Sunset at Montjuïc El Xalet, Barcelona summer of 2011

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Dr. Cheryl Marie Cordeiro Nilsson with Irene (Kenya) and Mame (Senegal), IFP 2011 dinner.

IFP 2011 Graduation Dinner, Montjuïc El Xalet.
The IFP 2011, IESE Business School, University of Navarra saw 41 participants from 26 different countries gather in Barcelona for three weeks of intense studies for executive management faculty.
Photo: JE Nilsson and C M Cordeiro-Nilsson © 2011

The last day of the the International Faculty Program (IFP) at the IESE Business School in Barcelona saw the Class of IFP 2011 gathered for a farewell dinner at Montjuïc El Xalet, a restaurant with a picturesque view of the city of Barcelona!

For three weeks I enjoyed the company of some of the world’s most interesting academics and professionals, from more than 26 countries across the globe.

The Class of IFP 2011 had a broad variety of backgrounds even if the syllabus of the program was specifically designed for faculty members of business schools. The course had a distinct focus of IESE’s brand of case studies as a method of teaching and learning in higher education, in particular with MBAs and EMBAs. The lectures and sessions with various cases proved highly motivating and made for numerous memorable learning experiences.
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A Red Dot meet-up at Penn

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LOVE at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

On University of Pennsylvania campus ground, a replica of American artist Robert Indiana’s iconic Love sculpture whose original is on display in the ‘Love Park’, near City Hall here in Philadelphia. The girls to the left? Haven’t a clue.
They were just there. Beautifully draped all over the thing.
Photo: J E Nilsson and C M Cordeiro-Nilsson © 2011

Founded by Benjamin Franklin, the University of Pennsylvania has consistently ranked one of the world’s top universities, with its business school, Wharton, being legendary. Even now as my work brings me side by side with faculty drawn from this ivy league university, I was happy to visit the actual campus, especially during Cherry Blossom season!

University of Pennsylvania, campus.

The Upper Quad Gate, the number one popular “dorm” or college house, among most Freshmen at Penn, scenic in the Spring sunlight.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro Nilsson and Jan-Erik Nilsson at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.

JE and I at Penn, directly across the Upper Quad Gate.

boyz

Campus life – just brilliant!

I completely enjoyed walking down some of its numerous pathways that bathed in the early spring sunlight, exploring buildings, the libraries, the bookshop and slightly beyond the campus grounds, a cozy shop that sold all things chocolate. Fictional Hogwarts excluded, I could never dream up a more vibrant campus life than what I met with at Penn walking down Locust Walk.
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Doktorspromotion 2009, University of Gothenburg

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Doktorspromovering 2009, PhD graduation ceremony, University of Gothenburg, Svenska Mässan

On stage, halfway through the ceremony. I’m seated third row from the back, in a white dress. Deans and faculty leaders of the University of Gothenburg (GU) are seated at the front of the stage, in the respective faculty colours and gowns.
Photo for CMC © Jan-Erik Nilsson, David Neikter Nilsson, Anders Lindström 2009

The 30th of October, 2009 was the University of Gothenburg’s annual prize giving and doctoral awards ceremony and gala event. It was wonderful to have these grey autumn days lit by people dressed up in formal attire, tailcoats mandatory for all men receiving awards that evening, and all women in long dresses or ball gowns. Everyone looked smart and regal.

For this event, I wore the full length, white crochet dress that my mother had made for me more than a decade ago. It was meant for my college prom night, so I was 18 years old when I wore this dress the first time.
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Reflections from days at the Division of Information Studies (DIS), NTU in Singapore

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Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

It was at the end of 1990s that I was doing my MSc in Information Studies at NTU, graduating in 2000.
Photo by JE Nilsson, 2009.

My academic career has taken me through several institutes of education, and the Division of Information Studies (DIS) at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (NTU) has been one of them.

It was a part-time Master of Science course that I took with NTU, while pursuing my Master of Arts at NUS full-time. The schedule was gruelling but nonetheless manageable, with mornings through afternoons spent at NUS, and evenings spent at NTU. I thought it all fine, till exam period came along and it became darkly humorous at one point, when I found myself sitting for papers in the mornings at NUS and evenings, at NTU!

Perhaps it was that I spent mostly evenings at NTU, when the greater student population would have gone home or be back at their hostels that I found the place generally more relaxing than my time at NUS. The long corridors of the NTU wings seemed to help sort your thoughts as you walked to and from classes, pondering the day’s lectures or simply unwinding as you stepped away from the lecture hall.

As I’m now looking to pursue new research projects, I realize that my research interests have always been cross-disciplinary in nature. That I found myself wanting to learn about information management (at NTU) whilst majoring in the English language (at NUS) was just the beginning of it! These days, it’s linguistics, organization science and information management that draws my attention.

With NTU being in the top 1% of the world’s universities (together with Swedish universities such as Lund and Uppsala) it was not surprising that DIS at NTU has put into practice the use of social media, such as its blog, as a medium of contact and social networking and also giving it a place in the education system.

To Prof. Chris Khoo, Head of DIS, NTU: Thank You for updates and contacts!

Cheryl

Triumph’s Street Triple in matt graphite

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Triumph Street Triple R, Cheryl Marie Cordeiro-Nilsson, Sweden

On the 2009 Triumph Street Triple.
Photos © Jan-Erik Nilsson, Cheryl M. Cordeiro-Nilsson, Adrian Cordeiro for CMC, 2009

I grew up with having bikes around me, where as far as I could remember, I was hopping on and off a bike, to and from school mostly, with my dad in the rider’s seat.

The pictures below were taken in the early 1980s, in the East of Singapore. They show my brother and I on my dad’s Suzuki GP 100A, taking turns to be in the front seat of the bike. It wasn’t a big bike at all, but it was a stretch for the both of us, to reach its front handles!

And when I turned 18, encouraged by my dad, I went out and acquired both my car and bike licenses. I took the lessons simultaneously and the bike license came to me just two week after I received my driver license for cars.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Suzuki ca 1980s in Singapore

On darling little turquoise tanked Suzuki GP 100A. Small, fast and fun to ride, this bike’s an absolute classic in today’s auto world. Both my brother and I grew up to love bikes as more than a means of transportation. My brother has had several Hondas in the 750 cc range, both to himself and shared with my dad.

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Doctoral Thesis, public defense May 9th, 2009

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Disputation Göteborgs Universitet. Cheryl Marie Cordeiro, Kirsten Jaeger, Aalborg

Waiting for the public defence session to begin. The Opponent and main examiner was Associate Professor Kirsten Jaeger from Aalborg Univeristy, Denmark.
Photo for CMC: JE Nilsson and David Neikter Nilsson © 2009

One of the things that have dawned on me during the years I have spent working on my thesis is that writing a doctoral thesis and having it approved are done for various reasons, and thus approached in many different ways around the world.

One reason for people to pursue a PhD is to obtain a final, formal confirmation of their status as an expert in their own lifelong field of work. In northern Europe, you can research and write a PhD thesis alongside your full-time occupation, and there is no real rush to it. If it takes ten years or more, it does not really matter. That the time taken to write a PhD thesis is secondary to the quality of the thesis is very much emphasized here in Sweden, and these values are reflected in the average time to complete a PhD in Scandinavia, which is 10 to 14 years, without anyone batting an eyelid.

A more common reason for pursuing a PhD is in preparation to your academic career in your particular field of interest. This is mostly done at the university where you’ve received your basic training, by adding a research education on top of what you have already done in your undergraduate days. This is a quicker way and you follow the methods of the professor you have already been studying under.

Personally, I have a passion for research and pursued a PhD because I wanted to become a research specialist in a field of my own choice and one that I have pioneered myself out of pure interest, which is to study Scandinavian management / leadership in Asia, in particular in Singapore. I also wanted to use the two qualitative methods of grounded theory and systemics linguistics as analysis tools on business administration matters, while most other studies on management have thus far favoured quantitative methods.

Having come from a mostly Anglo-Saxon education background, I have also sped through, the best I could, the Nordic education system with 6 years doing my PhD, that included a year as a ‘visiting student’, the time spent learning Swedish as a third language, the sporadically offered compulsory PhD courses for all doctoral students and the writing of the thesis.

I actually saw this entire process as something quite enjoyable. To be able to dig into tens and thousands of words and numbers, get them into order and eventually start seeing them form into patterns of meaning and information, is actually fun. I realize this might finally position me as a true blue ‘nerd’, but so be it.

PhD Public Defence session

Protocols for PhD public defence sessions in Scandinavia vary according to which traditions the institution follows. Some universities in Finland are amusingly conservative, so much so that one can almost see how doctoral public defences were conducted during the Medieval times, while universities in Denmark can be quite modern and informal. Swedish traditions are somewhere in-between.

Disputation, Arkeologen, G&teborgs Universitet.

All in all, around thirty persons made it to the event last Saturday. Considering this was during a spring weekend, I was impressed and happy to see so many attending the disputation instead of setting up barbecue in their gardens or pretty much doing anything else at all.

The procedure during my defence session in Sweden began with the Chairman opening the session by introducing the participants, which were the Candidate (myself) and the Opponent, in this case, Associate Professor Kirsten Jaeger from Aalborg University, Denmark, who was also the main examiner in the examination committee.

Next step was for the Chairman to ask the Candidate if there were any additions or corrections to the text. Most candidates will have an “errata” list that would now be added to the thesis. This is important if there are any significant mistakes in the paper, for example, if the word ”not” was left out in the main conclusion.

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Academic traditions: the Nailing of the Thesis, April 17, 2009

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Nailing the thesis at University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Nailing the thesis at University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Photo for CMC © Jan-Erik Nilsson 2009.

When I was told that I was supposed to “nail” my thesis to the University wall, it initially didn’t occur to me that I was supposed to do so literally and in person, with a hammer.

But so it went.

A University tradition since Medieval times
In the West, universities developed as centres for research and higher learning as we know them today around the 11th to 13th century when it became obvious that the old cathedral schools were no longer adequate.

A fully developed medieval university had four faculties of which the theological was the most important. Then came law and medicine, while philosophy was a preparation in the ‘seven liberal arts’ such as math and rhetoric etc. that you needed to clear before entering the higher levels.

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed his ’95 Theses’
Looking back at the traditions of the European universities, there is surprisingly little written on academic traditions. As for “nailings”, what comes to mind if something is the famous occasion when in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the All Saints’ Castle Church in Wittenberg.

In most stories about this event, it has appeared as if the nailing in itself was a unique act of rebellion, to draw attention to his protests, but personally, I think what he did was to follow an academic tradition of publicly announcing his “theses”, which in Greek means “position”, and more or less invited others to discuss this at the Wittenberg University where he was a Professor in Theology.

That the nailing of the theses by Martin Luther was in academic spirit and inclination appears all the more likely since in 1502, the All Saints’ church served as an annexe and a chapel to the University of Wittenberg. The church was the place where university students were awarded their doctorates and it would have been a place where the general public would weekly (or even daily) frequent in those times.
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Purple proper, to the “spikning” or nailing of the thesis

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At Repro Centralen of Göteborgs Universitet, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

At the printing shop of Göteborgs Universitet to collect copies of my thesis. Purple wool dress by Warehouse and black patent flats by Prada.

It was to be a small academic ceremony today where I collected my thesis from the printers and have one copy nailed to the public notice board of the University of Gothenburg. The spikning or the nailing of the thesis is for two main reasons, the first of which is to encourage the public to read your work and the second, perhaps more important reason, is to show that your work hasn’t been plagiarized.

Design in dress and colours on outfits have always been important factors in my life. When choosing junior colleges in Singapore, I remember how all my other classmates chose their junior colleges based on entry grades and proximity to the home. I chose my junior college based on its uniform. So I ended up at Victoria Junior College in Singapore, second highest ranked after Raffles Junior College at that time, with its beige coloured unifrom accented with a deep wine coloured belt. And I felt perfectly fine about it. I thought a neutral beige would help my mind relax in its notoriously competitive school environment and the deep burgundy wine just happens to be one of my favourite colours of all time.

Spikning, nailing the thesis to the notice board for the public at the University of Gothenburg

Nailing the thesis to the public notice board at Göteborgs Universitet.

The ceremony consisted of drilling a hole at the corner of my 554 paged thesis and putting a nail through that, onto the notice board at the University of Gothenburg. A champagne bottle was popped and served in celebration, and as a thank you for the group who had joined in for this happy event.

In dress, I opted for a 60s looking purple sheath dress from Warehouse with a boat neck and capped sleeves, since it had clean lines and turned quite chic when paired with dark grey wool tights and a pair of black patent Prada flats.
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PhD thesis Acknowledgements, 2009

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My PhD thesis, entitled Swedish management in Singapore: a discourse analysis study (2009) will be printed within the week. In this post, I’d like to share with you the Acknowledgements section of my thesis. This section tells briefly, the story of how the PhD thesis began and the individuals who helped me put it together.

More about my PhD thesis can be found at cherylmariecordeiro.com. The public defense of the thesis will take place on Saturday, the 9th of May, 2009 at 10:00 hrs, Room T302, Arkeologen, Olof Wijksgatan 6, Gothenburg, Sweden.

The Invite to the thesis will be posted on my website shortly.

Acknowledgements

Photo for CMC © Kevin Dominic Cordeiro 2009.

Cheryl Marie Cordeiro by Kevin Dominic Cordeiro, Kranji, Singapore

My PhD years at the University of Gothenburg and this thesis has had mentorship from numerous outstanding individuals both from within the university and outside of it. It is to these individuals, including the Scandinavian and Asian respondents that took part in my study, that my heartfelt gratitude and thanks go out to, for without their help, this thesis would not have seen its ISBN number.

First and foremost I would like to thank my parents Rita and Adrian Cordeiro and my brother Kevin, who through my childhood and study career had always encouraged me to follow my heart and inquisitive mind in any direction this took me. My parents provided me with a loving home, one where an academic mind was celebrated, and Kevin’s sharp sense of humour has been a gift in my life. If we ever had a family motto that would have been – If there’s a will, there’s a way – a philosophy of life I have been carrying with me every day.

I grew up in the Republic of Singapore. The history of this city state is not older than that I have followed much of its development myself, from its modest situation after its separation from Malaysia in 1965 towards becoming a small but modern state, with its gross domestic product (GDP) per capita ranking among the highest in the world. Singapore has accomplished this and several other milestones without basically any natural resources. In fact, Singapore does not even have enough natural freshwater resources to sustain its own population. I could not help but ask myself, how did Singapore make all this possible?

Singapore is also multi-cultural and multi-religious, as such, there was often some kind of celebration going on somewhere. The cultural beliefs and obligations were legion. My school- and classmates were Chinese, Malays, Indians, Eurasians and Arabs etc, all living as far as I could tell, happily together. As I grew up, I was surprised to understand that this was not always the case in many other places of the world. Here again, I could not help but ask, how does Singapore handle the multi-faceted social fabric of its society?

Later, during my university years and while studying towards two separate Masters degrees I got to notice that there were many foreigners coming to Singapore to set up and run Asian market head offices. Among those were many Swedish organizations. It was obvious to me that these foreign companies were part of the what made Singapore a successful business hub.

Eventually my inquiring mind put me in contact with Jan-Erik Nilsson in Sweden who, being one of the founding fathers of the Swedish East Indiaman Gotheborg III ship project, had a lot of thoughts on this subject.

It was our discussions around the peaceful and profitable historical Swedish – Asian trade adventures of days gone by and its modern continuation in Singapore that eventually led to the beginnings of this PhD thesis.

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