Tuesday

Monday was spent catching up with colleagues, mostly receiving and passing on information. Annie Pye's ESRC study of boards was reported in the Telegraph and the FT and led to some discussion in the Board Advisors group on LinkedIn. I'm looking forward to reading her study, it's been a huge effort for her with a serious setback initially due to ill health. We exchanged emails and I hope to catch up with her in the new year - we've discussed a project looking at the role of the company secretary and I'd still like to do that, the opportunity to work with her would be very good.

My inbox tells me this has to be a reading week, rather than a writing one. For the REF audit I have to read several papers published by colleagues in journals that do not appear in the ABS list and decide where they would sit in the ranking. This is so subjective that it seems quite pointless to me, especially when the topics are ones with which I am not familiar. The Belgian PhD student, Diane, has sent the final draft of her thesis for approval before submission so that will need careful attention, and then a trip to Louvain in February for her public defence. I am really interested to see how the Belgian process works but the Louvain campus is a bleak place at the best of times, let alone February...

Today we are interviewing for the post doc posts. We have a couple of candidates for our department, one who looks outstanding on paper.

(Later) The interviews were very interesting. Sitting on panels with colleagues always is, I learn more about them than about the interviewees sometimes. The first candidate came over very well but it would have been quite difficult to link her interests into our departmental plans. The second candidate was excellent and would be very good to work with: his background is political science and I can see he'll be a future MP (if the Lib Dems ever recover from the coalition). Hope he turns out to be one of the top five and that he accepts the post if it's offered.

Very good article in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/12/britain-ruled-by-banks
Looked up the CRESC site and found a paper by Julie Froud et al which underpins the book and article - they have written excellent critical stuff on corporate governance so this should be a good read. Added to the pile...

Managed to plough through papers written by colleagues and come up with some kind of categorisation for the audit. Agreed some dissertation marks.

Snowed this afternoon, big wet flakes but they didn't settle. This time last year we were snowed in. Freddie has had his collar taken off and is a happy cat.

More meetings tomorrow and then two clear days for writing, barring domestic disasters...