The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

Communities, vaLues, Conventions and aCtions

understood. The question will arise in a context for which there is an audience. This
audience will judge whether the outcome is a satisfactory or relevant response to the
question, and therefore whether they are any the wiser as a result of the research. The
appropriateness of the answer to the question for the audience will be reflected in
the use of methods that appropriately connect one to the other, and are used by the
community who form the audience for the outcome. Thus we see that for a community,
certain questions are relevant, certain actions are appropriate, and certain outcomes
are of interest to their concerns. These communities constitute disciplines, but also
share beliefs about what they are doing and therefore inhabit the same larger academic
community. discipline boundaries are defined by identifying communities of practice
that share certain interests and concerns, and expressing it in this way brings to the fore
the relationship of the community to its research and knowledge base (Wenger 1999).
it identifies that certain questions are meaningful, that certain methods are preferred,
certain solutions are regarded as satisfying, and others are not.
The academic community is satisfied with the coherent relationship between its
values and its actions. There is satisfaction that its value of accumulation is manifested
in the academic conventions that require the archiving and dissemination of outcomes
from the research activity. it is also satisfied that the actions that compose the research
activity are the ones that are meaningful towards the accumulation and dissemination
of knowledge, i.e. through publishing and reviewing of compiled literature. Thus the
research activity that is significant to the academic community is one that performs
actions such as publishing because it is a meaningful action towards the community
value of accumulation.
The creative practice community is similarly satisfied with the coherent relationship
between its values and its actions. The creative practice community values the notion of
‘the singularity of the event’. There is satisfaction that this value is manifested through
the convention of using non- linguistic communication. in this context, the significant
creative activity is the promotion of the direct encounter with the artefact. To this end,
the creative community is satisfied by actions such as exhibiting or performing. Thus
the creative activity is composed of actions such as exhibiting or performing because
these are meaningful actions towards the community value of ‘the event’.
our social- psychological knowledge model means that any community will find
satisfaction if there is coherence between what it does and what it values. in mature
communities, one can find these values formalized as conventions and sometimes as
regulations, norms and expectations. alteration in either the community values for
which that activity is significant or in the actions that make the activity meaningful
for that set of values will disrupt this coherent relationship. in our view, the hasty
academicization of the creative practice community has pushed the creative practice
and the academic communities together. This has caused a disruption of the internal
coherence of values and actions, leading to community dissatisfaction.

Conflict and disruption

at a theoretical level, academicization involves the adoption of the dominant academic
conventions and the values that support it. however, academicization is not just a
theoretical concept: there is tangible evidence of this process. at a practical level we