Reading PhD theses

Supervisor tells me to read PhDs to get examples of how to write mine. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to get PhDs to read. If you go to the Open University library, you have to ask for a particular thesis, which means you have to give the library the title and the author, and then the librarian goes and fetches it for you. You can't just browse theses. So it's a bit difficult to find useful theses when what you want is to see the content, the structure, the layout, and perhaps what the author has addressed when writing the methodology chapter. These aren't things you can search for on an electronic database, so there's no point in going on the OU catalogue system to look for a helpfully structured thesis because the catalogue can only search for content and topic of theses.

The OU has this wonderful repository of research, Open Research Online, but that doesn't reveal theses. You'd think that the Open University would have got round to putting its PhD theses on line, like Cranfield does.

I am writing - structure

I am writing, but it is not easy.

For the case studies, it seems sensible to structure the initial write up around the theory, so each case study will have a chapter laying out:

• setting
• actors
• dimensions of social capital: structural, relational and cognitive with comparison of client and consultant
• relationships between the dimensions of social capital
• outcomes - what engagement is there?

The information must come from the analysis so far: documents, role ordered matrices, nets or maps, themes and networks. Those go in appendices.

Now write!

Can't write

I'm stuck writing with many thoughts but not on paper, starting with getting a structure to write up one case study fully. Supervisors want at least one case written in the next month, if not two and it's hard because I can't get the structure right, though I do have the beginnings of an idea. I'll start with:

• setting
• characters
• structural dimension of social capital
• relational dimensions of social capital
• cognitive dimensions of social capital
• relationships between the dimensions

Still stuck.