Wednesday

Woke up at 4 am feeling queasy after sleep disturbed by vivid dreams (all components clearly related to previous day's thoughts and conversations but reassembled into a surreal experience). Decided against struggling into the City for ICAEW public sector non-executive director event. My main objective in attending was to identify potential interviewees for a project on public sector audit committees but there is no guarantee that I'll get the funding for this and if I do I already have contacts who can introduce me to appropriate people. Right now, the possibility of two consecutive uninterrupted days of reading and writing is hard to resist.

"The Corporate Objective" by Andrew Keay is the most disappointing book I've encountered for a long time. I am prejudiced against the legal style of citation with lengthy footnotes but the first part of this book has a footnote for every sentence. Some legal scholars include a parenthetical sentence summarising the relevance of the sources cited: at least that gives some idea of how the source supports the argument. But in this case the sources seem wildly disparate and often out of date. It reminded me of a student dissertation: lots of references to a huge range of literature but none of it pulled together properly. The writing style is ponderous and repetitious - a good editor could have improved it immensely.   By the end of chapter 1 I was ready to hurl the book out of the window. I skim read the remainder but even a detailed reading would have been unlikely to elucidate the new "model" proposed by the author and his recommendations for its enforcement. I searched in vain for any mention of the role of financial reporting in the accountability of directors, although there was a very brief reference to audit.

The second book "Corporate Governance: an Institutionalist Approach" is infinitely better. It's an edited collection of essays, one of which, on the Company Law Review process, is very useful. It covers some of the same ground as the Keay book in examining the theoretical frameworks but is so much better. It was published in 2003 and has been in our library since 2006 but never borrowed - I'm surprised it hasn't been culled! It wasn't on the shelf where I would have expected to find it and I certainly didn't recommend it so I wonder how it came to be purchased.

Chapter 6 got some attention today, I'm happy to report. I read the two papers which arrived via inter-library loan yesterday, which were early academic assessments of compliance with the Cadbury Code, and incorporated their findings. I reckon the chapter is half done so if I can crack on tomorrow I might even get it finished by next week.

I think the head of admin was shocked to receive anything other than a complaint. However, today the problem student has apparently been given advice by less sensible members of the postgraduate office staff which conflicts with the authoritative advice I was given and commits me, without consultation, to a course of action over which I should have had a choice. Thankfully it is what I had already planned to do but that office does need to be sorted out.

Trying to submit my ICAEW expense claim has given me a headache. I have to scan my receipts and then email them to my ICAEW address so that I can then log in to the ICAEW virtual desktop and put the claim together. This takes two passwords and I haven't yet worked out how to switch between desktops. Today I got started and then realised that I'd forgotten the cost code so tried to find an old claim to check it - that was impossible. So I had to log out of ICAEW to try to find it. In the end I phoned Gillian who was as usual very helpful.

And now I see that one of our new staff has decided to organise a Secret Santa for our departmental Xmas lunch. I HATE Secret Santa. What is the point of it? You look mean if you don't join in but I really don't want to have to buy a present for someone I may not like. I hope other people share my view.