Monday

A bit fragile today after fainting quite spectacularly yesterday. Spent much of the morning being interviewed by phone by a colleague who is researching PhD supervision. We had a very interesting conversation and the study when complete should make useful reading. Off to the optician to get my glasses repaired - the frame got bent when I collapsed. Fortunately the damage didn't require any expenditure...


Finally sent off the department's research output return and sent a cross note to everyone complaining at how unhelpful they had been by not following simple the instructions as to how to complete the form. I lost patience with the last one which arrived late so I just copied and pasted the information without reformatting. The research administrator came back with a query but I told him to check with the researcher concerned, I'd had enough!

Finished writing a review of an ABR paper this afternoon so sent it off and then dealt with email.

Papers arrived for ICAEW research board meeting on Friday, will have to read them tomorrow.

Plan to meet PhD student in London on Wednesday afternoon, after I've been to the reception at the House of Lords. Will miss meeting called by dean presumably to head off the current concerns of the professors about protecting research hours which have not been officially expressed to him - we have a Deep Throat in our midst!

Useful comments from our research manager on the joint funding application - she is very good at spotting points which could be more strongly emphasised, the things that I tend to take for granted and don't spell out clearly enough. Circulated to team who replied quickly - we all seemed to be working late this evening.Will try to finish that off tomorrow afternoon.

Sunday

Seeing Son's film again at the BFI on Friday I was even more aware of how cleverly he had constructed the story out of hours of interviews, a process very much like qualitative research. The story works on so many levels - a historical record, a study of a particular experience (being in a band), a description of the growth and disbanding (npi) of a powerful nexus and the animosities inherent in that process, an intriguing story with a shadowy powerful figure whose actions and personality underpin the whole structure but who never appears (in a way, it would have spoiled things if he had), a study of the contrast between success and failure and the workings of Fate. Watching some of the protagonists in real life, I am left wondering if the apparent failures aren't much happier than the successful.

Odd moments over the weekend trying to deal with lingering paperwork. I wonder why so many of my colleagues find it impossible to follow simple instructions in providing information. I wonder why they think I bothered to provide instructions at all. Is this wilful subversion or mere carelessness? Whichever, instead of simply cutting and pasting into the document I've been asked to prepare, I have either to spend time reformatting what they have provided or email them asking for the information in the format requested and then wait for them to reply. An expanded department seems to have made the job far more difficult. I must check my timetable to see if my allowance for this has increased! (That's a joke: hours on timetables never bear any relationship to the time the job takes, of course.)

Read article in NYRB by Paul Volcker.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/financial-reform-unfinished-business/?page=1

Was attracted to it by the illustrations:

Herscovici/Art Resource

René Magritte: La Fissure, 1949

Rafael Valls Gallery, London/Bridgeman Art Library

Gabriel-Germain Joncherie: Cashier Counter with Coins, 1829

Nothing new in the article, though, and I'm not sure that international accounting standards or auditor independence have much to do with helping us out of the present situation.

Should be able to finish review of paper for ABR and hope to be able to spend Monday on chapter 6. Very busy week ahead, out and about.

Friday

Came in very early in advance of a meeting and used the time to go through the various versions colleagues had sent round of our funding bid to look at Enterprise Performance Management in charities. The internal reviewers had made comments and this ended up with several versions of the document floating about so I checked through all of them to see what had been changed and then tried to sort out some inconsistent referencing. If we get the funding it will be important to manage the way the outputs are written so I shall have to give that some thought. I'm only used to working with one other person at a time and that's difficult enough in terms of matching writing styles. My most frequent co-author, bless him, has been very tolerant over the years of my changes to his style.

I see that two people have looked at this blog today, I wonder who. No-one has left any comments. I don't feel as if I'm writing for an audience, it's more like talking to myself. I've reached a part in "Wilful Blindness" where the author cites lots of research on productivity and how we are far less productive when we're tired but may not notice this. I certainly notice it! It's useful to read back over these entries and remember how it actually felt to be doing all the things I'm recording: I think that my tendency to postpone the tasks that need real concentration is not just procrastination but an inherent recognition that there are times in the day when it would be quite pointless to attempt them as my brain is just not up to it.

Thursday

Well, I managed not to check my email until 11.30 by which time I'd put in more than 3 hours on chapter 6. Well, chapters 5 and 6 really - I found I needed to restructure things. I woke up with really sore eyes, no idea why, but it's been a bit of a problem. Still, I have written a few hundred words and I think they make sense. I'm back into the flow now so it's a pity I won't have much chance to work on it tomorrow. I have to go in for a meeting in the morning and then we're off to London to see Son's documentary at the BFI. Big excitement today - he was interviewed on the Today programme. Of course he hadn't told us and we didn't have the radio on so had to listen to the podcast. He sounded really good. Lots of nice texts, emails and tweets from people who do listen to Radio 4 in the mornings.

Started reading "Wilful Blindness" by Margaret Heffernan. Seems to me that the idea of wilful blindness rather negates the possibility of NEDs, let alone women, having much impact on boards. I see that David Cameron thinks that more women on boards will curb executive pay - hard to understand the reasoning. Reminded me of when Linda and I had to apply for our own jobs because we were on temporary contracts. We both asked to be moved up a grade and the mad head of Accounting told us off because, he said, we were both married and didn't need the money! These days he would have been reported.

Wednesday

Early start for a Scholarly Connections meeting. It's so difficult to find a time when everyone is free that I decided to try offering breakfast. Five colleagues gave brief presentations about their current research and it all went quite well in terms of informing everyone about the different areas of work, especially for our new economist colleagues. And the breakfast wasn't bad although my fried egg sandwich had a runnier yolk than I'd anticipated. Several people seem slightly miffed that they weren't asked to present their work but in 45 minutes there wasn't room for everyone. I'll try to organise a couple of lunchtime meetings along the same lines over the next couple of weeks and see what happens.

Lots of conversations, mostly with anxious people about issues that aren't being properly managed but a delightful chat with a very good friend visiting for an exam board which cheered me up. A personal development review meeting with a newish colleague who is doing all the right things but researches in an area with limited publishing outlets so is inevitably progressing slowly.

Email discussion about statement I drafted after yesterday's profs meeting. Finally got the go-ahead to submit my funding bid - very pleasing to click on "Submit" at last. Our research manager has been brilliant in sorting it all out for me.

An internal call for funding applications is good news but will mean more work for me, helping colleagues with their bids. I think I'll encourage everyone to have potential bids tucked in a drawer ready to pull out when opportunities like this come up: at least they will have done some of the thinking in advance. And it's really good practice for less experienced researchers and those who haven't much experience of bidding. Perhaps I'll give a talk on bidding just for our department as I've done for the grants panel workshop in the past - it could be tailored to applications to the accountancy bodies.

Accepted an invitation to an event to be run by ICAS and BDO at the beginning of next month: "Principles not Rules: a question of action". Much of the most important thinking about financial reporting, auditing and corporate governance has come out of the profession in Scotland, as the Cadbury history shows. Good speakers and a London location convenient for evening travel.

Very interesting book arrived from local library: "Economics of Good and Evil: the quest for economic meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street" by Tomas Sedlacek. Apparently it's been made into a play in the Czech Republic. My bedtime reading for the next week or so, I think.

Email cleared as far as possible. I can see that some colleagues are not planning to send me their research output information until the last possible moment before the deadline I set on Friday. This means that I shall have to assemble the information over the weekend in order to get it to the research office by their deadline. I must remember to set a much earlier deadline next time.

Shall spend the evening sorting out papers so that I can get a clear run at chapter 6 tomorrow. WILL NOT LOOK AT EMAIL UNTIL I'VE WRITTEN IT!

Tuesday

So many emails... another request from a journal editor to review a paper but I declined immediately - the topic is too far removed from what I'm doing at the moment to make it sensible to devote time to it when chapter 6 is becoming urgent.

Emailed my kind referees to tell them that the funding body will need to be able to contact them in December or January - all replied very quickly to say it wasn't a problem. Only one is jetting off somewhere exciting and promises to check email regularly. Nice people but no doubt they'll all be after me to review papers, examine PhD students etc in the next few months..

In between a steady stream of visits from first year students I read through an MBA consultancy project report which I was sent by the student as she interviewed me for it. Did I really say what she quotes? More to the point, were the colleagues she interviewed quite so frank in their remarks as she reports? She has made a poor attempt at anonymising both individuals and universities where she collected data and the report is not well structured: I'm glad I didn't have to mark it.

The students all seem to be settling in well, happy with their accommodation, coping with the work and enjoying themselves. One is in her early thirties and I am astonished when she tells me that she has a teenage son. We used to get a great many more mature students than we do now and I miss them. At one stage we had a programme specifically designed for them which I ran for three years and I'm still in touch with a couple of the first group who graduated.

A quick trip to the library to return books - I thought I'd managed the process perfectly but a watching librarian pointed out that I hadn't followed the on screen instructions properly as to where to place the books. Collected another inter library loan and realised that the article would be very useful not only for chapter 6 but also in the review for ABR that I haven't finished yet.

Break for lunch and an interesting chat with Emma, my second cousin, who teaches part-time at Wheatley.

Spend far too much time trying to get to grips with the new letter template in order to put together letters of recommendation so that LSE colleagues can use the ICAEW library. Finally set them out in my own style, print them out, sign them and put them in the post. It all seems so time-consuming now we're so used to email.

Manage to write up notes from yesterday's meeting about PRME and circulate them for comment. Se that an email has arrived with comments on the joint funding project that I had hoped to get sent off this week. At a quick glance the comments seem mainly cosmetic and quite constructive: forward the message to the team and hope to find time later to go through them in detail.

Finally off to a meeting of professors to discuss our concerns about possible changes to our system of protecting research time. Volunteered to write up the statement we plan to produce - another task for this evening

Monday

The extra hour came in handy, allowing me to spend more time on reviewing the paper for ABR. The topic is very interesting and the paper is very well written: it's not often that I get asked to review a paper of this quality and it's taken me some time to reflect on ways in which it could be strengthened. As usual, I'm much more interested in how the research was actually undertaken than in the findings and this is especially so with case studies. The authors managed to get access to significant people and I'd like to know much more about the process of collecting the data. But typically journal articles say very little about this.

Spent the rest of the day on the South Bank and very much enjoyed a performance of Arnold Wesker's "The Kitchen" at the National Theatre. The production was quite balletic in places and left me thinking about how groups of quite dysfunctional  individuals can work together effectively. The idea of senior management being shipped off to experience work in a professional kitchen is quite appealing.

Monday got off to a good start - coffee with a young friend who has recently completed an Oxford DPhil and is now working on a fascinating project shadowing chief execs in the NHS. She told me all about her viva and, not for the first time, I regret not having pursued the project started a long time ago exploring viva experiences. (It was knocked on the head by our then research director who insisted that it wouldn't lead to an output RAEable under Business and Management.) She has sent me her thesis to read -  all 448 pages! She has cited my work on audit committees quite extensively so it will be interesting to see how she has used it.

Snail mail brings a report on risk reporting published by ICAEW which cites my co-authored paper on regulation by disclosure several times - excellent news as I can put this in the REF impact form I've been asked to complete. Slight problem that the paper itself may not make the cut as the journal is one of those which appear low down in the rankings in spite of its clear quality.

Issues about protection of research time have come to a head and after meetings, phone calls and emails I found myself organising a meeting of professors for tomorrow afternoon.

Made some headway on my inbox before chairing a meeting of the PRME task group. We need to produce some recommendations on how the Faculty should pursue the PRME agenda and I had made some notes on this beforehand but the meeting turned out rather differently - a bunch of extremely enthusiastic colleagues who see this as an opportunity to make quite radical changes in student engagement across all courses, the development of the Faculty culture and external relationships. It was a great pleasure to attend a meeting that did not involve anyone expressing anxieties or complaining about anything. Although those attending have a number of individual agendas, PRME provides a useful focus for these. I now have to draft a report which captures the interesting ideas put forward - the task list for Thursday, my working at home day, grows longer and chapter 6 is still calling to me...

Then off to teach a session on literature reviews on the MSc Finance research methods module. Most of the students seemed lively and receptive. I was shocked to find that they don't see the point of keeping themselves informed about business news by reading newspapers: they seemed surprised that anyone should suggest it. A few of them seem to have a clear idea of possible dissertation topics but many don't and seem to think they can knock out a proposal over the Xmas break. I think I shall have to offer to help with marking proposals. I rashly offered to deal with enquiries about literature reviews by email - by the time they come to write them, they will have forgotten everything I told them. In talking about how to read critically, I suggested that they should consider who authors are writing for and was then asked who the audience for their dissertations is - a very perceptive question from a student who told me he did an undergraduate degree in psychology and wants to look at aspects of behavioural finance in his dissertation. The time went very quickly but I was really tired by the end of the afternoon.