKSS conference, which is on now - see here or the OU teaching and learning conference but as an associate lecturer when I was teaching systems or in how to teach. I've registered for the CETL conference later in the month too since it is here on campus.

Template analysis course

British Academy of Management (BAM) ran a workshop on analysing qualitative data, using template analysis.

The workshop leader, Nigel King, compared template analysis with narrative analysis and content analysis, suggesting they are all forms of thematic analysis. The blurb for the workshop says:

Template analysis is a particular style of thematic analysis that can be used with any form of qualitative textual data. It seeks to strike a balance between the entirely bottom-up approach of Grounded Theory and the more structured, top-down approach of techniques such as Matrix Analysis.
It emphasises the use of hierarchical coding, such that themes are divided into sub-themes, usually with between three and five levels of coding. Template analysis works particularly well in studies where the perspectives of different groups need to be compared and contrasted, and is well-suited to many qualitative projects in organisational and management research.

The workshop covered:

• overview & introduction & preliminary coding
• clustering themes & developing an initial template
• modifying your template & using it in interpreting the data
• quality issues & writing up
  

Analysing data in groups was helpful because discussion queried and refined codes so I got more from it than just looking at Nigel King's web site on template analysis, though it's a contentful site that I recommend. The case study allowed us to develop an initial template from two interviews, which we then used on a third interview so we could see how we would want to modify the template.

The quality issues engendered a discussion on working alone or in groups, as well as indicating something of how we would create an audit trail.

If you're using qualitative analysis, this course is worth going on whether or not you're going to use templates.

Supervision

Next task is to review literature on the management of consultants, which is quite difficult to find, possibly because

1. there is little such literature
2. it's hidden because the research terms 'management' AND 'consultant' could mean how consultants manage, or how they consult for managers rather than how managers select, use and manage them.

I also need to turn up at the next supervision meeting with around 10 possible PhD skills to pick three from and concentrate on.

Thirdly, I need to work out what, if anything I can submit to the student stream at the BAM conference in September.