Thursday 5 Jan 2012

Finding it very difficult to get back into a routine and not sleeping well which makes concentration even more difficult. Spent some of this morning's very early hours literature scanning which is useful but I still have to read all the new stuff I've found. Sometimes I wish I could just shout "Stop!" like the voice on the 1950s radio programme "In Town Tonight" used to so that the flood of material on corporate governance would stop long enough for me to sort out some of the accumulation I have. My filing has been very random which doesn't help. I'm not sure if I dare ask Thom, the new post doc, to do anything quite so menial as put stuff on Endnote...

Yes, the good news is that he starts in a couple of weeks so I am busy working out which projects can be dusted off the shelf and passed on to him. I wonder if I can get him interested in visual metaphors? I've just acquired an interesting book, Visual Methodologies by Gillian Rose, which could be helpful in developing the images paper, although it doesn't have much to say on the copyright problem which is likely to be a stumbling block for publication.

The other good news is that one of our Cadbury interviewees has found some papers which may be useful. When we talked to him he promised to look and I then reminded him a year ago: we'd rather given up so it was a pleasant surprise to hear from him. Of course it may be material that's already in the archive but it will be useful to see. It also provides us an excuse to give the publishers for further delay...

Today I have managed to sort out some admin stuff like expense claims (the online system at ICAEW is very time-consuming, especially as I forget how to do it each time). I've also had a first stab at completing the REF "impact case study template" although the evidence of impact for my work is insubstantial to say the least. The paper on regulation by disclosure is in a 1* journal but it has been cited (three times!) in a recent ICAEW publication and I have an email that says that that publication is part of a pack of information circulated for discussion to members of the Financial Stability Board. Now I need to sort out material for sessions on corporate governance on the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes - at least the constant flow of events means that there are plenty of suitable topics to discuss which they may - perhaps - have heard about.