Thursday

Plodding on with the research proposal, I see that the website where it has to be uploaded will be down for maintenance for part of the morning - helpful to have a warning of that. So I fill in the boxes requiring basic information, save what I've done and then turn my attention to other inbox items.

A request from an interesting new contact, a former management consultant who works for an investment trust which has set up a governance consultancy. She has developed an online board evaluation tool and has asked me to test out a couple of modules. This takes some time as you are presented with a series of scenarios requiring board decisions and asked to rate a series of possible responses. It's cleverly constructed and I can see lots of scope for discussing the scenarios as well as picking out a response and ending up with an overall picture of the responses of the full board. I'm looking forward to talking to her about this and finding out more about how it works. I can also see how it might be used in a university context. I don't know enough about the market for these tools to compare it to anything else, other than a so-called toolkit developed by a group at Birkbeck, funded by ESRC, who ran a seminar last year which was less than impressive. Pretty slides with diagrams but no tools that I could see. I upset the leader of the project by asking where they were - "It's not a toolkit with spanners!" he snapped. In fact what they presented was a model and it was difficult to see its practical use, other than enabling the team to earn fees by presenting it at company workshops.

A request from ESRC to review a funding proposal. It looks quite interesting but they want the review by 10 November - can I find half a day to concentrate on it? My diary next week looks very full, two days meeting with all my new academic advisees to find out how they're settling in, meetings with other students who I'm supervising and two days at events in London. But I don't like to turn down these requests, it's part of contributing to an academic community that I am proud to be part of and which has supported me, although I've never asked the ESRC for funding. Reading the summary, I am immediately drawn into it, as the ideas are interesting and I want to see how the researchers plan to investigate them. A first read through of all the paperwork is disappointing, though. I spend some time researching the researchers and reading a bit about the data collection plans they propose which are new to me. They are also asking for a very large sum and I'm not convinced that all the costs are necessary. I'll need to read it all again.

Back to the proposal. Very difficult to convey excitement about the project and its importance as well as show that the ideas are grounded in the literature and that the theoretical framework and analytical approach are appropriate, all in 1000 words. The more I edit it, the feebler it seems to get. Late in the afternoon I finally upload it and send it off to colleagues for internal review.

An invitation arrives to lunch next week with a researcher at LSE, one of the authors of the ICAEW report that I signed off. My interest in it was passed on to him and he wants advice on turning it into an academic paper. I've never met him but he has published in top journals with people like Donald Mackenzie so I'm not sure how I can help him. He says nice things in his email about the paper I published in Accounting, Organizations and Society with Yves -  my best publication in terms of journal rankings and very important for the REF.

Late in the evening a flurry of emails from colleagues in the ICAEW technical directorate who are discussing a query raised at the AGM by a member wanting to know about research on the impact of technology on decision-making. Everyone thinks there must be lots of this somewhere but they don't know where it might be.  I too am sure there must be lots of work done on this topic but I know that if I start looking I'll get drawn into it, following all sorts of interesting ideas and, before I know it, days will have slipped past. The two foot high pile of material on my desk relating to board diversity is the result of my last casual search for existing studies and I have yet to find the time to write the critical review of that. So I resist the temptation and just suggest that the new Kahneman book might be relevant.