Down and out at the British Library and other dens of co-production

Abstract

As part of a searching for scholarly relevance, there is growing interest in how academics and practitioners might work together to produce knowledge. We offer reflections on our experiences as an academic and a practitioner co-creating a research project about leadership in UK public sector organizations. Using an autoethnographic approach we explore how we have engaged in becoming co-researchers, interactive processes which entail a multiplicity of identities and struggles with organizational and professional pressures. We suggest a way of thinking about academic-practitioner research interactions which emphasizes that, rather than forming a communion accomplished in a space beyond politics, they remain as situated and unsettling interactions. Our contribution is to offer a counterpoint to accounts of co-production which present collaborative research as a process of fusion; instead we portray it as involving relations between protagonists which are mutually constituting and uplifting but also at times disturbing and debilitating.

Visual Inquiry: Exploring Embodied Organizational Practices by Collaborative Film-Elicitation

“…Facilitated sensemaking consists of action research–based interventions of co-generative learning and social mediation exploring how practitioners create meaningful understanding. This approach can be used to study identity dynamics accommodating conflict and diversity, and how ambiguities are resolved and create shared understanding (Orr & Bennett, 2012). Emergent-sensing is about eliciting, articulating, and making sense of endogenous and exogenous changes by connecting past and present experiences with future possibilities (Shotter & Tsoukas, 2014).…”

Local Government Chief Executives’ Everyday Hauntings: Towards a Theory of Organizational Ghosts

“…The organizations were of different sizes in terms of geographical boundaries and of different council types -one county council, one borough council and one unitary council, and my chief executive participants were two men and one woman. The observational research is embedded in a parallel study (Orr & Bennett, 2012a, 2012b which has involved interviews with 35 chief executives, focusing on leadership and learning and during which, as the theme of ghosts has emerged, I have taken the opportunity to ask interviewees about the resonance of ghosts as part of their everyday practice and to invite reflection on what Gergen calls 'remembered persons' to surface the influence of absent colleagues and other intimate figures on the everyday learning and sensemaking practices of chief executives. Access has varied but a typical visit lasted 3 to 5 days and was repeated for a minimum of four occasions in each case.…”

Working With Differences in Everyday Interactions through Anticipational Fluidity: A Hermeneutic Perspective

“…We recognize that the need to express and work out differences in responsive dialogue is challenging work and that positive mutual relationships can be difficult to achieve in practice. Orr and Bennett (2012, p. 13), for example, experience the ‘unsettling interplay of identities’, the dynamic differences of theory/practice and personal/professional, academic/practitioner, and the politics of co-production in their research. Sharma and Kearins (2011) also note that collaboration is both a relational (in the sense of involving ‘problematic processes of social engagement’, p. 170) and political process because of the often asymmetrical interdependencies of individuals.…”