As a research associate, it’s wonderful to be working with other people instead of isolated on a PhD.    A PhD should be a research apprenticeship, but an apprentice learns sitting next to Nellie, not in isolation.  Now I learn from the others around me, work in a team with people who have experience in other disciplines, and share my scribbles with peers not just supervisors.  Now, I see project management in action having been exposed to the vagaries and wonders of electronic portals such as Glasscubes and Box.com.

Interdisciplinarity becomes important now. My PhD was under the auspices of the business school, proposed from my business experience but I worked in business IT; I can program and analyse, which is why I now tutor so many technical and computing courses, and I’ve achieved my aim – to be a hybrid. However, in moving between disciplines, I realise that I don’t know how to access some papers, such as the ACM conference papers, which are very important in my new fields.  Indeed, I don’t know the fields well enough to realise when a pair of words represent an important concept, not just a piece of management speak. For instance, an EU deliverable requires identification and specification of “orchestration factors”.  For four days, I meandered around the wrong  literature looking for “orchestration”.  Thank goodness for team work – a colleague said, “Dillenbourg” and I was immediately into the right realm.

Interdisciplinarity then comes with advantages and disadvantages, pitfalls and pleasures.  Enjoy the pleasures

Pat Thomson blogs on interdisciplinarity http://patthomson.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/why-it-is-helpful-to-read-out-of-your-area/

Adams, A., Fitzgerald, E. & Priestnall, G. (2013) Of catwalk technologies and boundary creatures, ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction (In Press).
Dillenbourg, P., Sharples, M., Fischer, F., Kollar, I., Tchounikine, P., Dimitriadis, Y., Pablo Prieto, L., Igancio Asienso, J., Roschelle, J., Looi, C.-K., Nussbaum, M. & Diaz, A. (2011) Trends in Orchestration: Second Research & Technology Scouting Report. STELLAR Consortium
Mednick, S. (1962) The associative basis of the creative process, Psychological Review, 69, 220-232.

I’ve been consolidating the learning I did on my PhD but also learning more, like how to run focus groups, and how to set up an analysis database that I must share with others who might want evidence from it.  I’ve used qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) before, and set up codes for analysis, but not shared my codes.  For example, if you’re looking at the advantages of participating on line, an advantage might be physical, and I’ve created a node in the database called ‘physical’.  But that’s not enough to share with someone else.   Like using one character identifiers for variables in programming code, it’s not self-descriptive, and I must rename it ‘physicalDifficultiesSurmounted’.

The JuxtaLearn project is an EU project and seems to involve an awful lot of paper work and bureaucracy, but then there are lots of people researching together, people from Portugal, Spain, Germany, Sweden as well as the UK, and we all have different things to do.  Apparently, what we do comes in work packages (WP) and there are nine or ten work packages, and each work package has deliverables due at various times over the next three years.  So you can see that serious project management is needed to pull all these packages together in the right order and on time, or at least in time.  It’s an interesting project because it is about learning and technology, both of which interest me.  Learning’s about what people do and I can’t think of anything better than researching people and technology.

“Life stuff distracting me from work stuff”

tweeted Katie Wheat in today’s Twitter Early Career Researcher chat stream (#ecrChat).  Today’s Twitter #ecrChat is on the topic of work/life balance, hosted by Andrew Frayn.

At the same time, I was in the middle of an email discussion with a colleague early career researcher who’s been offered a full-time one year teaching post at a minor northern university, while she’s also got a full-time six month post near home.  The poor woman has a dilemma, whether to choose  the job close to home but away from a research career, or the lecturer job that should help her to build up an academic career but too far from home.

“We cannot be the only couple in this position, forced to compromise the career of one so that the other may flourish.”

Eiffel Tour, Paris

In Paris, a couple of weeks ago, I presented a paper on how boundary objects afford engaged behaviours and thus engaged behaviours allow strategising activities.   The presentation elicited half a dozen questions, all useful.

One of the biggest problems is my anecdotal discussion of boundary objects, probably because when I collected my data, I noticed them but without enough detailed analysis or reporting of them.  So I need to identify their categories, attributes and functions.  Boundary objects seem to be stuff shared between different stakeholders to a project.  Definitions of boundary objects include Star and Greismer’s (1989) initial referral to one as “an analytical concept of those scientific objects that inhabit several intersecting worlds,”  the “intersecting” implying a shared overlap between the different worlds of the object holders.  Boundary objects are adaptable and robust, “adaptable to different view points and robust enough to maintain identity across them“.  I think what they mean is that when people who different things meet, this stuff that they share helps them also share meanings, value, knowledge and indeed to create new knowledge – the excitement of meeting at the boundaries, of pushing at the boundaries of your own discipline and of learning from another discipline.  What categories of boundary object push you into another discipline?

Categories according to Star & Greismer again are four: repositories, ideal type, coincident boundaries and standarised forms.  Later Levina and Vaast (2005) identified boundary objects as either designated (you’ve got to use them) or objects-in-use (more informal stuff that people develop as they go along).

I haven’t got a research question for this paper but perhaps there’s something about whether particular categories of objects span particular boundaries, and whether particular categories afford engaged behaviours better at some boundaries than at others.  How do you get a research question?

Levina, N., Vaast, E. (2005) The Emergence of Boundary Spanning Competence in Practice: Implications for Implementation and Use of Information Systems. MIS Quarterly 29, 335-363.
Star, S.L., Griesemer, J.R. (1989) Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science (Sage) 19, 387-420.

A few months ago, here, I mused on whether I should publish in journals or whether a conference was a publication.  My strategy was to present at conferences, get feedback and edit my writing in order to get an acceptable paper to publish.  Last year I presented at the Academy of Management biennial conference of the Management Consulting Division.  Earlier this year, I presented at the UKAIS conference.  My examiner was in the audience.

A couple of weeks later, said examiner emailed me to ask if, given review feedback I could revise the paper by 1st May for the possibility of its being accepted for a special issue of the relevant journal in August.   Ex-supervisors and I have been working on a paper for a different journal at the same time as I was preparing the conference paper, but you can’t publish similar papers because that’s self-plagiarism.  So we worked the two papers together, addressing the review feedback – thank you to the reviewers – and put it together in time.  It was accepted.

Not only that, but as a consequence of preparing for that research interview a few weeks ago a colleague told me of a strategy-as-practice workshop that was looking for papers and realised that my research had aspects that might be relevant.  I proposed a paper and proposal was accepted.  The full paper is now written and uploaded.  With feedback from the workshop in June maybe we (supervisors & I) can write another paper this year.

1. I really want the job
2. I believe I’m good enough to do the job

But the competition has been better and I’ve not been offered the posts.

It’s all part of learning.  One interviewer debriefed me by explaining that I didn’t go far enough on following through some thoughts on how a theory that I’d used in my PhD thesis might apply to the area we were discussing.  That’s important, because it was an interesting discussion and made me think it would be fun to work with these academics and  I would continue to enjoy such discussions – but they found someone better.  Fair enough.

In another, perhaps more structured interview, it was clear what sort of questions each interviewer had in mind.  I share them in case you, dear reader, are also anticipating such interviews:

• Methodological experience – describe a time when you had difficulties of access? I had difficulties here, here and here, the last being the most interestingly difficult.
• Publishing intentions – what’s your publication strategy? I’m presenting papers at conferences and then with conference feedback hope to develop them further to submit to journals.
• Limited experience in the area – where do you think you’d take time to get up to speed (in this new area)?
• Career – how do you see your career progressing?  I find this question slightly startling as being so old and of a generation when educated women were encouraged to go into teaching or nursing “in case you get married” I have rarely been asked this question.  It’s nice to think that interviewers expect a career of me (though cynically they have to ask the same questions of every interviewee) and indeed I recently heard on Radio 4 Saturday live program of a woman, Mary Hobson who completed her PhD at 74 and is now an award-winning translator of Russian novels, so I have the role models.
• What wider academic activities do you undertake? I’m not sure what they’re looking for here.  I tutor, monitor and have acted as an adviser.  I happen to have a little coding work, a little analysis work and some research interviews.  Perhaps they are asking if I attend conferences and workshops or support other students in some way.  I mentioned the LAK12 MOOC that I’d been following and that was novel to them since none of them had heard of Massive Open Online Courses.

Again, I didn’t get offered the job because they had people who were better experienced in the relevant area. The feedback from that research interview was encouraging:  they considered my answers measured and thoughtful, and told me to apply for future posts.

Perhaps I need to scupper the competition.

However, I fit in with today’s culture and obey expectations, so I dutifully prepared a set of slides for the UKAIS conference in Oxford recently, where I’d had a paper on my PhD research accepted.  I had a half hour slot, on the second day, just before lunch.  Do you think anyone is going to be that interested after having already watched three other presentations each with around 30 slides? NO, I thought.  They are going to want their lunch.  But what I want from them is for them to know about my research and to tell me how to tweak it and where to publish it.  So instead of rabbiting on for thirty minutes (one chair allowed 22 minutes and five minutes for questions, with the remaining time for turnaround between speakers), I planned to speak to twenty slides for six minutes 40 seconds.  Why so precise a timing?  Because this format, known as a pecha kucha, requires timed presentation of exactly 20 seconds for each slide, i.e. 400 seconds.  You have to know exactly what you want to say to each slide and how to say it – whether there’s a lot to say so you speed up,or vice versa.

I explained what I was going to do, what I wanted from my audience after the presentation, and that I couldn’t take questions during the presentation.  Then I set off.  Doing a pecha kucha is a bit like a sprinting race, and indeed one of the failures of my presentation I suspect, was that people were watching to see if I could speak to time with each slide rather than listening to the content that the slide illustrated.  But it was fun, for me and for them.

I got what I needed – suggestions for publication in for example the project management journals,or the International Journal of Project Management  or the European Journal of Information Systems, or interestingly because I hadn’t thought of it, the journal of Information Technology and People, and I was given a name of a couple of editors to contact.  It’s worth contacting the editors to check that you’re writing the right papers for them, that your proposed approach fits, and they might know if there’s a special edition coming up.  Rowena Murray advises this approach in her “Writing for Academic Journals” but this was the first time anyone had actually suggested it and given me names.  Now to do – I should read the possible journals and see what they already publish and how those published papers are written.

• presentation
• relevance
• objectivity
• method
• provenance
• timeliness

Experience and knowing where to look helps because you know which databases to search,  which journals to read and which authors to check, and the Literature Review HQ blog from a PhD student who’s gone through it helps remind you of the resources and the pain.

But recently, agreeing to write a paper with a colleague,  I committed myself to review literature in a field that was not in any of my PhD research areas, so I had no experience.  First with my limited knowledge, I checked papers of people who’d written in that area to see what journals they’d used, including in that check what my colleague had cited.  Then I drew up a list of possible journals and checked the university library for possibly suitable databases to use.  I kept a table of what databases I’d searched, what search terms I’d used, how many hits I’d got, and comments on the worth of these hits.  My PhD training on systematic reviewing helped.

Searching for papers and finding something useful is so empowering.  Six years ago I couldn’t do this and found it very difficult to put forward a research proposal to get on the PhD programme.  Now I can follow up newspaper articles to find and read the original source,   to form my own take on it.  Try it – find the sources for these articles:

• Cochrane Summary of Findings table for adjuvant radiotherapy after surgery for cervical cancer
• Aspirin’s Role In Cancer Prevention: U.K. Studies Show Off Drug’s Abilities

And that’s just the search, -I haven’t started the review.

But, people haven’t researched engagement between people, or even identified what engagement is, and there are lots of definitions of engagement but they’re all in metaphors because it’s too difficult to explain what you mean by it. And on top of that, the connection between engagement and how things can help engagement hasn’t been made.

My research has made that connection and shows how IT suppliers and their public sector clients use things to engage with each other to get things done in work time and places.

Findings are that if people don’t have things to start with, then they don’t have anything to talk about, to use to persuade and influence, and work doesn’t get done. If they use similar types of stuff like logs or plans but if they don’t share them, then they can’t share ideas either and work doesn’t get done. But if people have and share material things and places and time, work progresses a heck of a lot better.

So the argument is that if you’ve got things and share and use them then it’s easier to talk and then it’s easier to get work done.

In the end, it boils down to sharing stuff and then everyone can work happily ever after.

A first attempt to create a proposal for the Strategy-as-Practice Workshop meant absolutely nothing to my test reader.  I had to rewrite it as a story.  Does it make sense to you?