B U R N

I have a number of papers in the making:

“Wormeries and iPods: The Role of Mundane Artefacts in Ethicising Organisations” to be presented at the Spring 2007 Doctoral Conference at Judge Business School, Cambridge University, April 18-19.

“Becoming mr Ethical: Notes on the Reflexive Study of Ethics and Organising” to be presented at the 23rd European Group of Organizational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium under subtheme 19: Reflexivity in Organizational Research, Vienna, July 5-7.

“It’s an Ethical World After All”, co-authored with my supervisor Steve Woolgar, to be presented at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting, Vancouver Montreal, October 11-13. I am hoping to convene convening a session entitled “Ethics in Practice”, bringing together lots of interesting perspectives from a diverse range of scholars.

If things work out well, I might be joining a field course in Siberia, too.

Update 25/03/07: There was an essential ‘not’ missing in the post below.

Since joining my second company, which, after 4 months of particpant observation, is about to come to a close, I have been introduced to a broad range of issues that will help to advance my thesis and marketability. Working for a corporate responsibility consultancy has taught me a lot about redefined responsibilities and reporting practices within the media and the pharmaceutical industry, the nature of stakeholder involvement, and the tricks of the trade of being a provider of professional services.

On a more personal note, I have tasted what it feels like to give up your social life due to too many professional commitments and obligations, not least the frustrations associated with 5 hours of daily commuting, unpaid.

Negotiations with my third empirical site have started. We are talking about a very big company in the oil industry, and it might entail me moving abroad.

Whilst getting more and more excited about returning to my analytical mode, i.e. writing up my findings, I am also increasingly fed up with living as a student, a life in which the acquisition of a sandwich poses a significant blow to the state of my economic affairs. I feel very privileged to have been granted a full scholarship, but I am still left with the impression that Oxford is really geared towards people with a trust fund or a medium-sized institutional investor backing them. There are huge discrepancies between the value and duration of scholarships, on the one hand, and the actual cost of living and time required to jump all the academic hoops, on the other. For example, it came as a complete surprise that I had to do coursework for the first year; effectively doing an MSc and a doctorate in three years is simply not viable.

Working hard, working alone, working for nothing or kicks - that is SBS DPhil life in a nutshell and the primary reason why so many of my bright friends have dropped out recently.

With regards to the future, I am 100% sure that I shall not choose the academic route, and I am equally certain that I am not going to become yet another management clonesultant, which is quite a common thing to do in this neck of the woods. When you see right through management rhetoric, it sort of loses its appeal. For now, I will resume teaching an organisational sociologish course at the Stanford Programme next month.

Oxfordshire marked its 1000-year anniversary with a spectacular fire event termed Luminox:

Some of the University’s most historic buildings can be seen in a new light as part of a three-day sound and fire spectacular on Broad Street. For three hours each night, from 7-10pm on Thursday 15 until Saturday 17 March, electric lights will be switched off. Instead the area will be transformed by the light of a thousand flickering fires (from here.)

I took a few pictures, and so did a lot of other people.

Staggering home from the pub yesterday, I had my first ever one-to-one encounter with a badger. You may think this animal looks cute, it probably is, but my mind immediately re-ran the dreadful stories told to me by many an old fart when I was a kid. The story, which I have heard in numerous versions, always told by someone at +120 years of age, goes like this:

When I was a young (wo)man and had to walk 30 kilometres through the woods in order to reach school, I would always stuff my boots with lumps of coal. Why, you say? Well, if the badgers decided to attack, and they often did, its jaws would not let go until it heard the sound of crunching bones, hence the coal in the boots to fake that sensation.

And that explains why yours truly - sort of a grown up, yes - looked like a member of the cast of the Blair Witch Project upon encountering this a-bit-bigger-than-a-cat sized, shy animal in a street in Oxford.

Simply pathetic.

My new computer has a hardware problem, so I paid a visit to the Apple Store in Regent Street.

It turns out that you cannot return a faulty computer without booking an appointment in advance. Great to be told so when you live a good two hours away. Basically, it means that, after waiting in the queue for 15 minutes, some 17-year-old informs you that another 17-year-old has to ‘recognise’ and tell you that it is broken before the fault becomes a ‘fact’ - and the next ‘consultation’ slot was, of course, available on another day.

The days when I pledged my unconditional allegiance to Apple are long gone. In many ways, I think they have lost their competitive edge as an innovative company. The reasons include:

a) As Greenpeace’s campaign brilliantly illustrated, Apple has failed to embrace any sort of environmental commitment, which should be the case if the company’s branding of itself as a peace loving, huggable entity were ever to be taken seriously.

b) In the market of online music, Apple has become Microsoft, i.e. a monopolistic enterprise aggressively promoting their own proprietary formats. Whatever happens I hope the regulatory climate, at least in Europe, will change at some point.

To conclude, by the time I need to invest in a new laptop, I beg that there will be other viable alternatives available.

Think different.

Life is a bumpy ride, but the sledge does indeed fly when you are having fun…

The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden has a scheme whereby students get a text message when a performance is not selling out. This enables them to buy any seat that has not been been taken for the mere sum of £10. Unfortunately, since most performances are in very high demand, these tickets are not offered on a very frequent basis. Nonetheless, I was lucky the other day and secured very good seats for Handel’s Orlando.

Not being the most experienced opera goer, I enjoyed it thoroughly, i.e. I did not fall asleep, especially because there was a neat little device, built into the seat in front of me, translating the lyrics into English.

During the breaks, it was funny to witness the strange mix of people in the rather posh bar areas (I resisted the temptation to buy a G&T): On the one hand, there were all the student cheapskates wearing casual clothes and attitudes. On the other, there were the real aficionados, many of whom looked like a strange mix between Dame Edna and Mary Poppins.

I will surely return next time they open the gates like this, but I will be away from the blog for a week, starting tomorrow.

A) I am starting to wonder exactly how much more rain it will take before I turn into a mermate (that was deliberate, I do not what the male equivalent of a mermaid would be. It is not a Marmite, I reckon.)

B) My brother bruva, who is in Los Angeles shooting a documentary, had his laptop stolen by a guy who happily refers to himself as “G”.

C) “G” kindly offered to return the loot for a ransom.

D) “G” wanted to perform the transaction in person, in a neighbourhood where the police do not go after dark.

E) I think not.

F) I wonder if “G” was behind the theft of my computer in January.

G(!)) I hate musicals, thiefs and animal acterrorists.

For the past three days, the Business School has been hosting the Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies with prof. Donald MacKenzie from Edinburgh University. The Clarendon Lecture is the most prominent single-speaker event within the Oxford bubble and comes with a book contract. For example, Bruno Latour’s book, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, came out of the 2003 event. In addition, past speakers include Manuel Castells, Mark Roe, and John Roberts.

What is great about this sort of venture is the depth and thoughtfulness that can be conveyed in three lectures over three days. In the case of prof. MacKenzie, he was ‘booked’ for the event more than five years in advance, which says something about the meticulous preparations required to enchant a critical audience of esteemed scholars.

The lectures given this year, Making Derivatives, Making Facts and Doing Politics, fell under the rubric of social studies of financial markets, basically a sociological take on issues that are normally restricted to the domain of economists. A brief outline and a full list of previous speakers can be found here.