This week, we continued writing our literature review. As part of this, I read the National Youth Strategy white paper. I found this rather interesting, as it demonstrated the government's desire to enrich young people's lives, and not solely for the sake of having the byproduct of better academic attainment, as Ofsted reports sometimes imply. What I found most heartening was the focus on community-oriented integration - the government claimed to have big investment targets for building youth facilities and other areas for young people to gather.
On Monday, we had a talk from two people who had worked in the Foreign Office. I found this very interesting, especially being a PPE student, since they talked quite a lot about their experiences working with various Prime Ministers and during the 2003 Iraq war. I found the conversation especially engaging as they both had notably differing views on leadership (specifically, whether someone needs expertise to be a good leader), and yet they were able to surmount that and lead an ambitious organisation together. Their project itself is also very interesting to me, given that they're trying to surmount voter apathy and make people more involved in policy-making, which I find valliant given the principle and practical importance of democracy.
Most of this week was spent on reading and - importantly - organising our literature more systematically. This made it nice to get a more bird's eye view of our progress so far and the topics we need to consider. With the methodology, we mostly summarised the work we had done so far and used it as a sort of plan for moving forwards as well. The talk we got on methods and methodology was also very thought-provoking, as I hadn't considered that so many different factors had to be taken into account. It was also useful in that it helped explain some terms that I had encountered previously but hadn't fully understood!
Moving forward, we need to set clearer goals for what we want to read. We're reaching a point where we've read a lot of the literature that's easy to find or intuitive to think to read. We've received some suggestions from our project supervisors and Ben, so we're planning to split up those suggestions and follow up on more in-depth.
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Wiktoria, this is a thoughtful reflection on the point at which a literature review needs to move beyond finding the most visible or intuitive sources and become more systematic. Organising the literature thematically has helped you identify not only what you have read, but what questions and perspectives remain missing.
I was interested in your reading of the National Youth Strategy and its apparent recognition that enrichment has value beyond improved academic attainment. As you analyse it further, consider whether the document consistently values enrichment intrinsically or also justifies it through outcomes such as employability, resilience, safety and social integration. It may also be useful to distinguish policy aspirations, investment commitments and evidence about eventual implementation.
Catherine Day and Matthew Rycroft’s disagreement about whether leaders require expertise raises an excellent question. Perhaps their collaboration succeeds not because they have overcome the disagreement, but because they can work productively through it. What expertise must leaders possess themselves, and when does leadership instead involve recognising and enabling the expertise of others?
Your next step of setting clearer reading goals is exactly right. Try to turn each gap into a focused search question and document how you searched, selected and assessed the resulting sources. That will make the final literature review not only broader, but more defensible.