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Introduction

It is an honour to be invited to contribute to the guest blog. I do have a blog on here but so far I've not gotten into the blogging groove. Well, this stint will certainly get me moving. Some of you in the Network might have already interacted with me on projects or on Ning, and so would know a little about me, but for the rest who do not, here's a quick introduction before I delve into blogging over the next two weeks.

I have worked in wealth management, automotive tuning and e-commerce - I have gained phronesis from these roles and for sophia, I am currently reading English Language and Lit. It is slow work but the fruits of my labour will be reaped in due time.

It has been a whirlwind nine months at CE and I can hardly believe such a span of time has passed by in a blink. Compared to the autumn and winter periods when I first joined, the past two months have been madly busy and the next two months promise to be much the same. At times I've been taken for shallow dives (no, not into chaos but into different aspects of the work; I relish challenges anyway) but most of the time I have progressed at my pace, learning the ropes as I go along.

Apart from a number of projects here in Singapore, there is one recently completed for the Wales Audit Office and unlike many project reports, this was put on the public domain. What I particularly like about this study is that it blends inductive and abductive approaches, and the open-mindedness of the project team to use narrative and publish the results online. This sort of progression is heartening. Wales aside there are a few other international projects I'm taking on, and a couple of papers to author. Busy times ahead (and yes, Tri-Nations and World Cup next year, the proper one, without the vuvuzelas aka trumpets from hell).

I hope you'll enjoy reading my posts over the next two weeks, and I welcome discourse in the comments section.

Comments (2)

Laurie Webster:

Jules,
It would be helpful to define inductive and abductive approaches since they are not terms I am familiar with.

Thanks, Laurie Webster

Good point, Laurie. Dave has defined these terms in other blog posts here and here but I'll paraphrase.

Deduction, induction and abduction are three forms of reasoning; the first and most familiar would be that of deduction - if A is B, and C is A, therefore C is B.

Induction, or an inductive approach to research or social systems, is what many of us are familiar with; it infers a quality from multiple instances.

In contrast an abductive approach (from Charles Peirce) is pre-hypothesis and hypothesis-generating; one considers a series of seemingly unrelated events might be connected, and that is my/our approach.