Squaring the circle

I'm delighted to receive feedback from a research participant to whom I sent a case study write up. She hadn't seen something the way I had and welcomed my feedback, telling me what she could have done, things I hadn't thought through, and thus useful feedback, because I'll incorporate it.

One reason that research participant hadn't seen things that way was because she was the sole primary client, rather than sharing the client role on a project board, so she had no one to bounce ideas off. In another case study, where a contact client saw something one way, and the consultant who was the project manager saw things in a different way, the consultant was able to share his observations with others, and thus bounced ideas off a fellow consultant on the project board. He in turn worked with someone else on the project board to get done what had to be done.

Of course one of the things when you write up a case study is worrying that perhaps you'll show a research participant in a bad light, so I worry in that second case study that perhaps I'm showing the contact client as worrying too much about detail, but then I don't know that perhaps he was right and in fact the people on the project board didn't have enough information to make informed decisions. On the other hand, it is the job of project board members to have the vision, and the contact client's job was to know the detail, so there's no criticism of anyone.

Indeed, what I've got is the variety of perspectives that I set out to get. And the variety shows me that when some participants can't make the connections that afford engagement, engagement via two other connections can square the circle to get the job done.

Feedback to participants

Feedback to participants is a problem because:

1. not yet understanding what the findings are
2. not knowing what participants want or need or what interests them
3. not knowing the format they'd find most useful
4. time

That's all rather negative. Given time, you get to understand your findings, but feedback to participants may then not be timely so not useful for them. However, any feedback, even delayed is better than no feedback.

Silver (2005) has a short section on feedback in case studies. He advises (following Wolcott 1990, p60)

• ask for the kind of information required for you to make a recommendation
• identify seeming paradoxes in the pursuit of goals
• identify alternatives to current practices and offer to assess these

What’s the difference between social capital and trust?

Trust is “a key facet of social capital” {Nahapiet, 1998} that you can use to build up social capital. So is there any difference?

Assuming trust promotes useful knowledge {Levin, 2004 } - hence the value added bit - then you'd share knowledge with people you trust, but it's something that feeds into social capital, an aspect of social capital.

Pinto et al {2008} say trust facilitates positive relationships on projects. That's adding value too, but it's facilitating an aspect of social capital - it isn't social capital. But you couldn't have social capital without trust. Trust provides a competitive advantage to the consultant (Block, 2000) so would help a consultant to build social capital in a new project.

Trust cements critical stakeholder relationships {Pinto, 2008}, which is what a consultant must be looking at - the various stakeholders. Pinto et al's study views it as valuable to manage interorganisational relationships to improve trust, so it's a kind of lubricant {Costa, 2009} - an oil (which is what some of my interviewees suggested).

Fukuyama relates trust to culture, 1996}; networks are a means of trust generation and networks can save on transaction costs. That's really interesting because it suggests that the networks of social capital generate trust, but trust also generates social capital - there's a positive feedback loop.

Wenger's new book 2009 Digital Habitats "learning together depends on the qualities of trust and mutual engagement that member develop with each other" (p8) so he doesn't say trust is a facet of engagement but trust and engagement together lead to learning. And how does that differ from social capital?

---

Fukuyama, F. (1996). Trust : the social virtues and the creation of prosperity. London, Penguin.
Levin, D. Z. & Cross, R. 2004. The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: The Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer. Management Science, 50(11): 1477-1490.
McCormick, T. i. r. i. c. o. M. 1999. The impact of large-scale participative interventions on participants.
Nahapiet, J. & Ghoshal, S. 1998. Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2): 242-266.
Pinto, J. K., Slevin, D. P., & English, B. 2008. Trust in projects: An empirical assessment of owner/contractor relationships. International Journal of Project Management, In Press, Corrected Proof.

Poster competition follow-up

There's no feedback on the OU poster competition. I knew I couldn't present but expected to be able to show the poster, share information and get feedback. Since I’d gone to the trouble of creating a poster before I knew of clashing dates, I was a tad peeved to have put in all the effort to then get told that if I couldn't present, there was no need to put the poster up. I'd sent my apologies, with explanation, but got this reply.

"It is not going to be possible for your poster to take part in the poster competition as you do need to be present with it. There is therefore no need to drop off your poster.
Should you decide that you do wish to take part in the poster competition after all we look forward to seeing you by 9.45 am"

No way was I going to take part in 'playing posters' at the expense of losing good contacts. Although, few things would keep me away, one would be access, and I had an opportunity too good to miss.

My director protested to the person who 'organises' the competition, and I was allowed to get a colleague to put the poster up. As a consequence I also learnt that the competition is marked in two halves, 50% for the poster and 50% for the presentation.

However, there's no feedback. No one knows how many marks are allocated to whom for what. No-one can tell me who won, or what topics won, except by word of mouth that science posters won again. It doesn't seem worth the effort.

But I did come second in the on-line competition, so I must have been doing something right. :)

Feedback

Supervisor has read my proposal & suggests:

• rewrite the introduction - Supervisor has attacked it and written five sentences that bring the argument together - why didn't I write like that?
• sort out month numbers with real dates - good idea, I didn't like the numbers anyhow.
• reconsider which life cycle model to use - yes - the one I'm using is perhaps too simple for the context
  
• I be less casual - whoops!
• also have to work out some points of clarity

Nevertheless, perhaps I have a "robust" research question. Yeah!