An e-mail to my supervisor and her colleague

I'm stuck. I'm supposed to hand in a final research proposal Monday morning and I have serious doubts about the research question. Actually, I like the research question, but I can't operationalize it... So, I wrote an e-mail to my supervisor and her colleague that she's leading a joint thesis group with to see what they say - if they check their e-mails during the weekend at all... Let's hope they do.

It's as "soft" a research as it can be. If it was soft porn, you wouldn't even see the nipples of the girl. And, to be honest, I have no experience with that. What I've done so far showed everything, not only the nipples. The COM way of doing research says that everything is a subject of interpretation, there is no objective truth to know. So, "statistics" is a bad word and positivists are the evil crowd that have no appreciation of social processes.

And in this context, this is the e-mail that I wrote. If anyone has a suggestion, please do contact me via e-mail or facebook. Thanks a lot!

Dear Hanneke and Myrte,

I read through your points again and again. I think some of them are really justified, but I think that you must have misunderstood or misread my text at some places and I feel that I must clarify what I meant. That's what the first part of my e-mail is about. The second part is about the operationalization problems that I'm having. I realize that you might not read your e-mails during the weekend, but if you do, I would appreciate a reaction to the second part of my e-mail.

"On the other hand you talk about ‘enacting organizational culture, reifying power relations or enabling sensemaking’ and you argue that because these are not mentioned on agendas for meetings, meetings are merely instrumental."

I have not said such a thing at all. Throughout my text, I talk about *views* of meetings. In the last paragraph on page 5 I argue that "the social conceptualization of meetings and theidea of meetings as rituals" are similar and in the first paragraph of page 6 I argue that the "instrumental view of meetings and the identification of meeting as episodes" are similar. I can't find anything in the text that says that meetings are merely instrumental.

When I wrote that "One could even argue that primary functions of meetings are given attention is these views: I am sure that you, dear reader, have attended numerous meetings that aimed to come up with a solution to a problem, to discuss a situation or make a decision, but not many that aimed at enacting organizational culture, reifying power relations or enabling sensemaking. These latter points are rarely listed in meeting agendas." I have not at all claimed that meetings are merely instrumental. I argued for primary and secondary functions of meetings. I've been the member of several councils, but we haven't once had a meeting just to reify power relations. We had a meeting to decide what to do with a misbehaving council member, for example, and surely, in the meantime, power relations were reified - but that wasn't the purpose of calling the meeting. For that, we wouldn't have called a meeting.

You are saying that mixing ontological traditions is impossible. Yesterday, I talked to my ex-tutor in Utrecht, a philosophy teacher, and I came to the conclusion that I probably made the mistake of equating functionalistic or pragmatic with positivistic. According to him, there is no reason to do that. My idea is that meetings can be viewed through all the 4 "lenses" that I listed and he agreed that there is no theoretical problem with that. I think that a meeting can have a functionalistic purpose, is an episode, allows sensemaking etc. and can be very symbolic at the same time. However, I do think that what goes on on the social level is under the surface and that it is not noticed too often by the people who participate in the meeting. So, maybe I shouldn't call the functionalistic purpose "primary" and the other "secondary" because that suggests a difference in importance, but maybe I should call them "surface" and "under-the-surface", or something of the like.

I'll try to make the text clearer, because if you have misunderstood it, it is probably not clear enough.

What I really have issues with now is operationalization and analysis. What Jarzabowski and Seidl do is that they take meetings, identify the practices in them and see whether the strategy changes or not (this is what I referred to as "decision to implement a proposal" and they also used the word "select" with regard to proposals that get implemented). In my opinion this is a highly dubious method of analysis. It is basically "intuitive statistics", because if, for example, free discussion is associated to the change of strategy in 10 cases and no change in 6 cases, they say that free discussion is likely to lead to change. This is wrong. I think that if one decides to compare numbers (which is a sin in interpretive research anyway, but this is what they do), one should at least use statistical analysis because that will tell whether the two numbers are different in a way that any scholar could interpret. You can't just claim that the difference is significant because it feels significant...

So, my option one is to carry out a rather positivistic research with statistical analysis, focusing on the conduct (discussion types) of meetings. The independent variables would be perceived "discussion control" ("To what extent do you think the discussion was free discussion?", grade from 1-7) / or alternatively I could grade the discussions myself (both would have its flaws), and "agreement with proposal" ("To what extent do you agree with the proposal?", grade from 1-7) and the dependent variable would be "decision" (a binomial variable of yes or no to implementation). Logistic regression could be used to analyse the data and it would tell whether both agreement with proposal and discussion control have effects on the decision or only one of them or none of them. I realize that this option - apart from not being in line with the main COM focus - has several issues with it, including that the decision might not be yes or no, but the establishment of a working group, for example, or that there might not be a decision at all, or that J&S identified 4 discussion types on a continuum and now I would need 7 (because an assumption of the statistical analysis requires a continuous independent variable and a continuous variable needs at least a 7-point scale). But: I do think that it would be a reasonably good way of operationalizing the problem, even if not in a COM way.

My second option is quite unclear even to me at this point. I used the past 3 days to try to come up with a way to analyze how perception of proposal content (agreement with proposal in other terms) and meeting practices affect (you asked what this means, I have no better way to describe it, but to affect/have an influence over) decision (yes, no, working group or proposal being kept on the agenda) in an interpretivist way, but I failed to come up with anything useful. Sure, perception of proposal content gets formed both during and outside meetings (maybe even more outside of meetings). I think that the main issue here is that it is hard to claim that the perception of proposal content is completely independent from meeting practices: after all, if perception of proposal content also arises during meetings, meeting practices might have an effect on it - even if one might be unaware of this (This issue also applies to option 1, the statistical analysis). So, I could ask people before the meetings to tell me how they feel about the proposal to control for the effect of meeting practices, but that is hard to realize in practice (I would have to reach everyone before the meeting, they would have to have read the proposal, which is not always the case)...

AND: I still don't have a way to analyze my data. Because who am I to say that a certain meeting practice had a larger effect on the decision than people's agreement with the proposal? One of my ideas was that if most members agreed to accept the proposal before the meeting, and if it was not accepted in the end, I could attribute the outcome to the meeting practices. Same if most members would have rejected the proposal, but in the end it was accepted, I could attribute the outcome to meeting practices. But what's the chance to encounter these extreme occasions of everybody agreeing/disagreeing and then a decision that goes against the consensus?

And several questions remain. What if the decision is not based on consensus, but it is made by one person? Should I then look at what he/she thinks of proposal content? There are so many meeting practices... If I just consider J&S, they considered initiation practices (what's the order of points in the agenda, who is chairing), conduct practices (types of discussion: free, restricted free etc.) and termination practices (voting, stage managing, working groups, rescheduling): if I stay in the organization for only 3 month, I might only encounter a couple of manifestations of each of these.

This makes me think that I should just take a couple of change projects and follow their evolution (how they are kept on the agenda, how working groups get formed, what they actually do). I talked to the Dean yesterday and he outlined 4 change projects (with working groups), so I could do that. It would partly contribute to the literature (J&S did not investigate what working groups did, the establishment of a working group was an "end point" of a given proposal). I think that I might feel a bit too much pressure to contribute to the literature... Take for example Tirza's research - a great organization to be part of, exciting context, I'd do the same if I had the contacts, but it's not anything new (Watson was also looking at middle managers' sensemaking during change) - and I'm trying to force myself to come up with something that really contributes to the knowledge in the field. Had I not had this feeling, I could go with something very general (e.g. how do working groups contribute to organizational change? or how do meetings contribute to members' sensemaking?) and see what comes along. It might be something very exciting, but since I feel this pressure to be precise in terms of research question etc. (which also Yanow says could change during fieldwork), I feel very much stuck.

Again, I do realize that you might not read this e-mail during the weekend, but if you do, please answer the following questions:

- Do you have any creative ideas as to how to operationalize the original research question? (How do meeting practices and meeting attendees' perceptions of proposal content affect whether proposals for change get selected for implementation?)

- How would you feel about a research including a statistical analysis? (In particular, what I outlined as "option 1".)

- What do you think about following the evolution of the 4 change project groups? The concept I would include in the analysis would probably be sensemaking during meetings. Again, I don't think that meetings do not have all the functions that interpretivists say they do, I just don't think they are the reasons why meetings are called.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

Kind regards,

Dia

A new episode is about to start

Thanks to everyone who was thinking about me yesterday during my exam. It went well, although some of the questions were quite vague and others alone could have provided material for a 3-hour exam, but never mind. My summaries, summaries of the summaries, and - not joking - summaries of the summaries of the summaries worked really well. Handing the 9 pages in wasn't too climactic, but at least I was done.

Some groupmates said that they were definitely getting drunk that evening, but my plans were just to relax. I had a two-hour nap, shaped my eyebrows, put on a facial mask, read through the AllerHande that I got from the AH the day before, read the last comics on www.phdcomics.com and www.xkcd.com (only for nerds, this one), unpacked by bags (yes, I did realize that not unpacking didn't mean that I was at home or going to go home, so I faced my denial) and watched the last episode of Dexter. I had purposefully not watched this episode before I left for Budapest, and now it was the perfect after-exam treat. I absolutely love series 4 of Dexter, there is not one single episode at the end of which you wouldn't shake with excitement about what was going to happen in the next one! I think I just like crime stories. The season finale lived up to my expectations completely; I mean you obviously have a couple of scenarios in your head before you start watching it because the finale has to close the story and you hope that some things wouldn't happen, but at the same time you hope that they would happen, because otherwise it would be the American happy ending bullshit. And it was just the right mixture of the expected and unexpected, the good, the bad and the frustrating. 

Today, I went to Utrecht to meet the Dean. I managed to reach him and arrange an appointment. I admit that I was quite scared that the reason why he had not answered my mails was that he had changed his mind... So, I got on the train and I felt the usual nice "home, sweet home" feeling when I got to Utrecht and took bus 4 to campus. It turned out that he hasn't changed his mind. We had a nice talk, he had some suggestions and we talked about the practicalities. I'm starting my fieldwork next Monday! So cool! 

So, a new episode is about to start. An episode during which I won't go to classes (just meetings, since I'll be researching meetings), I won't have to study per se (just read articles and analyze my data), I'll be all around the place (in Amsterdam and in Utrecht), I'll have time to read books that I want to read (Roald Dahl's short stories to start with, because that guy is a genius), I'll catch up with old friends and I'll dance in the Winkel van Sinkel.

Which reminds me that I wanted to post something about this weekend's party... People, there is a charity salsa party in the WvS this Sunday: the sum of the entrance fees will be offered to benefit the earthquake victims in Haiti. So, anyone in the Netherlands up for salsa on Sunday must be in the WvS (instead of Cantinero, for example)! See the invitation below (in Dutch, sorry).

Caribische Geluiden voor Haïti - Zondag 31 januari in Winkel van Sinkel, Utrecht

"Vorige week werd ik wakker met de beelden van de aardbeving in Haïti en het ging me echt aan het hart." Aan het woord is Corrina Klijn, een van de initiatiefnemers van het Salsa feest 'Caribische Geluiden voor Haïti'. Van een land waar mensen zo van muziek genieten, waar zoveel expressie is en waar de Caribische zon altijd schijnt. Om in de sferen te blijven van muziek en dans heeft Corrina contact opgenomen met Union Salsa, waar ze ook salsa les heeft. Enrique was erg enthousiast en heeft meteen met allerlei mensen contact gezocht om een groots dansevenement te organiseren. Het programma begint om 18.00 uur met dansworkshops Salsa en Zumba en dansdemonstraties en er is live muziek uit Zuid-Amerika. Ook wordt er een loterij georganiseerd, met diverse prijzen. Het Union-personeel werkt die avond gratis en de opbrengst van de € 7,- entree en loterij gaat naar Haïti. Hopelijk kunnen we met deze dansavond een mooi bedrag voor Haïti ophalen. Er zal nog veel meer nodig zijn voor de wederopbouw, maar alle beetjes helpen en ik vind het geweldig dat zoveel mensen meeleven en zich inzetten om de mensen in Haiti te helpen!"

Het Salsa event 'Caribische geluiden voor Haïti' vindt plaats op zondag 31 januari van 18.00-24.00 uur in de Winkel van Sinkel Oudegracht 158 te Utrecht met demonstraties, workshops en live muziek. Voor de laatste informatie kijk op: www.unionsalsa.nl of bel 06-53616666.

Stuur deze email door naar je vrienden en familie en neem ze zondag mee naar de WvS om deze aktie te steunen. Alvast dank !

Dans Salsa en help Haiti ! Tot zondag !

Union Salsa team

My last exam?

Tomorrow, my Culture Change and Intervention exam might be the last one. I'd love to say the last "ever", but if not for "ever", at least for a while. I can't really oversee all the material that we have to study but I trust that by tomorrow 11 a.m. I'll have a clear idea of at least the general directions in the field. 3 books, 30 articles, plus the presentations, the case studies etc. It will be fun-fun-fun.

I made a schedule for today and I'm doing well so far. One of my veggie-rice dishes is cooking on the hotplate - exactly on time.

10.00-14.00: studying

14.00-15.00: break, cooking, eating

15.00-16.00: going to uni to print

16.00-20.00: studying

20.00-21.00: break

21.00-00.00: studying

00.30-08.00: zzzzzzzzzz (It really would be an accomplishment if I managed to resist staying up till later and sleep more than 4 hours.)

08.00-10.00: going through notes

11.00: exam: in bocca al lupo!

I traded...

... -3 degrees for -6.

... properly being together for the long distance stuff.

... studying for studying.

Because I'm back.

My two plants survived 1,5 months without water; they are fighters.

I have nothing in the fridge except an open jar of dried tomatoes, a jar of olives and a piece of Hungarian salami. I need to go to the AH, but I don't feel like cleaning my bike (covered in snow), and worst of all: I left my gloves in Budapest. Believe me, biking is no fun in -6 degrees without gloves.

A race against time

Yesterday, I defended my thesis in Veszprém, got a 4 on the Hungarian scale and I think that's good enough. It's a relief. I'm done.

And this is when the race against time begins. I have 4,5 days to prepare for the exam that is promising to be the biggest I've ever had. I'm not worried - but time has just become very precious. Then, I'll have another 3 days to write a paper and prepare a presentation. Somewhere in the meantime I'll have to finalize my research proposal and I MUST reach the Dean - that's been quite troublesome - to get a final "go" from him for my research. I'll be in serious trouble if I have to find another organization.

I have 4 days before I leave and that's emotionally quite taxing. The holidays have been great but now it's time to face reality. It's a great prospect to be around at UC, but it's a not-so-great prospect to leave Jani behind again, if only for a month. Btw, we're having dinner tonight with my parents...

And now it's time to return to my wonderful Demers book on organizational change.

A surprise ski trip II.

I promised myself that I would allow myself a break once I reach 10 complete pages in my research proposal ("csöbörből vödörbe") and so I'm here to finish my post about our holiday.

Food

The day before we left we had gone out to a small and cheap restaurant and bought tons of food. When I asked when we would eat that all, I got the answer that we would take some of it with us. I reminded Jani that we should pack some salami, cheese and bread for breakfast and somehow we ended up with 3 full boxes of food. That included some salami, cheese, bread, apples, oranges, tangerines, paprika, tomato, radish, leek, 12 pieces of strudels, canned fish, liver paté, yogurt, kefír and a big box of "töltött káposzta" (a dish made with sour cabbage and minced meat) and "túrós tészta" (pasta with cottage cheese, sour cream and fried bacon). So, the following day we left for our journey the good old Hungarian way - we had enough food for two weeks and even after that there would have been leftovers... Sure we had our drinks as well, Becherovka, energy drinks, wine, champagne, whisky and Unicum, just to name a few :)

Then we found a place where breakfast was included in the deal, so we had even more stuff left. Our balcony functioned as a fridge - or a freezer, rather - and within a day everything was nicely frozen... The töltött káposzta and túrós tészta were great for the first two days in the evening, then we went out for dinner and one day I convinced Jani that we had to eat "mákos cici" on the slopes - which is my term for dumplings filled with plum jam, covered with custard and sprinkled with poppy seeds (the literal translation of my term is "breast with poppy seeds", well, because it just looks like a breast with poppy seeds).

The wintersport thing

It's easy to forget that skiing is a sport. In my mind it's associated to beautiful surroundings, the sound of the snow under my skis, and I certainly know that it is a very demanding sport, but Jani didn't really grasp what skiing meant until after the first day. The word sore doesn't do justice to how sore our muscles were. Sure, we didn't prepare too much, although Jani has been dancing a lot and I've been biking a bit, but I haven't felt this much muscle ache for ages. But I think we did well. On average, we skied 30 km per day.

One thing I always do before skiing is warm-up. I don't care if it's not too fashionable (I haven't seen anyone else do it) but better be safe than sorry. They say that good warm-up can save you from a lot of injuries, so we always did a couple of exercises on the top of the mountain. The first hour of the first day I saw the first accident. A was watching a guy when his two skis went in two directions and he fell, twisting one of his knees. He might have even broke his leg. I thought he would get up but he didn't, so I skied up to him and asked if he was okay. He was Italian and he didn't speak any English, and he was seemingly in a lot of pain, held his leg in his hands and cried. He tried to move his leg several times but it just didn't work, and he didn't understand anything I said in English, so I said to myself god, please let me remember some Spanish and told him that I will get him the rescuers. Jani and I skied down to the mittelstation of the ski lift, I found someone who worked there, showed him the location on the map where the guy was lying and asked him to send people up there. I thought of him several times in the coming days and I kept on doing my warm-up exercises in the morning.

I usually don't fall, but if I do, it's quite spectacular. My explanation is that I'm experienced enough to correct small mistakes, regain control over my skis, so I only fall when there's something major going on. I've produced pretty somersaults in the past but I had no intention to repeat that. But, on the day when you're the most vulnerable (that's the third), I did manage to produce a nice fall. I thought that Jani cannot go through almost a week of skiing without getting into nice, untouched snow outside the boundaries of the piste, so I took him there. I really have an aversion to these areas because I've fallen so much in them when I was a child. So, yes, I ran into a pretty piece of rock covered in snow and that was my one and only fall. Luckily, no injuries :) But I didn't get to like this type of snow any better.

All I can say is that I still love skiing. The feeling of running down the slope is extatic. I think I managed to infect Jani with my passion for skiing and he was great during the whole holiday. I did manage to get him put his weight forward, face the valley and I could even recognize a trace of carving on the last day. I wish I could provide a better example, but I guess I could teach him enough to get started on a proper piste. The first time we stood on the top of a black piste, he was freaked out, but seriously, like a child, the moment we got to the bottom of the valley, he was like "let's do that again!". The last day we spent half of the day on black pistes.

(Talking about children, I'm really not a children person, but I adore those little things skiing down the pistes. They are adorable.)

By the time we got home in the evening (and those 200 meters seemed sooo much) we were always exhausted. We had a long hot shower before falling asleep for about an hour, just to be awake for a couple more before really going to bed. This week really made me think that it's a stupid idea to organize ski&salsa camps. Ski or salsa, but ski and salsa? I'd die. Unless it's one day of skiing followed by a day of salsa and so on... I could enjoy that!

A surprise ski trip I.

Surprise in the sense that I knew that we would go somewhere for a day or two but didn't expect to stay for six days... When Jani proposed that we should leave on Wednesday and stay for a couple of days, I thought we would come back on Friday or Saturday. Instead, we spent five days skiing in the Alps and got home around 2 am this morning. It was wonderful!

The place

So, 2 days before leaving I started checking out the Austrian ski regions - of course, we didn't have a reservation - and I ended up with about 8 top choices, which we managed to reduce to 4. I had two favorites, Obertauern and Bad Kleinkirchheim, both with about 100 km of slopes and good snow conditions, although none of them particularly close to Budapest. After a 6-hour heroic drive in the dark, we arrived to Bad Kleinkirchheim (B.K. from now on) and since we didn't find a room (or we did, but those were very expensive) I started calling the phone numbers that I wrote down the night before at 4 am. I had a dream that night and in my dream I had to talk to the owners of apartments or people at the reception, but they didn't speak any English and since I don't speak German, I had to speak Dutch to them. I talked to two people on the phone, and the second kept on speaking German to me, so yeah, I did start speaking Dutch and wow, magic, she understood what I said. And we got a room. Not any room, but a great room, 200 m from the main ski lift, with a view on the black slope, for a reasonable price, including breakfast. (If you ever go to B.K., Haus Anni is the place to stay!) We were extatic, celebrated our arrival with a bottle of champagne and had a walk in town.

The end of a 3 km long black slope, up, close and personal.

The view from our window.

The slopes

I think B.K. had the second largest network of ski slopes I've ever been to. It's located on the slopes of 7 mountain tops. Most slopes are "red", there is one long "blue" and a couple of "black" ones. It's an imperative for such a place to have modern ski lifts and the first one we had to take was a 6-person cabin lift to the top of the Kaiserburg. Jani was somewhat freaked out by how high we were and by the rattling of the wheels at the huge columns that held the whole construction, but soon got used to it. There was enough snow, maybe a bit too much even, as it was snowing continuously for 2 days and we could hardly see anything the second and the third day. If you've seen the movie Whiteout (a bad crime/horror movie), you have an idea of what I'm talking about, well, not so much wind, but the whiteness is comparable. Your safest bet is to try to spot the red sticks on the sides of the slopes and try to keep in between those. Sometimes, we didn't see those either... But we also had two sunny days, which is when we took most of our pictures. And, if you do the maths, we had one fair, somewhat snowy and somewhat sunny day, too.

The slopes.

I love the mountains, I love the brute force about them, the way they stand there so calm and majestic, that you can see so far (when the weather allows), the huge pine trees, the sparkling snow, and especially, being above the clouds. The Spitzegg and the peak to the left of it were our favorites, with gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains and always above and among the clouds.

Isn't it stunning?

Our favorite black piste, number 21. Short but fun.

To be continued...

Aaand... welcome to 2010!

I might have already mentioned this last year but here we go again: I like to think of the first day of the year as the indicator of the rest. I try to jam in as many things into the day as possible to have a good start.

At midnight I was with Irma and Jani, the best people to be with on such an occasion. Irma, her almost-fiancé Tibi, Eszter and Bence (a couple we met at Irma's and Tibi's Christmas party) came over in the evening to have a couple of drinks with us before going to a salsa party. The party was good, lots of people, quite some space, a shot of welcome-pálinka, a good selection of music, champagne at midnight... Irma and Tibi left quite early to check out another place and they didn't actually witness that I had the winner number of the evening on my wristband :) I won a place in an Afro-Cuban workshop. Eszter and Bence stayed till quite late and we only called it a night at 4 am.

Then we followed our usual early morning routine: food, shower, sleep. Good-afternoon-sex.

I made my first ever lentil soup that day, a traditional dish to be eaten on 1 January in Hungary. It's a very thick soup, a "főzelék" actually, not a soup, but I don't think that has an equivalent in English, so let's stick to soup. It turned out really delicious. So, if you want to be rich - because tradition says that the more lentil soup you eat, the richer you will be the next year - here's the recipe:

Ingredients:

1/2 kg lentils

1 big onion

2 cloves of garlic

a couple of bay leaves

2 slices of lemon

1/2 dl oil

3 ts of flour

1/2 ts of sweet paprika powder

2 dl sour cream (I like it very creamy, but for anyone else 1 dl might do the trick)

salt

pepper

How to make?

Soak the lentils in water the night before. Next day, drain the lentils and start cooking them with enough water to cover all the lentils. Add some salt, the bay leaves and the lemon slices. Once the lentils start to soften, you can make the "rántás" (this will thicken the soup). Take a small pan, heat the oil, add the finely chopped onion and a little bit of sugar and fry till the onion gets kind of opaque. Then add the flour and keep stirring till the flour gets a bit brownish (this will take a couple of minutes). Add the chopped garlic and the paprika powder, stir, take the pan off the hotplate and add some (~3 dl) COLD water to the mix. Keep on stirring. The mix has to be very smooth and you'll see it start to thicken. Add the "rántás" to the cooking lentils (cook on low heat) and keep on stirring the soup till it gets thick. You can then take the soup off the hotplate, add the sour cream and stir till it gets evenly distributed in your soup. That's it!

We finished the last serving yesterday, so after 3 days of lentils, I don't care how good the dish was, but I don't want to see lentils for a year...

So, we had some of the soup and then I read a book for my course, thereby including some studying in the first day. Jani was mixing music for the first Cinetrip party of the year and at 19.30 we left for the Gellért bath to set up the DJ booth and enjoy each other's company a bit till 1 am, which was when he started playing. He finished at 3.30, so again, we didn't go to bed till like 6. My circadian rhythm is getting more and more screwed up.

Anyway, it was a nice day, had a bit of everything you need to have in a year: friends, love, salsa, sex, cooking, studying, partying and thus, I'm satisfied.