The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

foundations

community’s interest in producing single transferable outcomes is contrary to the
creation of diverse personal experiences.

Consequences of compromise

Because dissatisfaction is a function of the disjunction between values and research
models, it often seems to stem from academic conventions. however, this is misleading,
because it is not the actual academic conventions that stifle the evolution of the
practitioner- researcher community but rather the nature of conventions per se. The
conventions that communities adopt are shorthand for what actions and activities are
coherent with their values. as such, they act as facilitators for maintaining the original
intra- community coherence. any newcomer to that community need only act in
accordance with those conventions in order to be seen as belonging to that community.
once established, conventions tend not to change but act as gatekeepers for the
community. however, when circumstances change, conventions get disconnected
from the values that they served. When this happens, conventions inhibit the natural
evolution of the community and, consequently the internal coherence is disrupted.
Rather than setting out how members of a community should behave, when the
coherence is disrupted, conventions ultimately reify the actions, thus potentially
causing them to get out of step with the values that they were originally intended to
sustain.
This may explain why, when we consider the academic community, one of the
complaints we hear is that research in areas of creative practice does not meet their
conventions. on the other hand, practitioners feel that meeting those conventions
produces research that lacks coherence with their values. however, we claim that,
rather than being dissatisfied with the actual research models that are available to
them, the practitioner- researchers are dissatisfied with the fact that adopting those
models and meeting those conventions is not coherent with their practitioner values.
it is important to draw attention to a subtle distinction in the practitioner- researcher
community dissatisfaction: between the dissatisfaction with the existing research
models and the dissatisfaction with the lack of a research model that is coherent with
the practitioner values.
Coherence between values and actions defines a satisfied community. any
disruption to that coherence leads to dissatisfaction. in the case of the newly emerging
practitioner- researcher community, the disruption of this coherence in both the parent
communities has led to each being dissatisfied with reciprocal aspects of the production
of academic research in areas of creative practice. The creative practice community is
dissatisfied that it has to perform academic actions that do not reflect their values. These
actions are meaningless to them and the resulting research activity is not significant
to their community. They are also dissatisfied that the actions that are meaningful to
them, lack meaning to the academic community. in turn, the academic community
is equally dissatisfied because the actions that the creative practice community want
to include in their research activity are not meaningful to the academic community.
hence, when these creative practice actions are included in the research, they do not
reflect the academic community values and are therefore not significant as a research
activity.