building a research culture in a #highered institution

Presentation at the Operational Planning Workshop, Department of Business Management,

University of South Africa (Unisa) 6-7 February 2017, Pretoria

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Building a research culture in a

#highered institutionBy Paul Prinsloo

Research Professor in Open Distance Learning

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this presentation. I hereby acknowledge the original copyright and licensing regime of every image and reference used. All the images used in this presentation have been sourced from Google and were labeled for non-commercial reuse.

This work (excluding the images) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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How do we think about building a research culture in a context where

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• The playing field is not level – but gendered, raced and embedded in geopolitical and disciplinary contestations and networks

• Criteria such as citations are increasingly suspect as citations, reputation and impact are not necessarily linked

• Your gravitas as a researcher is increasingly dependent on the amount of funding you secure

• Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are accused of mission and ethics creep and the excruciating impact of the proliferation of reporting to an increasing number of stakeholders

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Some examples…

Page credit: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/female-professors-pay-price-academic-citizenship

Page credit: https://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/if-male-scientists-were-written-about-like-women?utm_term=.mjerpnKMm#.gnPAKXZQ2

Page credit: https://aminer.org/mostinfluentialscholar/ml

Page credit: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0166149&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0

Page credit: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/jan/27/unsackable-senior-staff-make-life-even-harder-for-junior-academics?CMP=share_btn_tw

Page credit: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/funding-for-innovation-ranking-2016

Page credit: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/312/5779/1441

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There is therefore a real danger that our strategies and interventions are misguided due to misunderstanding the field; underestimating the complexities of becoming and being a researcher-in-context; and/or succumbing to the

often empty institutional rhetoric regarding building a research culture

Some preliminary remarks

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Context is everything

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Disclaimer: I acknowledge the impact of my own intersectionality of race, gender, age, role,

privilege and academic/disciplinary expertise/field on making sense of ‘building a

research culture’

Research looks different between…

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• ‘Types’ of higher education institutions – eg distance education, comprehensive institutions & research intensive institutions

• Disciplines – eg mathematics, economics and sociology• Where you are in your career and where others are in their

careers• Different intersections of race, age, gender, family

responsibilities, teaching and supervision loads & networks (whether scholarly, institutional-political, industry)

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Institutions and individuals often see their rankings & citations as a true reflection of their standing and

gravitas in a particular field.

These reflections are, however, approximations and skewed representations due to the structures and epistemologies underpinning and upholding the

mirrors

Image credit: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

The increasing number of reporting and auditing regimes result in researchers feeling as if they are

being constantly watched, monitored and assessed, even when they are not…

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The reality of being a researcher/doing research increasingly resembles an assembly line with the emphasis being on the number of boxes produced, and not, necessarily the content

of the boxes

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Doing research and disseminating research findings constitute a minefield of contesting understandings of knowledge and knowledge generation in and between different disciplines, contesting narratives between the global North and South, a quantification fetish and the

commercialisation of knowledge production and dissemination

Image credit: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dismemberment

Researchers are also torn between different initiatives and pet projects of the different portfolios representing research, teaching, community engagement and academic citizenship…

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Being, becoming a researcher and doing research are therefore fragile notions and

enactments and are found at the intersections of structural, raced and gendered

arrangements in a particular institutional and geopolitical contexts

Final preliminary remark

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Understanding developing and supporting research as ‘field’

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The way management sees the field of research

• Institutional reputation, league tables, & standing and funding

• Attracting high quality scholars and students

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The way researchers see the field of research

• Messy• Slippery• Competitive• Biased i.e.

quantitative/ qualitative, Global North vs Global South, editors and reviewers as gatekeepers

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The way researchers see the publishing process

• Increasingly competitive• Dependent on the interpretation

of rules by different referees• Different sets of rules depending

on the field• The limited space/time to score a

goal

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The first step to building a research culture is a critical and caring understanding of the field

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• The player: Her skills & dispositions

• The field: Discipline, institution – what is acceptable

• Her position on the field: (In)experience, quantitative/ qualitative

• The referee – Rules & implementation of the rules

• The goal - definition• The prize – what is the prize?

How to score, what are the rules, according to whom and what is the prize?

29

[(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice/agency

My habitus - how my context (past and present) (and my understanding thereof) shaped and still shape me

The capital that I have acquired in the process (or not)

The field – the context in which I find myself in. This is not a neutral space, but is, itself, shaped by various structures, and agencies of individuals and collectives

My practice/agency and my understanding thereof…

Adapted from Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. Richard Nice (trans). Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Exploring researcher agency

The player: Her context, history & dispositions

• Gender, race, socio-economic circumstances (past and present)

• Locus of control, self-efficacy• Academic background, standing and networks (past and

present)• Parental/care responsibilities• Research expertise and understanding of the field• Quantitative and/or qualitative/mixed methods

Her position on the field

• Departmental/institutional position/location

• Career trajectory• Disciplinary context• Institutional context and delivery modes• Teaching and research expectations and

workloads• Team composition and team role• The state of the field –

enabling/disempowering• What the other players expect of

her/how the other players see her

The referee – rules & implementation of the rulesMultiple levels of refereeing: • Disciplinary & inter/trans disciplinary gatekeepers • Networks that include and exclude• Journal editors• Reviewers

Multiple sets of rules: • Disciplinary/ epistemological• Technical• Research methodologies• Disciplinary traditions and conventions• Publication conventions (eg referencing styles)

The goal - definition• Publication in a preferred or accredited

journal – ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’• Monographs• Chapters in books• Conference presentations

Let us also consider…• Alternative digital forms of scholarship e.g. blogs, sustained

engagement in micro blogging networks?• Open and peer reviewed scholarship • How our current practices of privileging closed (behind pay

wall) publications sustain the commercialisation of our research

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Guiding pointers for building a research culture

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Pointer 1Research productivity is a dynamic, context-specific, multidimensional

process shaped by mostly interdependent and mutually

constitutive factors in the nexus between the institution, the disciplinary locus of

the research, the researcher

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Pointer 2The researcher has agency, but her

agency is constrained/enabled by other actors in a particular context

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Pointer 3Administrative processes for funding and ethical clearance should be efficient and

as short as possible without compromising accountability or

transparency

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Pointer 4Research is an intentional process sustained by

curiosity• dedication• serendipity

• the value and quality of networks

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Pointer 5While the current research imaginary is based on

a technocratic logic and sustained by a quantification fetish, we must find ways to

embrace, acknowledge and support other forms of scholarship in an increasingly digital and

networked world

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Being, becoming a researcher and doing research are therefore fragile notions and

enactments and are found at the intersections of structural, raced and gendered

arrangements in a particular institutional and geopolitical contexts

(In)conclusion

THANK YOUPaul Prinsloo (Prof)Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)College of Economic and Management Sciences, Office number 3-15, Club 1, Hazelwood, P O Box 392Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa

T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)

prinsp@unisa.ac.za Skype: paul.prinsloo59

Personal blog: http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com

Twitter profile: @14prinsp