Proposal for probation

I have my proposal ready - thanks to bright idea of supervisor #2.

It will be a qualitative study of engagement between consultants and clients in the public sector with the aim of finding how engagement adds value to a consultancy project.

Data collection will come from 5-6 case studies with around 6 interviewees per case, the unit of analysis being a project. The framework for the questions will come from Nahapiet and Ghoshal's framework for building intellectual capital from social capital.

Analysis will be using discourse analysis of interview data together with relationship analysis (SNT) gathered from interviews and questionnaires.

The contribution will be to

• academia - the findings on engagement
• practitioners - how relationships influence value

How does this sound?

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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

Social network analysis

What is social network analysis?

A social network is a structure of people or organisations linked in some way. It can be depicted as a graph of nodes and connections. Wikipedia gives an example here. And this sketch looks like a network of clients and consultants and others.

Social network analysis explores interactions reported by the people at the nodes and mapping relationships. Graph theory can help analysis. York (California) University has a site that explains lots of IS models including social network theory here. But I'm hoping to have fun messing about with computer models like this game of networks. It may be that the course on maths for research that I went on last autumn will be useful after all.