Relaxing reading

I've just spent a happy half hour lying in bed reading the Open University's student and alumni magazine Sesame. You can read some of it on-line here, but the latest edition isn't up there yet.

I don't read on line when I'm having a lie-in, with a late morning cuppa tea. In fact, I wouldn't read Sesame if it were only available on-line. I realised this when I reached page 33 of the magazine where I recognised a photo I'd seen before somewhere - I'd seen it in the on-line version when the OU sent me the link. I'd opened the link, skimmed it and got back to work. Consequently I had missed heaps of interesting articles, such as

• one by my fellow research student, Tom Farrell, on whether shock-tactic advertising is an effective and ethical campaign
• Student support for those with Asperger syndrome - one of my students at yesterday's tutorial has that
• a short course on the physics of sport - something I'd like to know about when I'm doing tae kwon do

But they're going to put Sesame on-line. That's so sad because after more than 30 years as an OU distance student, an associate lecturer or a full time PG, I'll not be reading it any more.

Elluminate tutorial

Had an electronic discussion using Elluminate today with several OU people. We're discussing Zittrain's book: The future of the Internet and how to stop it, meeting once a week for three weeks to discuss the next of each of the three sections of the book. There's lots of reviews of his book, like this one at BoingBoing.

Zittrain discusses the generativity of various layers of the Internet including physical, content, social. Generativity is the:

"capacity for unrelated and unaccredited audiences to build and distribute code and content through the Internet to its tens of millions of attached personal computers"

The section we've just been discussing concerns how government intervention prevents generativity - topical given today's news that China has been trying to prevent new computers entering the country without internet filtering software.

Although Zittrain writes about the Internet as though it were some anonymous, autonomous robotic system, it strikes me that a lot of the issues concern people. People provide the problems and the solutions, whether individuals, communities or government.

It would be nice to be able to discuss papers more relevant to my research with other people, and difficult but important books like Berger & Luckman's "The Social Construction of Reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge".

It's difficult to generate ideas or argue with yourself and gets a tad lonely talking to yourself. Elluminate is one way of meeting and discussing synchronously though at a distance, but it requires a server. A wiki is an less synchronous alternative.

Typical research day

• Make tea as soon as I get into the office
  
• Read emails
• Play jigzone
• Follow my Zetoc alerts to new papers
• Use OU library site for electronic access to journals and to search databases like EBSCO
• Coffee with colleagues
• Write notes in my bibliographic software (Endnote) or blog
  
• Check PhD comics
• Remember to open Twirl - a feed for my Twitter updates
• Avoid Facebook
• Check academic networks like academia.edu or the OU Ning site

By lunch time I've used an email package, rss feeds, a web browser, word processing software and perhaps a drawing package like Inspiration. If I've been working on data I've collected, then I've also used analysis software, and perhaps transcription software.

What I don't do enough of, is reading and writing, slow careful thoughtful reading, and academic writing. I suspect the technology distracts.

Too much to read

I have many interesting books,

• (Czerniawska on the intelligent client,
• Czarniawska on narratives,
• Scott on network analysis)

and many relevant papers

• (on engagement,
• intellectual capital,
• social networks
• projects)

to read and to review and to glean from them something useful, and then to write on something coherent. I don't think I can do it fast enough, nor remember enough to bring it together, let alone produce some argument.

Writing dialogue with reader

The PACE session this week, run by Sarah North, was about the dialogue with the reader, and started with an analysis of some out of sequence sentences from Jean Aitchison (1989) The Articulate Mammal. There were questions in the extract that performed an important function by signalling to the reader what was coming next.

Questions and their answers may be nested. So the main and first question comes not with an answer, but raises another question which must be answered before the main question can be addressed. You have such a situation when perhaps you are discussing whether or not to go to the cinema:

Q1: Do you want to come to the cinema?
Q2 What's on?
Ans2 Let's look it up - oh x is on (but that leads to another question...)
Q3 What time is it on?
Ans3 Here's the timetable .... decision on timetable
Ans2 (completed): decision on whether or not to go and see x
Ans1 Decision on whether to go to cinema.

I shall look for the questions, and perhaps this sort of structure in the next few papers that I read.

I need to think of the questions that my research will answer, and at this stage think especially about what the literature will answer. To create my argument, I must anticipate what the reader will be thinking and persuade the reader.

One of the hypotheses behind my research is that
public sector managers find it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of the consultants that they bring in.

What could be the queries or doubts or objections to this hypothesis? I guess:

• Where's the evidence of the difficulty?
• Why the public sector in particular?
• What's evaluation?
• What do you mean by effectiveness?
• Should anyone bother to evaluate consultants? Why should public sector managers? Why not someone else?
• This assumes that consultants are managed. What evidence is there for that?
  

If you're reading this, please do comment and tell me if you have a query, doubt or objection to this hypothesis.

First supervisory

First supervisory meeting of the PhD is due tomorrow. I need to think in the light of the MRes experience, what to do next:

• is this still the topic I want to pursue?
• what is the research question?
• what further reading do I need to do?

I think it is still what I want to pursue. Accountability is so important - public accountability is especially demanded in a social state that provides care such as the NHS. See for example the outcry over the dirty hospital.

What light does the MRes cast? That there are different ways of accounting for use of consultants depending on what sort of client relationship you have with the consultants, but also what your relationship with the public is, and what sort of job you have. Relationships are complex.

What's the research question? For the MRes, it was about how the client-consultant relationship influenced accountability. But perhaps there's further to go on this question. Perhaps develop the question further to examine types of clients, types of consultants types of relationships and different types of accountability. There's more research to do on just the question as it stands, using other organisations, or a different project in the same organisation.

What further reading do I need to do? But, if I read further, then I might find new questions. What should I read? Do I read quantitative or qualitative papers? Both I think, as both shed light on what research is already done. What areas? Accountability relates to ethics, and to finance. I think it's more ethics that interests me. What else does accountability relate to - psychology, such as personal construct theory? When starting a systematic review of the literature last week, there were questions:

What is the size of the literature?
How do I measure size of literature? There is a body of literature on accountability, a sub division on public accountability. Similarly, there is academic literature on consultants, written either from the consultant’s perspective, or from the client’s.

Are there any cross-disciplinary perspectives that need to be taken into account?
Could be, such as psychology, social science, maths if it gets complex, IT if concentrate on one of the large sectors for consulting. Use economics for agency theory. Perhaps social network theory is relevant.

What are the major issues and debates about the topic?
Issues about client types, about the discourse of accountability, and about the discourses between clients and consultants.

I have a year for the literature review, so there must be a lot of reading.