PhD – Clare's research blog

I’m so excited to be launching this project. I’ve mentioned it a few times (just a few) over past blog posts, but here we are… it’s live! You can visit the site here, and I’ll be posting more about the processes involved and how I’m approaching it here.

This project has been a long time in the making. I first started sketching out what my “journey” might look like in 2019, right after passing my viva and feeling that I could give myself permission to step away from the core content of my research for a bit. It had been a long 8 and a half years. In hindsight, it was worth every step. But there had been moments along the way where I’d sworn blind I wasn’t cut out for this and was going to quit.

Fortunately, for me, I had a wonderful support team of supervisors and mentors who made sure that the nuclear option never happened. But I’m not alone in having moments like this – any long research project has its ups and downs. Sometimes we want to give up. We don’t feel we’re good enough, or can make this lifestyle work.

So, the Mountains of Metaphor project is a way for me to share my story and reach out. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar? Maybe you’re considering a PhD but aren’t sure how to approach it, mentally?

There are some supplementary materials on the site that you can download and play around with – why not try creating your own map of your research journey? Where are you on the map? What’s going on around you? Can you still see your eventual goal?

Why not send us a postcard from where you are?

I’m in the process of moving everything over from my old site to this shiny new one, and wanted to bring some of the content with me. This (included below in this post) is one of the original pages I wrote for the old site, back in 2012 or so, when I was just starting out with the PhD. Reading back on it now is a little bit like looking back over a long journey and realizing just how far you’ve come. The final draft that I’m about to submit is so different to what I originally wrote!

Of course, this is all completely normal and just part of the process of doing a PhD. But there are a couple of other things that have leaped out at me too, rereading over the abstract. There’s so much “jargon”! There are entire sentences below that make me wince. It’s not that I don’t understand the terms – I’m completely comfortable relating to and with the ideas. But really, my supervisor and I are the only two people in the building who understand what I’m talking about, then what is the point?

This has become quite a significant part of the drafting process as time has gone on, and I have another blog post lined up about this. But in the meantime, the only way research is going to have impact in the real world is if people in the real world can understand what you’re saying. And for this to happen, the research has to be accessible and in plain English (as well as interesting, engaging, and relevant, of course).

In the meantime, here is what I was embarking on some seven years ago…

Recent World Bank policy documents are notable for hinting at a retreat from doctrinaire reliance on “investment climate” discourse frameworks. Although the concept of an “ideal paradigm” still informs much of the World Bank’s lending and consulting praxis, there has been a reappraisal of the empirical certainties underlying many assumptions. While a quantitative, leximetric approach to law and governance continues to define World Bank ideology, assertions of causation between these and economic development are increasingly being questioned.

By taking a socio-legal approach to an investigation of the interaction between law and the economy, this research offers a new approach. Taking law as a socially constructed phenomenon existing as perceived by the actors in their interactions both with each other (economically-oriented actions and interactions) (see the work of Roger Cotterrell) and with the local laws (operating on a range of scales from the micro, macro, meta and meso levels (see the work of Sabine Frerichs and Amanda Perry-Kessaris), this approach questions both current terminology as being overly laced with economic theory, and the frameworks that deny the normative bias of much of the current discourse. The research responds to calls for careful empirical socio-legal studies by Cotterrell and Swedberg, amongst others, by conducting grounded-theory informed ethnography in Sri Lanka, interviewing foreign investors about their interactions with the legal system prior to, and during the investment process. The framing of law in a socio-legal paradigm thus facilitates the use of the results not only to engage with questions of correlation between the legal environment in Sri Lanka and the actions of foreign investors, but also with causation; understanding clearly the motivations and perceptions of the investors themselves.

The results will enable clarification of the interaction between law and the economy in Sri Lanka, as well as the use, abuse and avoidance characteristic of the interaction between foreign investors and local laws. It is then possible to ask whether legal and governmental reform lending conditionalities recommended by the World Bank and other International Financial Organizations (IFOs) were a factor in the attraction of foreign investment to the country, and to what extent this might have been the case. The results will allow for an appraisal of current IFO policies, as well as the extent to which Sri Lanka should tailor its legal system to the requirements of foreign investors, potentially at the expense of other actors in the domestic legal and economic systems. Moreover, a careful selection of interviewees should allow a comparison between attitudes and approaches towards the importance of formal law and legal systems in an investment situation, both along nationality and institutional sectoral axes. This should thereby facilitate closer appraisal of the legal reform process with respect to more accurate tailoring of the reforms depending on the desired outcome. This should also work to minimise unintended, and undesirable, side effects of reforms on local businesses and entrepreneurs, while facilitating investment according to policy objectives.