Peter is coming into the office this afternoon.

Now that the assignments are out of the way I guess it's time to pay a little more attention to this dissertation. I think I'm a ways down the road but who knows.

on the plus side - Have a reasonably good idea about what I'd like to explore - Social Capital and the Internationalising SME. I think that this provokes a number of other questions - types of social capital, the roles they play, sustainability, acocuntability their influence on the choice of  foreign market entry and the mode that selected. I think this is the basis for a solid Lit. Review section. Coming out of that may be a framework that fixes Emerald's Social Capital along a particular set of dimensions relative to other SMEs. The hypothesis may be that Emerald's use of it's Social Capital will be more important in entering a market such as the UAE than it is for the US.

Subseqent Qual and Qant analysis will compare UK SME's entering UAE (n=4) in a comparative case-study methodology to provide/disprove this Hypothesis.

the tools and techniques used to evaluate Emerald's Social Capital networks in foreign market entry and mode choice may become useful artefacts in subsequent FME exercises.

That's, broadly speaking, the proposal I think.

I wonder if a more refined version of this would be acceptable as a proposal to the board for Feb 20th and the actual Research Proposal (March 9th)? 

One for Peter I think.

In addition to our LM supervisor (mine is Peter Chippendale) we are now required to choose an Internal mentor for our Dissertations. I'm not entirely sure what the point of this is other than to make sure we eventually produce something that has an Emerald slant to it, but I thought this was already agreed.

Martin Fojt has agreed to be my mentor, though it's proving difficult to arrange a suitable time to meet and discuss what this might mean.

In an attempt to sum up for Martin the proposal I have so far I mailed him this

"My dissertation explores the value of Social Capital to the internationalising SME. Specifically it will investigate analyse the outcomes of firms of Emeralds size as they enter a new market (Arab markets in this instance) and ask how valuable a role informal and formal Social Capital played in the achieving the firm’s objectives. Using a comparative case study approach I intended conduct a quantative review of the networks of the SMEs and seek to draw some insights about :

• what constitutes Social Capital,
  • Social Capital theories, resource based view of the firm
• how it is exploited in successful firms,
  • Cross-cultural considerations and awareness
• competences and resources required for exploitation of a firms Social Capital
  • strategic appreciation of networks, resource allocation/priorities, implications for value chain configuration

 The actionable results I hope to bring out from this are:

• techniques for evaluating Emerald’s social capital
• a range of strategies that allow Emerald to exploit it’s Social Capital
• a greater strategic and tactical awareness of the cultural considerations of a specific market (Middle east/Arab world)

Hope this makes sense Martin. The research proposal and the primary research question itself is still undergoing a process of refinement and so may change in scope or structure before the final proposal is submitted Feb 20^th."

 

 

 

Seems OK to me so far. Hope it pans out like this.

Had a good email exchange with Peter Smith last night. H'es helping me sort out the woolly stuff with respect to OL and LO. He came up with a nice angle -

"You might look at social networking as an influential topic for building Social Capital and competitiveness in offices being developed in new environments - I have done work with orgs showing that expats do well if they have good networking skills."

Which leads to a new research question:

'To what extent are Social Capital Networks a CSF in the successful establishment of a new overseas office for the internationalising firm? The case of Emerald and the UAE.'

Issues that could be explored:

• Resolving conflict between new and extant knowledge
• Appreciation of cultural norms in the creation, and subsequent perceieved value, of social capital networks from different countries
• What properties best describe efficient organisational structures for dissemination of knowledge acquired through and residing in SCNs - Organisational Network Analysis, Communities of Practice/Inquiry, Weka & strong ties??
• Can OL result from the interaction of actors within the SCN?
• Directing the social capital network. Can it be done? What levels of Managerial intent can be leveraged
• Fostering emergence of Social Capital in a network
• How to measure the effectiveness of a SCN

From the Lit review section, Internationalisation and Learning org paper 

"However, the implementation of domestic routines in psychologically distant business contexts may also lead to the generation of experiential knowledge, since the as routines are implemented in different environments, divergences and variation is bound to occur (Cummings and Teng, 2003). One important reason for this is that, while organisational routines may resemble templates of codified knowledge, they still rest on the implicit assumptions of the business culture in which they originate. Implanting such routines challenges shared beliefs and breeds variety. This may fuel routine variation and change at the local level, which in turn may challenge the existing routines of the entire organisation due to their nested nature (Sinkula, 2002; Zollo and Winter, 2002). This leads to the second issue: How do organisational knowledge in the form of existing routines affect what is actually learned from the local application of organisational routines? "

I think this is very close to the question I'm trying to arrive at: How might organisational knowledge, in the form of local, existing routines, affect what is actually learned from the local application of [Emerald] organisational knowledge?

Feels a bit tighter... 

I think Peter Chippendale has been confirmed as my supervisor for my thesis. I've a meeting with him tomorrow (October 30th) and it will be my first chance to work through what I'm trying to research here. It's still pretty woolly stuff to be honest.

JP left on my desk a copy of his recent paper reviewing the Learning Organisation 'Video killed the radio star, but has Google Killed the learning organisation'. I actually stumbled across this a few weeks ago (see earlier postings) but it did cause me to reflect again on this thesis proposition. How relevent is this stuff really?

I'm not sure that I'm now in the process of rationalising my logic by looking for new angles to research the same topic - am I in the 'denial' phase of the research question definition process?

Still, I can't shake it off as a broad area of investigation I'd like to pursue. Asia/Japan strike me as exemplars of global organisations that embrace WorldWide Learning as a Strategic Choice and this is reflected in Organisational Culture and Structure (Sony, Hyundai, Toyota for example). USA and European firms, as they globalise, carry with them strongHome Country identities (I think) and therefore attempts exploiting WorldWide Learning is made less effcient because of legacy cultural and structural dimensions. Between these two Geographical poles lies the Middle East and Gulf States - what global or international firms emanate from here and what is their position regarding the value of Worldwide Learning in developing Global Strategies of their own? The brief time I spent in Dubai last year exposed me to the superficiality of the incumbent UAE businesses - petro-dollars and increasingly tourism. However the UAE and UAE businesses are sitting a ton of Soveriegn Wealth Funds. If they wanted to to go global I'm pretty sure they could do so just by buying stuff up. How do they incorporate foreign business into their infant globalised firms? How ready are they culturally to adopy WorldWide Learning as a Strategic Choice. Bring this back closer to home, what can this then tell us about UAE approaches to working in International business as Emerald continues to expand into Africa and the Middle East?

In earlier posts I've made much about the role of the Learning Organisation. I think I'm getting confused here about the concepts of WorldWide Learning  and the more prosaic notions of The Learning Organisation. Are they the same thing?

Driving to work tjis morning, thinking this thesis through (as you do) I ended up reducing this whole venture to the proposition - 'Middle Eastern Research is pretty thin - what cultural and strategic interventions could Emerald do to stimulate a demand for Management Research and Authorship in the area?'

Follows very much along the lines of the MBRF debacle but this time tightly focussed and basedon the premise that we need to understand this and then come up with appropriate strategies rather than hi-ho Silver! and away we go! which is what happened last year.

Not sure if this is the same research question at all, I think it's related to the original - need to discuss with Carr. 

The Research Proposal is due March 29th. Before that a draft version is to be submitted to the Emerald board by Feb 20th.

The last meeting with Peter assured me to some degree that I was on track with my area and overall proposal. That being the case I've ploughed on a produced my Proposal and hope to have it approved by the end of Feb.

Initially I believed that the proposal was expected to be around 3000 words; that's been revised to 1500 -2000 words. Actually, once I got into this fitting it into 2000 words has been difficult. I was surpised by this since I had little idea about what the proposal should look like and what it would accomplish and so I believed blagging and filling the proposal with guff for 3000 words would be the hardest part. 

The advice I've received about keeping this focussed, tight and achievable might sound like so much obvious hot air but it really is true.

My proposal is at first draft and stands at about 1800 words. I think it's focussed and achievable and outlines a strategy and a method that answers the research questions. The research questions are derived from the literature (Agndal, Chetty and wilsons indicators). Only by working through the proposal was I able to refine and refine and refine again the broad ideas I had only a couple of weeks ago, so it's been worthwhile and I'm comforable about the rest of the exercise (even though I'm getting a real sense of the scale and commitments required to get through this!).

More later. 

Very interesting reading from the special issue of the Learning Organisation journal. Editorials and articles that question the very validity of the LO as a serious model for a modern firm. JP and Kate snowden wrote a piece about the impact of google and web tech on the LO but I'm not sure i agree with their findings. There's much reference to Revans on Action Learning as a pure form of the LO in practice. I'm tended toward thje editorial piece which argues that the LO is a much more complex and multilayred concept than that opined by Senge.

Emerald's The Learning Organisation Journal

WRT to my own paper, I think I need to develop an appreciation of the 5th Discipine and Reg Revans' work. I intuitively feel that the LO, if simplistic in nature - naive even since it fails to acocunt for interpersonal politics and agends, is important and is a source of Competitive Advantage. The task is to develop this hypothesis and support it if possible,

The learning Organisation is a pretty hoary term - kinda vague and wooly but what does it really mean? And why should it be a source of interest for a dissertation?

I guess you have ask youself what learning is. For me Learning is about change. If there's one constant in the world today it's change and while it may appear that other functions like quality, marketing, and finance appear compartmentalised learning (change and improvement) seems to cover something a little broader and wider.

Learning organisations appear to be particularly skilled in prob;lem solving, experimentation, the creation and acquisition and application of new knowledge -as disticnt from businesses that are able to gather data and statistics about it performance and the market but no processes to apply them.

I read a review of Peter Senge's seminal work 'The Fifth Discipline' and in it there's the story of the boiled frog syndrome

It goes like this:-

In 1962, the Japanese share of the US automobile market was less than 4%, and Detroit's motor manufacturers saw no threat to their supremacy. They watched impassively as Japan's share grew to almost 10% in 1967, then 15% in 1974. By the time the US companies began to look critically at their own practices and assumptions, it was the early 1980s and the Japanese share had risen to 21%. To systems students this is known as the 'boiled frog' syndrome. A frog placed in a pan of cold water will not react as the later is slowly heated. Unable to detect the minute changes of temperature, it will remain in the pan and boil. Likewise,  fascination with short-term indicators and 'snap-shot' analyses prevented the US motor industry from detecting the greater risk. 

The somewhat vague proposal, examing if the Learning Organisation structure found at UK HQ can be extended to accomodate International offices (WorldWide learning/Organisational Learning) might also have another, indirect result?

I guess if the paper examines learning styles, cultural differences with respect to learning, professional development and organisational learning that may also provide a very real insight into how Arab states regard research and research content too? Too early to tell I'dsay but worth bearing in mind.

So it's Dennis I thank for getting me started on this. Our second and final year of the Emerald MA International Business begins on September 30th and once it starts time will go quickly I think.

Garry Carr was here a couple of weeks ago and informed us of the process for developing the MA proposal, writing it up and submitting it in time for the deadline. The deadline is, give or take a week. September 2nd 2009. About 1 year from today.

Say 350 days. Some rough summing up here - a 18000 word dissertation divided by 350 days gives you 51 words a day. Of course, it's never going to work like that. We won't be given formal approval of the proposal until around October/November. Let say we have 9 months - from January to September to do this. Now we're down to 270 days or 66 words per day. I want this done and dusted by June 30th latest, or six months (180 days, or 100 words per day) - every day. Unlikely. Crap, this sounds like it may require some discipline.

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