The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

Communities, vaLues, Conventions and aCtions

a report or making a painting is not significant per se but only as part of a network of
other valued actions (hirsch 1984).

Satisfaction through coherence

There is a relationship between a community’s value system, the activities that they
deem relevant, and the actions that comprise these activities. When this relationship is
coherent the community is satisfied because their values have conditioned the actions
and are therefore reflected in them. This is the case within the communities of creative
practice and of academic research when they are addressing their respective aims and
interests. These activities have evolved in each community over a long period of time,
hence their internal coherence with the community’s values. in traditional academic
research, the connection between actions is of a particular kind that reinforces and
responds to the academic concept of knowledge production. similarly, in the areas of
creative practice we find communities producing culturally significant outcomes in the
context of the concert hall or the art gallery, that respond to the changing nature of
the cultural environment. These activities reflect the creative practitioner’s concept of
creative production. in each case, satisfaction results from coherence between what is
needed and what the activities supply.
our definition of academic conventions is that they are a cipher for the network
of actions that constitute meaningful research, and establish membership of the com-
munity by determining its professional codes and standards. in the same way, the world
of professional creative practice has its codes which determine success and by which
membership can be judged. We claim this even for contemporary creative practice,
which appears to thrive on breaking rules and changing standards. however, in our
view the professional practice of any activity is never a case of ‘anything goes’, despite
occasional appearances to the contrary.
academic aims and interests are embodied in the conventions of academic research,
manifested in such things as the regulations for doctoral study, the requirements
of research councils and academic journals, etc. From observing these academic
conventions one can begin to see what the concepts are of academic research per se,
prior to a consideration of how these might be applied in ways that satisfy particular
communities. We believe that academic conventions provide a kind of shorthand for
what activities the academic community needs and wants. if these academic conventions
are unpacked, it will be possible to identify what are the specific requirements of each
academic community. if these conventions are considered as a meta- level system, it will
be possible to identify the actions that constitute research activity that is significant to
the academic community in general, and that thus reflect the values of the academy.
These values include elements such as rationalism – meaning the ability to explain the
logical connection between one concept and another; and communication – meaning
that ideas are shared and the academic community grows in its knowledge by this
process (searle 1993). The aspect that we focused on was not whether this element or
that element was important, but the observation that these elements described actions:
the action of rationally connecting ideas, the action of disseminating outcomes, etc.
These actions were undertaken because they reflected what the academic community
valued, in this case for example, the values of connecting, building and sharing.