Blog finishing

This was a blog for my PhD. New posts won't be about that PhD process, so I'll blog somewhere else. Shortly I'll put up the link for that new blog, the experience of post-doctorate - with or without the experience.

Of the four post-grads in the Open University Business School that started the full-time PhD in October 2007, three of us are successful. Here's what's happened:

1. I'm through and finished
2. Colleague who did the MRes with me has successfully passed her viva with corrections, and that means she is successful. Congratulations to her, despite her wanting no fuss :)
   
3. Canadian colleague is valiantly writing up. He registered a month later so he doesn't have to submit yet. The rules are that you must submit your dissertation by midnight of the last day of the four years, or none of it counts. You'd have wasted the four years. However, if you go part-time, then you have some more years before you must submit. The problem is, going part-time requires an expensive registration fee, and it means there are visa issues for non-EU students and Canadian colleague doesn't want to do that if he can help it. So go you, Canadian colleague. Get it written.
   
4. EU colleague cleared his desk - we've been told to clear our desks for the second year PhD students to move into. I don't know what he's doing, just that he's had problems.
   

In total, it's a comparatively successful year group in that half of us have submitted and got through, with the promise that 3/4 of us will be successful in the forseeable future. Several earlier year groups had students that didn't make it within the four years, perhaps because they got married, had a baby, went back to another country, went part-time, or returned years later to complete. So our year group is doing well. Why? Perhaps because:

• we had good supervisors that directed our reading, gave rigorous and prompt feedback on our writing, encouraged our project management
• we came with the new OU MRes, or with substantial research experience
• the university supported us by providing relevant courses on research methods, academic reading and writing, presentation of work, networking.
  
• we were lucky with data access
• we worked 35 hours a week on our research
  

I know my colleagues will take issue with some of these suggestions. Over four years, you expect to have some bad luck and hurdles. In the year group that started the MRes with me, five years ago, some had to change supervisors, some had difficulty getting data access, some have been ill (I had cancer), one got married, another divorced, one had a baby, another's child was seriously ill. You can also have good luck, for example, like finding good access to data, choosing the right supervisor, living close enough to make the most of the experience, and enjoying academia. I had good luck.

Conferred

The degree was conferred in absentia at the meeting of Congregation on 9 August 2011. I have the certificate.

Winding up

There are several finishing points for a PhD:

• submission - the biggest and most exciting hurdle
• viva - the scariest hurdle
• sending your corrections to the examiner(s)
• receiving the examiner's feedback - have you met the academic requirements?
  
• taking the bound copies to the Research School
• having the degree conferred
• attending the degree ceremony - the nicest and most fun with champagne to drink with friends, relatives and supporters

Tomorrow I take the copies to the Research School, and I'll contact some of the gatekeepers to my case studies to offer them copies too. On Tuesday, I'm told that the university has congregation at which they agree the award of degrees, and thus the degree of PhD will be awarded to me in absentia. Then the Research School will invite me to attend one of the degree ceremonies, which being the OU could be in the UK (Portsmouth, Milton Keynes, London Barbican for example) or in Dublin or Versailles. How nice.

But the winding up is a long process. It's taken six months since submission, six months of juggling other things in my life, including new paths - winding up one and looking for a new path.

A new path might be a post in the OU - I'd like that - perhaps I'll find an opportunity to develop research from my PhD, something to do with government IT perhaps stemming from last week's Parliamentary committee report. Now that would be exciting - a new start after a long finish.

Met academic requirements

I have an official letter:

"I am pleased to inform you that the University's Research Degrees Committee has confirmed that your thesis meets the criteria for the award of a research degree. You have therefore met the academic requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Open University, with effect from 27 July 2011."

Yah! Go me! I have to get bound copies of the thesis to the Research School in just over a week if I want the degree awarded in August, otherwise I have to wait till the end of September.

Colleague submits

My Chinese chum has submitted. This is special because she has had a baby on the way through her PhD journey, had to move back to China, wait for her baby to be big enough to leave with her relatives and then come back to England to complete her degree. She's rightly proud of her achievement.

Following hard on her heels is my Canadian colleague, who was much delayed in collecting his data, but is now analysing and writing up at speed. He'll be working right up to the last minute of the four year student registration. Go him!

Grades of PhD degree

A doctorate from the Open University may ultimately be a pass or fail, but there are five grades given after the viva:

• Award of the degree
• Corrections and modifications
• Substantial amendment
• Major revision and resubmission for re-examination
• Alternative recommendations for PhD candidates
• Fail

Straight award with no corrections is rare. The most likely result is minor corrections and modifications, for which you get a couple of months to do them in. Substantial amendment is still a pass and you get six months to fix the deficiencies. With amendments you don't have to get reexamined. I am not contemplating the lower grades.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this thesis provides useful insight that enhances understanding of engagement.

Progress

We have progress.

1. The draft my supervisors have just read is the penultimate draft. I’m acting on their feedback, and getting the thesis to supervisor #2 in two weeks time, who will return his feedback by 1st March, aiming at small, not restructuring points so that I can submit within a week of that. Good.
2. We’ve discussed examiners and made a decision.
3. Finally and interestingly, we haven’t got a date for a next meeting – there won’t be any more. Howzat?

That means I'll have time to work on the paper I'm submitting to the Management Consultancy Division for their biannual conference in June. That's the first conference paper I've ever submitted.

Ridiculous confusion

All I have to write is a couple of paragraphs about different ends of the belief spectrum of enquiry (ye wha'?!). Belief system - how you believe reality. It's about what you believe is real, what your assumptions are. It seems reasonable to surface those assumptions, because they influence what you believe you know, and therefore how you go about researching, and I need to explain why I researched it the way I researched it, to justify it.

Except, the belief spectrum of enquiry is full of paradigms, perspectives and isms.

• Positivism
• Realism
• Constructivism

And on top of those there's post-positivism (don't ask me if there's a negativism), critical realism and constructionism. I don't know the difference between constructivism and constructionism. I had thought my approach was constructionist, but now I'm confused and it might be that my ontology is constructionist and my methodology hermeneutically dialectic, though I thought this research was taking a critical realist research perspective because, although the organisation’s IS projects took place in real objective spaces, each individual participant constructed themselves in a particular way in relation to the project or programme setting. Which is they constructed themselves, so aren’t I working to a constructionist philosophy?
Now I have all these different terms to work with:

• approach
• ontology
• methodology
  
• perspective
• philosophy

This bit of my methodology chapter is never going to get writ.

---

Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions and emerging confluences. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3 ed., Vol. 3). Thousand Oaks ;London: Sage Publications.

Editing and writing and editing

The second draft of the methodology chapter is under way as I restructure it because it was not meeting supervisor's approval. Supervisor #1 wants something written on other approaches as well as the one I've chosen - but so many academics have already writtenon these, and much better than me so why write an essay on comparing research methods?

I'm off to compare other PhD theses methods and methodology chapters.

As I research qualitative approaches, I discover that 'quality' is next to 'qualm' in the dictionary. Quality ' the degree of excellence' is next to qualm, a 'momentary faint or sick feeling'. I have qualms about my writing, about the excellence in my writing, about the logic of my arguments. I don't feel good.

Double the work or double the fun

Today's PhD comic is just where I'm at, after my supervisor commented two weeks ago that progress seemed to be slow. So:

• I'm thick, or
  
• I'm wading through research sludge, or
  
• I'm doing the wrong things, or
  
• I'm not doing enough things.

I am doing enough PhD work. Like fellow PhD blogger, Minh, here, I think and talk about my PhD so I'm well not happy to progress slowly. I want to submit this year.

So what do I do? Double the hours? Do double the wrong things?

Shell shocked

I always come out of supervisions feeling slightly shell shocked and unable to do anything for 24 hours. It is slight consolation that supervisor had the same feelings when she was doing her PhD.

However, my Facebook friends console me.

Informatics Friend: Once you recover, do you find the content was useful and usable?

Me: I do something different as a consequence, so the content is used. But these discussions are so mind challenging that it takes time to use the content.

IF: Being stimulated is good :-)

Psychologist Friend: Know what you mean.

Me: In summer I wrote 5 case studies, and sups said don't structure the thesis with these 5 chapters, rewrite them as four chapters, analysing across cases by addressing four developing ideas. I gave them those 4 chapters last week, but they don't like it done cross-case like that and they want a different structure - more like the first effort.

IF: Which I hope you've got saved somewhere.

Successful OUBS Phd Friend: That is so annoying. Don't they realise you haven't got endless time to indulge their whims!

Me: And the final comment was, "you don't seem to be making much progress". So I don't think I'll be able to submit before Christmas

IF: Which do you think is the better structure? Would there be any value in just outlining it and trying to get some quick reactions rather than going through the pain of writing several chapters to have them 'not liked' again?

I know all this is ahead of me, but I guess there is something in this around who actually owns your thesis and the structure of it - and whether you are happy with changing/conflicting advice.

Good luck!

Me: Outlining is what we discussed, now I have to implement it. I can see where they're coming from, but until I'd written it this way, they, none of us could have seen that it wasn't going to work. Now, it's clear that it doesn't read well that way, so I have to write it another way, and just slightly different from what I did in summer. The slight difference also means that it will integrate more with the methodology, and lead to the conclusion. I see them every four or five weeks, which gives me 3-4 weeks to get stuff to them, then they're very good at reading and commenting. Their changing/conflicting advice is because they're moving on in their understanding of my research as I write it - and I do write and give them stuff, which is why I'm upset by the comment about my progress as if I weren't working.

IF: If they could have said something like - it must feel as if you are not making much progress, but actually it is because of all the work you have done that the way ahead is becoming clearer...

I guess they were wanting to encourage and empathise but it came out all wrong - lessons in this for all of us who try to mentor, tutor or teach!

Are you able to edit your previous work rather than having a major re-write - and are there other chapters you can work on in parallel to draw out that integration?

Me: Oh yes, IF- that's the way it could have been said. It's a major edit rather than a major rewrite because I've written it all before, and filed discards in a discard folder. What will take time is editing the drawings that I use to show the thread through the thesis. So it's like

• in spring I had skeins of wool and didn't know what I was going to knit,
• by summer I'd started on a pullover,
• but in autumn, now I realise it should be a cardigan, and the sleeves are too short, so I have the right colours and know what who has to fit, but need to unpick, redesign and knit more.

PF: Yes, you need to look at the positives and try not to worry about the negative. You have made progress - you've started knitting and now you have a better idea of the final garment

Presenting a pecha kucha

In a pecha kucha I presented all my three years research this morning. My fellow students came, watched, listened, and then asked questions.

A pecha kucha (pronunciation here) is presented in twenty slides of twenty seconds, i.e. 400 seconds so six minutes 40 seconds. You have to set the slides to move on automatically. This provides a discipline of

• not too much on the slide, and
• knowing exactly what you want to say and saying it in no more than 20 seconds.

I benefited from having to limit my research to the important points, demonstrating a thread through it from the initial problem, to a conclusion that showed I'd answered the research questions.

The consequent questions made it clear to me that I should change one of my research questions, because I was answering something else. My colleague students also drew my attention to some usefully relevant literature. Thank you to them.

I recommend any third year PhD student present a pecha kucha of research so far.

1. Problem
2. Literature
3. Research questions
4. Theoretical framework
5. Methodology
6. Five case studies
7. Preconditions of engagement
8. Environment & participants
9. Knowledgeability
10. Emerging behaviours
11. Sharing
12. Sense making
13. Adapting
14. Connecting behaviours
15. Actions for sharing/ sense making /adapting
16. Self reinforcing behaviour
17. Client-consultant interactions
18. Value
19. Template for creating engagement
20. Conclusions

If you want to see the timed show, contact me here.

Assignments

This week has been a distraction from writing my research findings, but I shall spend the weekend marking computing assignments that my students sent in a week ago.

A colleague has just facebooked that she's submitted her thesis today! I like that posting.

Rewriting

After supervision, I seem to have found a new ball to roll. By the end of last week, I was getting stuck, apart from a short moment when I realised that my theoretical framework could act as a paradigm for good practice and if components or connection on it are missing, then I have a tool to analyse how to improve engagement.

I wrote that idea up in a hurry, illustrating it with some of my case studies and gave my supervisors 24 hours to read it before our meeting. I'd already given them two other papers and then rolled to a stop.

Supervisors' response is positive because it may be a way to compare across cases instead of using tables, (which I'd tried and weren't working).

Future weeks' work then will be to rewrite all five cases studies:

• do they show mutuality of engagement of interactive problem solving?
• do they show a meta-capability to produce engagement?
• what was complex about each project?
• identify the value that grew from solving complexity and knotty problems
• write about the value for each case
• identify what the key issues were that needed to be resolved, if they were resolved and how engagement helped the extent to which they were resolved.

I feel like my supervisors have given me a kick, and like a ball I'm slowly rolling again. May be this mess of thoughts will gain speed.

Life after PhD

Cloudworks is showing a conference or a seminar this morning that features ex-PhD students and what they're doing, how they moved on, and what in their PhD helped them to get work afterwards.

See voices of experience.

Counting words

On the Master in Research (MRes) I used to take around three weeks to write each assignment. If I assume I can now write 5000 words in four weeks, and I need to write a PhD dissertation of around 80,000 words, then I need over a year to write it. If I make it longer, and the maximum length is 100,000 then I need another four months.

Conclusion:

• write quicker
  
• use everything I've already written
  

or I'll be struggling to get it in by my registration cut-off date of 31st September 2011.

PhD day reflection

Participants at our round table included full and part time students, three academics, a South African, a Chinese, a Belorussian, and a Canadian. I don't know the other three nationalities. They all came with different research experiences and interests: human resource management, e-learning, ERP systems, Chinese investment, disconfirming communication, women managers and ICT.

My South African colleague strongly advised me that I needed to use the knowledge transfer literature, like Szulanski but I'm not so sure. Yes, knowledge gets transferred during a process of engagement, but knowledge isn't my focus. Does engagement alter the quality of the knowledge transfer? Probably yes, but my question is how people engage, not about the quality of the knowledge transfer. So that literature helps address a different question. And that was an interesting discussion.

The Canadian's research has a psychological element to it, so I'm not surprised she asked me about the affective factors of my research. (Pause and think, "'Affective', what does that mean?" Ah! emotion"). Yes, I'm aware of Saks work on employee engagement, requiring dedication, absorption and vigor, but I'm not looking at employee engagement with work, but at engaged relationships between people, which is a broader understanding of engagement, and has not been well researched. Nevertheless, I see the links and she and I could probably have useful further discussion.

She and I will be at the AOM conference in Canada in August so maybe we'll meet again.

---

Saks, A. M. 2006. Antecedents and Consequences of Employee Engagement. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 21(7): 600-619.
Szulanski, G., Cappetta, R., & Jensen, R. J. 2004. When and How Trustworthiness Matters: Knowledge Transfer and the Moderating Effect of Causal Ambiguity, Organization Science, Vol. 15: 600-613: INFORMS: Institute for Operations Research.
Szulanski, G. & Jensen, R. J. 2006. Presumptive Adaptation and the Effectiveness of Knowledge Transfer, Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 27: 937-957: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. / Business.

Doctor Wu!

Minor corrections - hurrah

Own incompetence

Have I been pulling the wool over my supervisors' and funders' eyes for three years? I may have the data and know the literature, but how do I get anything of interest from there.
How do you analyse colours when you’re colour blind, or don’t have words to distinguish shades?