The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation:Academics’ writing practices in the contemporary university workplace

Literacy Research Discussion Group28 February 2017

Research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK

Karin Tusting

David Barton

Mary Hamilton Ibrar Bhatt

Sharon McCulloch

The context: The changing Higher Education workplace in England

• Elite to mass system of higher education• Changing funding structures – student fees -

marketisation• Internationalisation• Increasing accountability and managerialist

approaches• Transformations of communication through

digital technology

Writing as a lens

• Writing is at the heart of academic work– Research and scholarship– Teaching– Administration– Service– ‘Impact’

• > The everyday workplace literacies of academics can be studied as a ‘nexus of practice’ (Scollon 2002), on which all the forces shaping HE converge

Our theoretical framings

• Literacy studies (Barton 2007, Hamilton 2012): purposes; resources and tools; physical settings and activities; domains of literacy

• Sociomaterial perspectives (Fenwick et al 2012, Bowker & Leigh Star 2000): people and material artefacts in networks of activity; trajectories of texts; physical and information architecture of contemporary practices

Existing academic writing research

• Much research focuses on student writing, teaching academic writing, and student academic literacies (Lillis & Scott 2008)

• Analyses of written academic texts – genre analysis (Swales 1990), metadiscourse (Hyland 2005), lexical bundles (Biber et al 2004)

Existing academic writing research

• Science and technology studies (Latour 1987, &c.)

• Disciplinary practices in Higher Education (Trowler et al. 2012)

• Digital technologies in HE (Gourlay 2012, Goodfellow and Lea 2013)

Studies of academics’ writing practices

• Swales (1998) “Other Floors, Other Voices” – comparison of different disciplinary practices

• Audit, accountability and academic cultures (Strathern 2000)

• Lillis and Curry (2010) – particular focus on multilingual academics’ publication practices

• Lea and Stierer (2009, 2011) lecturers’ everyday writing as professional practice

Phase 1: working with individuals

• Interviews with individuals about their writing practices: walk-around, techno-bio, day-in-the-life

Phase 2: detailed study of writing

processes

• Recording writing processes using screen capture, webcam, keyboard tracking, observational fieldnotes

Phase 3: understanding the community

• Interviews with managers, administrative staff, colleagues and collaborators

Participants to dateMaths Marketing History TOTAL

peopleUniversity A 7 7 4 18

University B 8 7 10 25

University C 3 6 7 16

TOTAL no. of participants 18 20 21 59

Plus pilot interviews with 9 people in our own disciplines, and auto-ethnographic work – 73 in total.

Data collected to date

• 115 interview transcripts• 240 photographs• 8 screencapture videos and videologs• 22 sets of fieldnotes

• Analyzed against research questions using Atlas.ti coding

Research questions

1. How are academics’ writing practices shaped by socio-material aspects of the situation?

2. How are digital communications technologies shaping socio-material processes of writing?

3. How are managerial practices shaping and co-ordinating writing work?

4. > How are academic scholarly and professional identities shaped by the above?

How are managerial practices shaping and co-ordinating writing work?

Academics’ writing

practicesNational policies

Institutional policies

Departmental culture

Disciplinary cultures

Individual career

objectives Personal histories

Metrics

Digital pressures

Students’ expectations

Managerial practices

• Market orientation• Competition for resources• An ethos of enterprise• Use of performance indicators• Measurement of outputs

(Shepherd, 2017)

Managerial practices

• [a] normative system concerning what counts as valuable knowledge, who knows it and who is empowered to act in what way as a consequence (Clarke, Gerwitz & McLaughlin, 2000).

What counts as valuable knowledge?

Well the writing I guess that we are encouraged to value the most is their research writing but we also ask them to write a phenomenal amount of other stuff.

Clara: Head of Department (History)

People who write textbooks: they are valued because, obviously, they’re really very good for the reputation of the department, and the students love it, but they’re not seen as the priority activity.

Rose: Head of Department (Marketing)

A lot of the work is grey literature where people have written blog pieces. I think that's opened my eyes to what's possible in that area but yes, if there's time – I think it's always a question of time. Again, that work is not valued by the university as far as I can see.

David: Professor in Mathematics

Across the range of duties, they’re expected to be researching […] they’re expected to be doing research and to be producing output that would be able to be submitted to REF. That means 3 and 4-star papers. That’s how people talk.

Rose: Head of Department (Marketing)

They [tweets] are useful to form a brand awareness ... As in the brand of my department, and my brand. And when the day dawns that I have anything published, it will be all over Twitter.

Emma: Lecturer in Marketing

Key findings on managerial practices

• Ambiguity around forms of knowledge creation that are (seen to be) valued

• Academics’ writing positioned in relation to managerial rhetoric, whether they resist or internalise

• HoDs potentially in powerful position of mediating between strategy and individuals’ working lives

Time, space and boundaries

Day-to-day work time• Multiplicity of demands leads to fragmentation of work time• Email

• Interruptions

Email is of course this spectre that looms over modern academic life. So I try to turn it off. … I don’t have notifications on. And I try as well then, if I’m wanting to write, to go, “Right, I’m not going to have that on.” And I find in some ways it’s the temptation of, “Oh, well, I’ll have a quick break and check my email,” which I’m trying to discipline myself out of, but it’s easier said than done. (Alex, History)

You think, “I’ve got two hours. I’m going to get something done,” and then it just takes one knock on the door to interrupt that (Will Maths)

Annual rhythms• Changes to long-established academic writing

annual rhythmsThere's not a block where you can say I’m doing writing. We used to have the summer. But things like overseas partners, it massively intrudes on everything. (Diane, Marketing)

It used to be the case that I could get some [research writing] done during Christmas and Easter vacations. Increasingly less so. That’s taken up by marking really. (Rebecca, History)

Disjunctures in timescales• Writing demands at different timescales

• Lengthy timescales of research writing vs immediacy of other demands (teaching, admin)

• Institutional timescales vs. individual timescales

There is a huge what I call curse of the long-term deadline. It’s the same thing when we’re doing our PhDs. You have this overwhelming Sword of Damocles that never goes away. … How long does a paper take? We’ve had a paper in review for three years. That’s the difficult side of it. (Charles, Marketing.)

Writing is a slow process. Things like REF don’t necessarily factor in that writing is a form of thinking. As you write you process and you reflect and you think and arguably we need to speed all that up because we now have these deadlines and these targets. … that need to speed up, you just kind of short circuit somewhere along the line the thinking and reflection process. (HoD, History)

Temporal strategies• Constructing boundaries around times to protect

different types of writing• Particular times of day for particular types of work• Time blocking and compartmentalising

• Extending the time / space of writing work• Need for autonomy in constructing workable

temporal strategies

Time blocking and compartmentalising• Combining spatial and

temporal boundaries to protect particular types of work

When I write I tend to look for a block of hours, minimum I would suggest two or three hours, which I can actually do something and minimise interruptions. That can of course happen in the office, although less likely in many ways these days. So I can do it at home quite often. So that’s the way I tend to organise my time. (Mark, Marketing)

By trying to compartmentalise the admin stuff in my job and the teaching stuff, apart from the research, I’m trying to clear some headspace, if you will, for just sitting down, “Okay, I’m not going to worry about email today, I’m not going to worry about students and teaching materials and so on. Let’s just keep pounding out this chapter and see where we get to by the end of the day.” (James, Marketing)

Space

• Academics’ writing work takes place in a wide range of different spaces• Although most people are provided with an office,

the office is only one of the spaces in which people write – and not the most preferred one for many of our participants• Much of the work is done in

other places – increasingly facilitated by digital technologies – which has both positive and negativeaspects

Spatial strategies• Different spaces for different kinds of writing• Different offices• Different desks• Different computers

I have one desk which is very much like my work space and it’s for looking at spreadsheets and stuff like that. Then I have another desk which is much nicer. It’s got far more tactile things around it, and it’s in a much more restful space. That’s for if and when I ever do some research writing. … That’s the luxury bit, isn’t it? (Clara, History)

Spatial strategies - Mobility

• People wrote on the move, and in transitional spaces between other activities. • Cafes• Public transport

I do not use the office for writing because that is too disruptive and despairing. I write either in libraries or in cafés. (Louis, History)

Where do I write that? Trains are fantastic. … because you have two or three hours where, going down to London when nobody can irritate you. (Robert, Maths)

Extending time and space of work• Others extend work

across boundaries – day/night, home/work, personal/public, research/teaching

I do work evenings, and I do work weekends sometimes. Research takes me a long time … I get emails from students all the way through… If you’re up and working at 1, 2, 3 in the morning or you’re up anyway, it’s tempting just to try and action it just then with a quick fire response. (Charles, Marketing)

I will check my emails many times a day. I will answer emails at eleven in the evening. In summer I wake up early so at five thirty in the morning. … It does mean that work and non-work are very much interlinked. I don’t know if that is entirely a good thing. It gives you more control but it does mean you tend to spend more time I think. (Will, Maths)

Transformations in tools and resources in the academic workplace

• Virtual learning environments (VLEs)• File sharing and other tools for collaborative work• Online library resources• Smartphones and portable devices• Social media, and everyday software

Every aspect of academic practice is changing

Wide range of digital tools and platforms used in writing• Diane S: Writes in Word; uses Skype often and

screenshares documents; uses shared Dropbox for version control.• Gareth W: writes using Word and LaTeX, sending

documents back and forth using LaTeX which his student compiles, uses email, but not VLE much• Rebecca A: digital camera revolutionised collection

of archive material; but still likes to hand write notes about manuscripts

Different paths to common goals:The example of Powerpoint

1. ‘I prefer Prezi.’ v ‘Prezi’ makes me vomit.’2. ‘PowerPoint… for images not texts.’3. ‘…make it sound as if it wasn’t being read.’4. ‘my foundation point for a lecture used to be a text, now it’s a PowerPoint.’5. ‘…then we look at it together over Skype and sort of change whilst we’re discussing it.’

New technologies:

- Encourage new forms of collaboration- Encourage the mobile scholar- Encourage new writing practices- Reflect individual histories- Need to be discussed in the context

of other social changes.- Reflect other online issues

What’s it like to be an academic these days?

• Have to deal with an increasing number of genres, including newly invented ones.• New collaborations with new stakeholders in

supporting academic writing• New tools for writing in a more complex

technologized social practice• New identities to manage• Increased stress

Conclusions and implications• For individuals• Academic writing involves

• Multiple demands• Multiple identities – online / offline• Multiple allegiances – disciplinary / institutional

• In a context of instability, marketisation, and managerialism• Need to find ways for individuals to protect the writing

that is of most import for them• Creating and managing boundaries• Manage interruptions – physical / digital• Protecting autonomy and choice

Conclusions and implications• For institutions• Acknowledge multiple demands, on different time

frames• Design spaces to meet academics’ needs as well as

students’• Explicit and reasonable expectations

• Working time• Email and online communication• Availability• Publications

• Create cultures that protect and nurture writing and writers• Recognise the negative aspects of target culture around writing