Viva questions (General)

The type of questions which invite introductions from the researcher are thought through in this blog. All example questions below were posed by Bedwell and Butcher (2022, pp.135–138):

Question: Can you start by summarising your thesis?

My research explores a previously unexplored phenomenon I refer to as different intentions, which I relate to different parties involved in public-private partnership projects. In other words, exploring the different aims and objectives, goals or otherwise the reasoning behind why organisations become involved in this type of interorganisational project. I have shown how such intentions differ between public and private sectors but also vary by types of entity within such projects. Attributes of these different intentions then help to explain why all parties have potential to threaten the purpose of such projects in pursuit of self-interest. Surprisingly, this includes the elected government instigating such projects or their successors. I relate the different intentions to the many and varied governance structures and process directed at such projects, and furthermore find this relates to how latent tension can be created as a source of future conflict.

Question: Now, can you summarise that into a single sentence?

I show that parties enter PFI projects with different intentions and that this leads to a subjective and conflicted set of priorities of governance structures and processes which endures as a key threat to the project purpose(s) per se.

Question: What is the idea that binds your thesis together?

The idea that no single party-specific perspective has privilege over the rest. In other words, to understand the whole, it is important to not split the phenomenon in question. This is an idea argued by the thinker Martin Heidegger. In this research that means seeking out the totality of perspectives from all sides, meaning all sides being brought together on commercial grounds to achieve something bigger than the intentions of each.

Question: How did your research question emerge?

My research answers the question: how do different intentions of PPP parties relate to governance and conflict? This question became established following long deliberations through the first year of the PhD, but its origins started as a curiosity whilst a practitioner working within such projects. I was heavily involved in around 100 of these projects, providing insurance due diligence or services through bidding stage and construction. Thirty years of sitting in the middle of commercial conversations which would talk of collaboration between the parties we each represented, whilst simultaneously each tasked with the creation of contracts best suiting the organisations we each represented. On the one hand hoping all would remain collaborative, but on the other hand each knowing the other was tasked with defending one’s own side should all go wrong. I arrived at this PhD not knowing what that was as a research problem per se, just knowing it was problematic and needed to be understood differently.

I had a bumpy landing back into this academic forum as I reframed and refined that curiosity into something more firmly situated within extant literature and the contemporary discussions within it. During the first year in this PhD, that sense of a problem to be better understood became a wrestling between my experiences and the different literatures (e.g., organisational conflict literature, construction literature, organisational behaviour literatures, social psychology literature) to find the ideas and vocabulary addressing what I knew to be problematic in practice. Matters I also knew others in practice agreed to be problematic. Each aspect of different intentions, governance, and conflict (i.e., the three legs of the stool which my answered research question now rests upon) therein became solidified around this search to best articulate this problem. Only much later could I be more confident in saying that the literature did not address this problem. As such this became the gap in literature this research problem called into question.

Question: What is original about your work?

The notion of different intentions is a new framing. As a phenomenon it opposes the assumed goal-alignment between parties over time—i.e., as a premise which the literature tends toward. The revealed orientation problem this underpins now has both practical and academic implications. The dual orientation that splits public and private sectors, and directing interests in opposing directions which further split as party-types, is all new. This has implications in contextualising the observed deteriorating public-to-private sector relationship in UK PFI over time (as noted by recent government-sponsored reporting). It also points to different questions we can all ask of ourselves and our organisations as the practitioners creating future policy, or responding to such policy invitations, and rethinking some immediate challenges in the ongoing UK PFI era of asset hand-back now upon us. Academically, calls to explore PPP to understand overlaps between party-interests in governance are responded to, whilst also showing that much of the governance of interest starts at levels beyond the project. All of which returns to the exposed project governance fallacy we asset when presuming future goal alignment is the unconditional outcome of governance(s) at project level. In hindsight, much of this seems common-sense, however my empirical evidence is a first in highlighting how different intentions relate to both governance and the potential for future conflict when we falsely assume all will become aligned.

Question: Which aspects of your thesis are you proud of?

Three aspects come together to form my sense of pride. Firstly, the developed meaning of different intentions and the four attributes of difference which I have developed has future possibility. It offers a simplification of what is otherwise a rather nebulous and unwieldy phenomenon. Having intellectually wrestled with this from both the philosophical underpinnings which relate to intentionality, and with empirical evidence now showing it applied in practice, I see it having possibility elsewhere. I think that potentially useful to academics in other areas and with practical applications in the field. In the specific research context here, I have found it useful as a common language that connects different literatures by helping reveal which intentions they relate toward. At practitioner-level I also turn attention back to future policymakers, practitioners (as well as a source of future academic research). Notable specifically is the future address of a missing basis of governance which can now be explained as protecting the project purpose from all party-type intentions which can threaten it.

Secondly, I am particularly proud to have established an empirical case that now articulates something that now seems self-evidently true. I feel vindicated in my obsession to understand what I now know as different intentions better, and the coined orientation problem it exposes. That relates to, thirdly, the achievement in getting to this point of submission when I consider where this journey began. I can summarise that as so many moments of self-doubt and battles fought in establishing more plausible explanations. Those battlegrounds now sit across the UK PFI landscape of governance I have now created. Likewise, whilst my thesis seemed to be turning toward controversial claims at times (in pointing to limitations in any one perspective taken by theory or field of scholarship) that too turned into a potential means to bring more literature together. The literature I borrowed from is instead noting those different party-specific perspectives each takes. I look back along that path—from those initial seeds of sensing something different was there to be understood, to the more robust understanding now offered by this thesis—and there is much pride in that.

Question: What are the weakest aspects of your thesis?

I can address this in two ways. Firstly, weaknesses as limitations. Secondly, weakest as meaning the aspect of the thesis that needed the most effort to strengthen and retain form.

I divide limitations into scope limits and methodological constraints. Scope limits narrow these findings to UK-specific conclusions, notwithstanding PPP is now a global form of project procurement. Methodological limitations acknowledge compromises and priorities to which the unprioritised become weaknesses of sorts. Most notably limits to how far legitimacy of power could be considered and the inherent assumption that power had legitimacy. Other philosophical positions could have taken a more challenging approach to the orientation problem exposed. The upside of hermeneutic reasoning was the means to embrace bias from all sides and establish meaning from between each, however I accessed organisational intentions from an elite’s perspective, and as such I focused upon strategic-level interests and remained ambivalent to operational-level matters or other important framings of individual-to-individual per se. Whilst I therefore claim to have revealed something more of the referential totality of governing in a broad landscape, I also obscure some sense of the individual or the unempowered but affected.

The weakest aspect of the thesis is not addressed within the limitations per se because it relates to how the thesis came together. The most troubling aspect of the thesis was the vastness of the landscape of governance that came to be mapped. The mapping was always planned as an objective, but from a practical perspective I was at times overwhelmed by the amount of data and levels of governance needing to be addressed. The literatures at these different levels helped make sense of what I was looking at; giving guidance and confidence that I was right to be distinguishing levels of governance and to be keeping distinct the sectors but also digging within each. However, it was a concern at various times that I was attempting too much in bringing all this together. I was saved by the hermeneutic basis of reasoning which allowed both data and extant theory to be considered side-by-side and to be circled between. I doubt I would have established the clarity of levels and sides to the governance landscape without those returns to extant literature. The methodological limitations reference above are therefore aligned to how this was addressed and what limits the claims. It means my claims remain held-together by an authority that is either aligning with or deviating from extant theory. Again, the inherent acceptance of legitimacy of power is therefore retained by this research approach. This aspect was both the biggest threat to completing this PhD, and the compromise which most aided the claimed means to making sense of the whole.

Question: Has your view of the research topic changed over the course of your endeavours?

All three focal points of this research—i.e., intentions, governance, and conflict—all became differently framed as this research progressed. I began contemplating future shared intentions. Intentions also began as psychologically considered but shifted to sociological grounding as I moved from year one to year two. Governance began as a narrow framing of contracts and relationships, then project governance, and eventually it became apparent that much of what I was researching sat at levels beyond the project per se. Conflict also began as the focal point of interest but it later became clear that conflict was a means to reveal different intentions rather than be the focal point in-of-itself. The most surprising finding was that the elected government entity can become the threat to the project. Only once all three aspects of research became more nuanced and more fully understood did this revelation become clear. It seems obvious now, but it took significant analysis and shifts to see this.

–END–

Next time, some specific and in-depth questioning will begin to be unpacked.

…to be continued

References

Bedwell, S. and Butcher, I. 2022. How to Excel in your Doctoral Viva. Palgrave Macmillan.