Communities, vaLues, Conventions and aCtionstheories, etc., as part of an academic network of the production and consumption of
knowledge.
in the uK, one can observe that, under pressure for productivity in the new regime
of post-1992 academia, universities, funding councils and others, hastily adopted
apparently productive models from traditional subjects. Concepts from the creative
and performing arts were mapped on to these models, but this mapping failed to take
account of the difference in community values between these traditional academic
subjects and creative practice. The values of the creative practice community include
many significant activities for its members, but amongst these are not, for example,
prediction and control. This is perhaps more clearly exposed if one looks at the broadly
scientific model from which many concepts were adopted by practitioner- researchers
(Chapter 2).
The hasty academicization of the creative practice community has had a disruptive
effect. The phenomenon has caused the coherence between values and actions to be
broken and each community finds itself judging activities that did not emerge from
their own values. in response to the demands of this hasty academicization, the
practice community has adopted some of the conventions and actions of the academic
community in order to try to produce research of the academic kind. although these
actions conform to the conventions of academic research, they do not result in a
significant research activity. as we have said, actions are not meaningful in isolation.
The performance of isolated actions results in a loss of coherence and in dissatisfaction.
We observe that, as a result of academicization, there is dissatisfaction from the
academic community that what practitioners do is not research; and from the practice
community that their values are not represented or reflected in academic research.
We have focused on these as the interests of distinct communities, who do not feel
they have a stake in the outcomes, and so the outcomes of one lack meaning for the
other (Biggs and Büchler 2008a). dissatisfaction with explanations comes not from the
inadequacies of language, but from a misunderstanding about where satisfaction is to
be found. The reason one is satisfied with an answer to a question is because one sees
some connection between the two. The satisfaction comes from the user perceiving
in the answer something that adequately responds to the question. This means that
answers, per se, do not satisfy questions owing to anything external, but rather it is the
perceived connection between the question and the answer that is satisfying.
a social- psychological knowledge model builds on the understanding of knowledge
as a perceptual and consensual act. it is perceptual because it relies upon members of
a community finding knowledge potential in the same phenomena. it is consensual for
two reasons: individuals elect to belong to a given community, and they consent to the
new knowledge that is added by their peers. a social- psychological knowledge model
reveals the internal coherence that exists in a community between values and actions.
The coherence between values and actions is a factor that might be problematic for
the integration of the communities of creative practice and academic research. This is
owing to the stereotype of academic knowledge being, in many ways, a scientific one. For
example, academic research assumes that knowledge is communicable and impersonal,
whereas creative practice often emphasizes the personal and subjective experience.
it is stereotypical even in the creative areas, where one can find the common title of
‘scientific committee’ for selection and review panels of conferences and journals.