Supervision meeting

Today I met with my two supervisors to discuss my draft literature review. It's not due until 1st May, but supervisor number 1 had asked me to provide something earlier and it's been a very useful exercise. Firstly, it has got my thoughts on paper. Secondly, I've found more papers that might be suitable to use for the B852 End of course Assessment (ECA).

Disaster!
You know how you worry about criticism, and really aggressive comments about how stupid you are? Well, S#1 had just nipped off as I joined them (they hadn't seen me waiting at another table), and supervisor number 2 greeted me, but looked so worried about my writing, that my heart sank. My review has no 'so what?'. There is no obvious research question. It needs a punch line. So I had one of those hot moments while I worried. Fortunately, S#1 returned, pointed out that this was only a draft and didn't need to be in for another 5 weeks. So there was no disaster and we then went on to a constructive discussion.

Nevertheless, the literature review needs to lead to a specific question to research,

1. one that is more than just interesting. (We have an exercise for the next B852 seminar on identifying a research question that we would like to pursue, so these thoughts might help that exercise).
2. Secondly, such a research question might involve the interaction of clients and consultants with the link to accountability. For example, projects thrive with ambiguity of who is responsible for outcomes. And where does that idea take me? There are different kinds of accountability and accountability matters when disputes occur. Maybe the research question is about failure of projects. I don't like that avenue, a) because it is retrospective, b) because I haven't seen much success of T401 students on this avenue, and that may again be because retrospection is so theoretical after the event.

So if outcomes of projects are co-produced between consultant and client, then how do you allocate responsibility or accountability?

There is a broad area and people don't know how consultants are held to be accountable. The research could be on

• accountability
• or on consultancy in terms of clients.

A refined research question might look at

• the production as a joint enterprise. Should it be client or consultant or a chain of accountability?
• how accountability works in the public sector? Are there problems about that, such as ambiguity. There might be multiple accountabilities.
• audit inspections exist, so do potentially different chains of accountability, in particular when consultants are used, it is not that clear who is responsible for what.
• how are the guidelines used and are they useful?
• how is accountability enacted with regard to management consultants?

The key ideas are:

• multiple accountabilities
• contextual factors such as history or culture
• idea of the tensions between sorts of accountabilities
• how clients manage the consultant

I meet with S#2 next Wednesday to discuss aspects of consultants and meet both again near the end of April.

Research choices

In our B852 tutorial today we discussed several questions:
1. Do you think that research in accounting and finance (or any business discipline) is going to be driven by issues of interest to practitioners?
I think we said no, not just such practical issues, but also theoretical ones. No, because there are forces and motivations acting on academic researchers to produce research based on theory.

2. What do you think are likely to be the differences between research topics that emanate from practical issues and research topics that are inspired by more theoretical issues?
Whilst research topics that arise from practical issues may have immediate relevance, the relevance might be limited to that particular area or field. In contrast, research arising from theoretical issues might have more generalisable applications.

3. What are the attributes of a ‘good' research question or topic?
Starting with the concept of ‘goodness', which is a philosophical debate on its own, I think that ‘good' depends on who is assessing it, so goodness is a subjective thing.
A good research question must be something of interest, and doable. What is a good research question to me may not be to my supervisor, and that matters, because he is assessing my work. So a good research question is also a question that is of interest, not only to me but also to a wider community. It has to be something that other people what to debate, that others want answered, so that question exists in a society, a political society of its time. And a good question for one time may not be for another era. Hence, when I come to propose my topic for my PhD, I need a research question that will be of interest to me for three or four years because I'm going to be doing a lot of work on it, but also of interest to my targeted supervisor. If I don't find an interested supervisor then I won't be doing the PhD.

Symbols of consultancy

Kaarst-Brown (1999)[1] has suggested five symbolic roles to consultancy. These symbolic roles indicate something about the stage that a consultancy project is at, and that symbol can relate to Lewin's stages of unfreezing, changing and refreezing. The symbol is useful to indicate the stage. However, if the client perceives a symbol at the wrong time, then the project incorrectly moves into another phase.

Her research arises from her consultancy experience, realising that at least one project that she and her colleagues were involved in, had not completed all the expected tasks even months after the consultancy project had been signed off and the consultants had left.

The consultant can deliberately use symbols to indicate the phase of the project. It's of relevance to my research because it relates to the client-consultant interaction. That interaction involves the consultant getting the client to be accountable for using consultancy services and symbol may explain failed projects. One reason for using a consultant might be political, because the consultant legitimises the management action, so that the manager is seen to have another authority justifying the possibly unpopular or criticised decision. Whilst Kaarst-Brown says that there is an inadvertent symbolism associated with the presence of an external consultant, the symbolism can be consciously used manage a project.


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[1] Kaarst-Brown, 1999, Five symbolic roles of the external consultant: Integrating change, power and symbolism, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 12 No. 6, 1999, pp. 540-561.

Consultancy: academics & practitioners

There are two kinds of literature on consultants and consultancies. The academic literature uses and builds on management theory with references other academic literature. In contrast, the practitioner literature offers practical steps for how to do it, and is more often aimed at the consultants, rather than the clients.

For example, Edgar Schein, whom other writers on consultancy often cite, uses theories of organisational development. In 'Process Consultation: Its role in Organization Development', Schein describes models of consultancy: the purchase of expertise model, the doctor-patient model, and the process consultation model. It is the process-consultation model that he defines and describes in great depth, and on which his other writing is built. The process of consultation concerns the client's activities to solve a problem rather than solving the client's problem for him, which would be content consultation.

A practitioner like Fiona Czerniawska writes to be immediately useful to the consultant and to the client. She offers a single simple model with no explanation of the theory behind it, and no academic references. Last year, she wrote 'Ensuring Sustainable Value from Consultants' and she has recently advised the National Audit Office on central government's use of consultants.

Management consulting news shows a pragmatic approach to writing, with no obvious theory.

Networking

Today there was a doctoral training workshop on the topic of networking. Unfortunately I had to miss it in order to go to a business women's networking event.

Amongst the many interesting women that I met, in a friendly and non-threatening atmosphere was one Woman of Particular Interest for my research topic. WPI is a senior civil servant, joining the civil service only about 18 months ago, with experience of having been a consultant and of using consultants in the civil service. She tells me that accountability is not so much of an issue. She finds that red tape is a nuisance and so encourages people to get round it, take more risks, but calculated risks, taken with knowledge. She said that projects that involve consultants need not go wrong if they are correctly managed and we discussed the NAO guidelines. It was encouraging to find someone who was practically interested in what I'm researching and willing to talk to me. I hope we'll be in touch again when I come to do my interviews.

Systems thinking

From this plethora of understandings of accountability can I suggest that it emerges from different human behaviours?

Public accountability

Accountability requires at least two people. Networks and constructs of accountability could not exist without each other, although they are not obviously the same. If accountees were not there, the accountor could account, so a social network must exist. There has to be someone to account to, the accountee, and someone to account, the accountor. Bovens [i] seems concerned with the idea of accountability as a social network. Its functions are for democratic control, to enhance integrity of public governance, provide public catharsis, and improve performance and maintain or enhance legitimacy of public governance. Accountability could be a scheme for blaming; if there is liability, who is the accountor? Broadness of accountability in the public sector makes accountors almost anonymous. There are many accountors in an institutional context: corporate, hierarchical, collective, individual (c.f. Sullivan). This could be corporate accountability or hierarchical accountability and links with Day & Klein’s discussion of hierarchical accountability.

Secondly, there is a problem of many eyes: who is the accountee? Such stakeholders are more diverse than in the private sector. Who is the accountor accountable to, and these could also be institutional accountees, not just individuals. Such accountees may be organisational, political, legal, or professional. Role of the media has increased importance to political accountability, and accountability is symbolic of the integrity of governance. In the move from vertical to horizontal accountability, which eyes are more powerful? There can be a problem of too much accountability, where the best outcomes are not obtained because of the need to prove fairness.

[i] Bovens, M. (2005). Public Accountability. The Oxford Handbook of Public Management Draft, L. Lynne & C. Pollitt (eds.),. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Accountability - what is it?

What is accountability? Accountability is variously described as:

• links in a chain (Day and Klein),


• a chameleon (Sinclair),


• a chimera (Lindsay & O’Byrne) [1]


• consisting of many hands (Bovens, Sullivan) and


• many eyes (Bovens).

Day and Klein [ii] refer to accountability being a social and political process, a point that is taken up by others (Sinclair, x) in discussion of forms of accountability. Day and Klein point out that accountability existed in the simplest of ancient societies, but would be embodied in institutions in the more complex societies, which implies a social framework and shared expectations.

“Our starting point is that accountability is all about the construction of an agreed language or currency of discourse about conduct and performance, and the criteria that should be used to assess them.” (p.2)

They asked how members of different kinds of committees & authorities defined accountability and accordingly researched accountability in five public services, interviewing members of boards and also collecting and analysing agendas and minutes and attending meetings. They found that accountability depends on an agreed framework of meaning, brought about by a shared dialogue and also that board members saw a dimension of accountability in the general sense of being answerable for the individual actions of service providers, an interpretation that “revolves round the ability to call service providers retrospectively to account for their actions.” (p. 236). However, there are still difficulties of collective competence in getting objectives met.

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[i] Lindsay, A., O'Byrne, G., Accountability of Tertiary Education at the National Level: A Chimera?
[ii] Day, P. and R. Klein (1987). Accountabilities: 5 public services, Tavistock.

Construction of my argument

I’m interested in the possibly excessive expenditure by the public sector on consultancy services, and what accountability exists for this expenditure.

Possible cause of the problem

• Confusion of accountabilities
• Enthusiastically self-marketing consultant
• Needs,which may be people, perspective, process and perhaps political

How does public procurement of external consultants affect various stakeholders? I think it must demotivate some employees, particularly those that are further from the consultancy selection process, it may annoy some other stakeholders such as unions, but on the other hand it gives new skills to those employees (managers) higher up the management career path and those who are closer to the choice to use consultants. Secondly, it gets a job done that otherwise would not be done quickly or effectively or at all.

Consequences

I deduce that the consultancy market will continue to grow, that the public sector will continue to purchase consultancy services and that there will be two classes of workers involved:

1. Public servants who cannot do what consultants do
   
2. Consultants who have specialised skills

And this division will be self-perpetuating. So in order to justify the division, there is a need to discover evidence of lines of accountability amongst those who select and use consultants, identifying accountors and accoutees.

Seeking salvation for accountability

This paper by Melvin Dubnick (prepared for 2002 annual meeting of the American Political Science association) distinguishes between the word accountability and the concept accountability. In discussing the word he points out the difficulty of translating accountability into other languages. I know some of the major romance languages so had already realised the problem there would be when I was anticipating having to research all the literature even in other languages if I move onto writing a doctoral thesis. Transferring that problem of language knowledge, I suspected that other languages would be equally intransigent. Dubnik indeed reports:
“The result is there exists little room in those languages for a possible distinction between the conceptualisation of accountability (as a concept) and responsibility."

Accountability in US forces - Matty Hull

Today’s paper reports on the death of a British soldier, Matty Hull, through US friendly fire. The inquest heard yesterday that if the Americans had followed the same combat rules as the British, then the mistake would not have happened.

A relevant piece of research overlaps with my studies of accountability: Romzek, Ingraham, “Cross Pressures of Accountability: Initiative, Command, and Failure in the Ron Brown Plane Crash”, 2000, in Public Administration Review Vol. 60, no3.


As in the Matty Hull case, this paper indicates that wrong procedures were followed. However, the focus of the research is on accountability, and identifies a conflict between “institutional rhetoric and managerial conditions (that) encouraged entrepreneurial behaviour and initiative” and an administrative reality that “emphasized a risk-averse, rules-oriented approach to accountability when things went wrong.”

From what I read in today’s newspaper on the Matty Hull inquest, and from seeing the video published on the web, I’d guess that this conflict still exists ten years after the Ron Brown crash.

I notice in the research that the American authors comment on hierarchical accountability that reflected in disciplinary actions and a “combination of different accountability standards”. They refer, not to a disaster, but to a ‘mishap’. Their reflections on damage to career do not express a concern for the human loss and the pain of the victims’ families. How odd! I notice that an MP comments that the US military has failed to help the soldier’s family in their question to find out the truth about his death.

It seems to me that 10 years after that crash, the US military still apply different standards of accountability, and particularly when non-Americans are involved.

Literature review

Looking at the literature on accountability, I have found papers on its forms (Sinclair) and dimensions (X). Some write about systems of accountability (X) but few define it. Fewer measure it; it is not quantifiable. Accountability is discussed as a discursive construct and its forms identified as different according to some circumstance of context. It is accountability to some body or some organisation, not accountability for anything other than for decision-making.
The literature on consultants may be categorised as:

• Academic
• Practitioner
• Media
• Grey

The academic literature has two strands (x):

• Functional literature reflecting OD and how the consultant helps a client who is in charge;
• The critical strand reflects takes the view that the client is weak and the consultant powerful in possession of knowledge.

Practitioner literature tells consultants how to do it, offering steps, processes, advice on marketing, and salary agreement between partners (Maister).

Media criticise the amounts spent on consultants and offer horror stories in the public sector, sometimes confusing outsourcing with consulting.

The consultants’ professional body, the MCA, together with the NAO and OGC have written reports on the use of consultants, with advice for clients in the public sector on how to procure and run consultancy projects. This seems to be the best source for suggesting managers in public sector can be accountable for the use of consultants.

Foucault and consultants

Having read Townley's (1) argument for application of Foucauldian ideas to HRM, I am wondering how to apply them to consultancy services. I think I'd want to look at the transaction between client and consultant, that Townley calls an "analytic conceptual space". I think this approach would contrast with Czerniawska’s (2), perhaps, more pragmatic explication of the relationship between client and consultant. Czerniawska sees these as separate systems or functions. She argues that these functions built a relationship. If seems to me that she is basing her structures on an underlying systems model within a positivist paradigm. Her thesis might be built on an underlying systems approach, seeing two interconnecting worlds, that of the client and that of the consulting world, with three subsystems to each world, and relationships to explore and analyse. Those relationships are examined in terms of routes to success (c.f. Hard Systems Methods) before considering a blueprint for the future.

My stance would be to look at the specific aspects of client behaviour and how a client accounts for what the consultant does.

There is passing mention to accountability:

1. Page 132 as being on the client’s agenda
2. Page 183 location of accountability within a portfolio of projects.

I would argue that the relationship is constructed.

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1. Townley, B., Foucault, Power/Knowledge, and its relevance for Human Resource Management, in Academy of Management Review, 1993, Vol. 18, 518-545, No. 3 in B852 Block III Reading 6. See http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=1&hid=9&sid=58bdc04f-3136-4b08-a555-81ae696857c4%40sessionmgr2

2. zerniawska, F., Toppin, G., 2005, Business Consulting: a guide to how it works and how to make it work, The Economist

Justifying my research choice

The purpose of my research is to find what accountability there is for the use of external consultants. Since there are some meanings, forms and dimensions to accountability, it is not a quantifiable concept but discursively constructed. Therefore I have to research using methods that gather and analyse such constructs. The following is based on Crotty (1998).

1. The techniques I plan to use are:

• Case study
• Semi structured interviews
• Document collection.

Interviews will be face to face if possible with chief executives or senior management of at least two pubic sector organisations, but may be constrained by telephone interviews. Whilst improving my shorthand, I’d still hope to record these interviews.

Documents that I’d hope to access would be

• Contract,
• Agreement
• Conditions
• Organisational structures.

2. This study is framed within the interpretive research paradigm employing qualitative techniques. Methodology is ethnographic enquiry in order to uncover management perceptions of lines of accountability and the Weltanschauung of the managers. This is an appropriate method because there is little attention in the literature to accountability for the use of consultants, and the inductive process may provide thicker /richer description.

3. Philosophical stance is then symbolic interactionism.

4. The epistemology is constructionism.

Working

Despite no blog here for a month, I am working. It's just that I'm confused over the reading I'm doing and cannot put it into words. I think that I'll have to do the same as winsome words and write something about every paper every day for a month. I'm drawing maps and influence diagrams of writers and who cites others but it doesn't seem to be moving me on very far. I have to discuss my outline literature review with my supervisors on Tuesday, and have the draft ready in about four weeks. That's getting scary. I have found books and research papers on accountability and on consultancy, but the nearest overlap is through advisory reports from the National Audit Office.

So here's an alternative in the hopes of spring:

I meant to Do My Work Today

I meant to do my work today -
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree.
And a butterfly flitted across the field.
And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went sighing over the land
Tossing the grasses to and fro.
And a rainbow held out its shining hand -
So what could I do but laugh and go?

Richard LeGallienne