Moving on

I'm leaving here. I said it was a one-year blog and it is. I'm starting a new blog on the doctoral experience at http://phd-ejh2.blogspot.com/ but I might pop back to post any final news on the results of my dissertation, if there is any.

Viva

Viva done yesterday and it went better than the interview for the PhD. This time I did feel like there was a conversation at one time rather than an inquisition, though the director of studies this time realised how nervous I was.

The first question was about how the philosophy influenced the choice of methods and collection - and I can't remember the whole question.

They also wanted to know what I'd have done differently in the light of the last excitement of negotiating access and having the interview data withdrawn on the last day. What had I learned?

We had a discussion about transaction costs and differences in procedural and outcome accountability. Transaction costs is something to investigate further.

And there was a question about the theory that overlapped both accountability and consultancy - I couldn't remember the different types of literature on consultancy nor the words - but they wanted me to talk about agency theory and the model that I used to show the chain of accountability.

I was a bit disappointed to discover that the examiner had a list of corrections to the references. How could I have missed these! And the director wanted me to remove the use of the first person where I'd reflected on methods. Okay.

Incidentally, they congratulated me on my use of diagrams and tables, which they said helped to show the concepts. Just as well as I'm so low on my verbal reasoning skills that I have to use these other skills.