Friday

Late last night a tweet from James McRitchie who runs the excellent site corpgov.net alerted me to a fascinating paper in BJM critiquing agency theory. One of the inter library loans which took me to the library this week is a similar critique from a US scholar which I have only had a chance to skim. Good to see this challenge to the dominant approach. James' link was to an HTML version of the paper and wanting to save a pdf I went into EBSCO to get it and found that that issue of BJM had some fascinating articles on the state of management education in the UK. I sent one of them on to the deans as it mentioned Mike Wallace who is coming to do a workshop for us, at my instigation. He's an important person in the area and a useful contact for us.

Downloaded the articles and then Firefox crashed. Decided to try Chrome. Seems much faster. Spent some time bookmarking sites I use a lot. Late to bed and then started reading "The Sound of Gravity", a novel by Joe Simpson, the mountaineer who wrote "Touching the Void". Completely gripped by it from the first page but began to feel rather cold....

Friday: Early start at the dentist who poked about, took an X-ray and pointed to something nasty that may be lurking and needs sorting out. Made an appointment for three week's time - hadn't realised quite how full my diary is.

Not many emails this morning but time-consuming. A rather unhelpful reply to a query of mine prompted me to spend some time composing a lengthy response raising some fundamental issues about resourcing research. The university reorganisation has led to some very tricky issues about accountability and responsibility which no-one has thought through properly.

A dissertation draft from an undergraduate student which I have promised to feed back on by Monday will need careful reading. And a request from a journal editor to review a paper which is so interesting I dropped everything to read it.

Then a call from Gillian at ICAEW about the progress of a funding proposal. The chance of concentrating on chapter 6 becomes less and less likely as the day goes on...the answer has to be to ignore email entirely.