Week 29 : Preliminary Draft of Community Chapter Produced

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	52,368
Words typed this week:	2670
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	2670
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well progress has been made this week. Admittedly some of that only because I have a supervision next week. If thesis writing was hiking then this week has been scrambling over a bolder strewn rise. It has not been sticky like mud but there were just so many challenges to get over to make progress. The work has been tough but progress has been made. I am slowly getting the feel of this thesis and this last week there have been several "aha" moments when I have stumbled on something and realised that it was important for my thesis. On the other hand I have had to try and digest a couple more theorist who have applications for my thesis.

One of the real oddities of this thesis is that while I am working with fairly small local groups/organisations called "congregations" quite a bit of the stuff I am drawing on with respect to identity is normally used for groups such as nationality. This time I have been looking at the work of Fredrik Barth a Norwegian anthropologist who in looking at ethnicity changed the focus from the individuals to the actions that sustained the identity. So I have two Barths in my thesis, from different strands and I am using an anthropologist as a theorist rather than a methodologist. I think the thesis is the stronger for it. Actually the whole theory region I am using is mid-way between psychotherapy and theorists of Nationality and I seem to work with pretty broad brush across the whole range of those although there are a couple of sociologist in there who do not seem to have done too much work in either camp.

The one group that I seem to be light on is the theorists of sociology of Religion whether congregational studies or ethnography of religion. With the Congregational Studies people I know to some extent why it is. The area has a broad stream of rather simple approaches from organisational studies. The problem is that the simplicity of many of them makes me cautious. This is less so of UK ones than American. It is also not true that all organisations studies are simple, I have also been looking at the work of the Tavistock Consultancy who work psychotherapeutic models to understand how organisations work, in particular the early work of Eliot Jacques and  the nursing studies of Isabel Menzies-Lyth.

Oh well the papers went off for supervision today and this week I will need to try to write about the tradition. I expect I will spend the next bank holiday I will be doing a major redraft of this chapter.