The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics' Writing Practices in the Contemporary University Workplace

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The proposed study will investigate how knowledge is produced, shaped and distributed through the writing practices of academic staff working across a range of disciplines and at different career stages within the contemporary English HE system. Academic writing practices of various kinds (scholarly, pedagogic, and 'impact' writing) are central to the enterprise of higher education. It is largely through these writing practices that universities achieve their central objectives, against which the success of different institutions is measured. Available digital resources, increased managerialism and the internationalization of higher education are reorganizing the socio-material contexts within which academics carry out their writing work. This study aims to inform future innovation, productivity and teacher training in HE through a better understanding the dynamics of these interconnected processes. The study will inform ideas about how the mission of the university sector can best be supported and developed in challenging times, when demands for greater accountability, increasing numbers of students, resourcing decisions, technologies and changes in the understanding of academics' roles are transforming the work of professionals in higher education. The writing practices of academic staff in nine disciplinary sites will be followed over a year, through a combination of interviews, close ethnographic observation of both online and offline writing activities, and analysis of the wider organizational context. These methods will generate a multi-modal data set which will be analysed through the theoretical lenses of literacy studies and social material theory. Literacy studies draws attention to how participants perform everyday tasks and enact "being an academic" in organizational settings. They link methodologically with studies of everyday practice and involve the close observation of textually-mediated interactions. Socio-material theory articulates the importance of both people and material artefacts in networks of activity. This approach identifies the trajectories of texts, how they circulate and co-ordinate activities across multiple sites; and reveals the underlying physical and information architecture of contemporary practices.Combining these approaches will lead us to analyse elements of the everyday experience and activities of participants including: social networks and relationships; the purposes for academic writing and the location of these within the dynamics of other competing purposes and types of writing; resources and tools including digital and other technologies and library/learning resources; the distribution of academic activities across space and time; and disciplinary and institutional domains including activities of research, teaching, administration, consultancy and service.