The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

Communities, vaLues, Conventions and aCtions

of research. asking what model would constitute valid research in the arts presumes
that there is a model that would satisfy both the creative practice and the academic
communities. given the long running debate, we concluded that perhaps there is not a
single research model that would satisfy both communities, and instead we should ask
what is the source and nature of the dissatisfaction with the existing models of research
that are available to practitioners, in order that new approaches to the problem might
emerge.
Changing the question means that we have shifted from focusing on what model
would satisfy the communities, to focusing on what it is about the existing models that
dissatisfies these communities. our hunch was that this long- running disagreement
was grounded in different notions of what was required in research, owing to different
values. as a result, we asked ‘how coherent are these actions as a form of advancement,
given the culture of knowledge and values held by this community?’ The advantage
of this question was that it substituted a ‘right or wrong’ judgement by a ‘satisfied or
dissatisfied’ judgement. it seemed to us that dissatisfaction could be observed, whereas
the ‘correctness or incorrectness’ of a model could only be determined if one had a
standard to which it could be compared. The long- running debate is evidence that, as
yet, no such standard exists in research in the creative and performing arts.
We observe two different communities presenting conflicting claims: the community
of academic researchers working in contexts such as university departments, and the
community of professional practitioners working in contexts such as the concert hall or
the art gallery. We also observe these communities being thrown together by external
forces, and a new community of so- called practitioner- researchers becoming visible
(Chapter 1). in a nutshell, the practitioner- researcher archetype refers to individuals
who hold practitioner values but produce research in an academic context.
in the parent communities, we see dissatisfaction. on the one hand, we hear the
academic community at large – understood as academic researchers in any academic
area and discipline – express the dissatisfaction that what creative practitioners
produce is not academic research. on the other hand, we hear the dissatisfaction of
the creative practitioner community that their values are not reflected in traditional
academic research models and, as a result, when they use these models the outcomes
are not relevant to them. hence, there is dissatisfaction in both camps. in this chapter
we identify the source and diagnose the nature of dissatisfaction that we observe in
both the academic and creative practice communities, and discuss some of the actions
that are employed in response to the problem.

Concept of community

in the fields of cultural studies and activity theory, a community is defined as a group
of individuals who share common values. a community has a shared set of values
that define them and to which the members broadly subscribe and thereby identify
themselves as part of that community. Values include cultural beliefs and also
ontological and epistemological beliefs about the nature of the world and how one can
interact with it (Kroeber and Kluckhohn. 1952; hofstede 1991). When communities
evolve naturally, these values reflect the community’s practices and these practices
reflect those values. such a community thus possesses an internal coherence between