Revising and writing papers

Phew! I just uploaded a conference paper "Cycles of Engagement", due in today!

Revising my work for the viva started with

1. reviewing generic viva questions,
   
2. then the more specific ones that came up in the mock viva.
   
3. A third approach is to write a paper for a conference, and that's been the focus of my work over the last couple of weeks.
   

Of course, this conference paper for the Management Consulting Division biennial conference has got my supervisors' names on it, and deservedly so. After speaking with someone from the MCD at the Academy of Management conference last August, I was encouraged to present at the PhD consortium, but once I approached the MCD they suggested I presented a paper at the full conference. I wrote a proposal, and they accepted it, to my surprise and delight. But I shouldn't be so surprised, because now at the end of my PhD, I know what I have to say, so perhaps I wrote a sensible and interesting proposal.

After the mock viva, my supervisors offered to help me to write this paper, and I'm glad they did, because, in the last few weeks, I've learned a lot from the way they write. One supervisor addressed the challenge of how to put all the richness and detail that makes a PhD study what it is - into just 8000 words, restructuring the original paper I wrote; the other has greatly improved the flow of the argument. Whenever am I going to learn to write like this!

Why write a paper before your viva? Because it:

• helps you to identify the key points of your thesis,
  
• makes you reread parts of your thesis,
  
• helps you spot typos and mistakes before the examiner points them out to you

If the conference were before my viva, I'd also have practised speaking the points I'm learning by heart for the viva. But the viva is in May (probably) and the conference is in June. Look here for the paper if you want to read it because it's a good summary of my work.

I'll welcome constructive feedback, so do contact me through this web form.

Boundary complexity & management consultancy

There's a book out soon by Sturdy, Clark, Fincham and Handley called:
Management Consultancy: Boundaries and Knowledge in Action

I found this out because I was looking for their 2006 working paper on Boundary Complexity in Management Consultancy Projects. The reference was in Sheila Marsh's book, and cited a web site that's no longer available: www.ebkresearch.org. So I can't find the paper.

Anyone got any suggestions?

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MARSH, S. (2009) The feminine in management consulting : power, emotion and values in consulting interactions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Scoping the literature

Before starting a systematic review you have to scope the field. The areas of interest to me include:

• consultancy
• public sector
• engagement

Then I have to check the literature, not in the whole of the field but in the overlaps (I think). I worked through literature on engagement last summer and have found it quite useful because there's so little written on engagement, but on similar concepts such as participation or cooperation or involvement or collaboration, none of which are quite the same as engagement.

I suspect the tricky bit will be writing about the overlaps. If there's little literature on engagement then there'll be even less on engagement and social capital, let alone engagement AND social capital AND consultancy AND information technology.

Knowledge creation

Marwick quotes Nonaka

"the key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilisation and conversion of tacit knowledge".

For example, a particular contractor would learn much from Internet sources or the local BCS. He would share this knowledge in a two page document that other team members could then work with and expand to a 15 page report. The contractor mobilised knowledge.

Nonaka has a matrix of four forms of knowledge conversion. One form is tacit to tacit knowledge conversion, which is socialisation and can be done in meetings and discussion between people sharing a common culture. "Thus tacit knowledge sharing is connected to ideas of communities and collaboration, Marwick argues. So far okay, but I'd argue that you need more than collaboration. Collaboration is where people have to work together. Collaboration is about groups of people, organised groups of people who've agreed to work together. You can have such groups in a meeting but they don't engage because engagement is different from collaboration. It's more personal and involves respect for what other individuals have to say, and what their experience is. If engagement is lacking then the tacit knowledge won't get shared. For example, consider a project that runs over time, perhaps because resources for testing are not available. One group, the users, tell another group, those allocating resources that there'll be a problem, but without engagement between the two groups, the words will go unheard. There's a lack of client-client engagement.

Of course this could all be hogwash if you don't believe Nonaka. I see Gourley has critiqued his work [1].

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Marwick, A. D. (2001) 'Knowledge management technology', IBM systems journal, 40 (4). 994
[1]

Knowledge Management Technology

I have a [1] paper by Marwick about knowledge management technology. It's interesting now that I have some case studies because I can see where it applies. For example, Marwick writes

"explicit knowledge is represented by some artifact" (p814)

Explicit knowledge gets kept in documents, project documentation, service requests, opening and closing project documents, programme plan on a wall, minutes and agendas. All these contain information that a team shares between its members.

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[1] Thanks to Shailey Minocha who drew my attention to it.
Marwick, A. D. (2001) 'Knowledge management technology', IBM systems journal, 40 (4). 994