Understanding academic work as practical activity – and preparing (business‐school) academics for praxis?

Reconceptualising academic work as professional practice: implications for academic development

“…There is a complex and multi-faceted set of practices in this area, each with its own tradition. Practice theory has already been used in discussing a professional development programme for new academics (Räsänen, 2009) and to provide a critique of proposed compulsory teacher training for academics (Trowler & Bamber, 2005). We wish to go beyond these specific foci and propose practice as a new overarching frame that will accommodate some features from current academic development practice memory, but that will challenge others.…”

Academic Knowledge Production: Framework of Practical Activity in the Context of Transformative Food Studies

“…Although we are driven by the need to reflect on the academic practice of knowledge production by drawing on the context of transformative food studies, this article stems from our own experiences of participating in academic practices in the global North that may not be relevant to all transformative food scholars. However, we believe that making the local struggles of scholars visible also reveals how what appears possible and impossible has been translocally institutionalized into academic practices of knowledge production (Räsänen, 2009;Stengers, 2017).…”

“…Despite the several "turns to practice" within the social sciences (Ortner, 1984;Reckwitz, 2002;Miettinen et al, 2009), it is not common for academics to turn to one's own research practice to reflect on how knowledge is produced, why scholars perform research in particular ways, and what they pursue in doing so (Eikeland andNicolini, 2011, p. 166, Stengers, 2017, but see also Räsänen, 2012Räsänen, , 2014Parker, 2018). In this sense, we are not advocating for scholars to bridge the gap between "theory" and "practice" (see e.g., Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011;Derickson and Routledge, 2015;Routledge and Derickson, 2015); rather, we seek to bring forth an understanding of academic research as a particular practice (Bourdieu, 1990;Räsänen, 2009) that is characterized by knowledge production (Kuhn, 1970;Stengers, 2017). Understanding and being capable of reflecting on one's own research practice is important not only because this enables academic scholars to (1) be more conscious about their research designs and theory development, and (2) improve processes of knowledge production (Nicolini, 2009), but also because (3) academic practice may be part of the problem when researchers reproduce the underlying paradigms that have led to the ongoing ecological, economical and societal crises in the first place (Stengers, 2017).…”

Fire and water combined: Understanding the Relevance of Working Life Studies through a Concept of Practical Activity

“…This broader understanding of practicality is not in vogue in these times, but it has lived long. The concept of practical activity is in fact a reinterpretation and reinstrumentalization of the Aristotelian idea of praxis (Räsänen 2009). We are hardly ever practical in this strict sense of praxis, for we cannot usually resolve all the four basic issues and in a coherent way.…”

“…We have developed it to enable the articulation and description of particular forms of work in educational, developmental, and participatory research contexts. For instance, in the course on academic work participants are asked to articulate their goals, and thereby the goals become an object of reflection and possible revision (Räsänen 2009). Moreover, participants make joint inquiries in the specter of possible goals and in the influences that bear on individuals when they unknowingly adopt or consciously choose certain goals.…”