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.