Louise Phillips - Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research

1 E-Research

Transformation in Scholarly Practice

Edited by Nicholas W. Jankowski

2. The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society

Edited by Ann Rudinow Stnan, Heidi Mork Lomell, and Svein Hammer

3 Multi-Sited Ethnography

Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods

Edited by Simon Coleman and Pauline von Hellermann

4 Research and Social Change

A Relational Constructionist Approach

Sheila McNamee and Dian Marie Hosking

5 Meta-Regression Analysis in Economics and Business

T.D. Stanley and Hristos Doucouliagos

6 Knowledge and Power in Collaborative Research

A Reflexive Approach

Edited by Louise Phillips, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehvilinen and Ewa Gunnarsson

A Reflexive Approach

Edited by
Louise Phillips, Marianne Kristiansen, Marja Vehvilinen and Ewa Gunnarsson

First published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Knowledge and power in collaborative research : a reflexive approach / edited by Louise Phillips ... [et al.].

p. cm. (Routledge advances in research methods ; 6)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. ResearchSocial aspects. 2. ResearchMethodology.
3. Communication in science. 4. Participant observation.
5. Research and development projectsSocial aspects. I. Phillips, Louise, 1967

Q180.55.S62K66 202

001.4dc23

2012017549

ISBN: 978-0-415-54024-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-08367-3 (ebk)

LOUISE PHILLIPS, MARIANNE KRISTIANSEN, MARJA VEHVILINEN AND EWA GUNNARSSON

MAJA HORST

PAULIINA LEHTONEN

KAREN DONS BLDEL

MARJA VEHVILINEN

ULLA-BRITT LILLEAAS

BIRGITTE RAVN OLESEN AND CHRISTINA HEE PEDERSEN

AGNETE NEIDEL AND TRINE WULF-ANDERSEN

LISBETH FRLUNDE

MARIANNE KRISTIANSEN AND JRGEN BLOCH-POULSEN

RIIKKA HOMANEN

URSULA PLESNER

LOUISE PHILLIPS AND MARIANNE KRISTIANSEN

LOUISE PHILLIPS AND MARIANNE KRISTIANSEN

This book is the product of the collaborative work of the NordForsk Network for the Study of the Dialogic Communication of Research co-ordinated by Louise Phillips (20082012). In cross-disciplinary, cross-national fashion, the network brought together researchers from across four dispersed traditions of research (action research, feminist and poststructuralist research, science and technology studies and dialogic communication theory) from different departments in nine universities in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden: the Department of Communication, Business and Information Technologies and the Department of Psychology and Education, Roskilde University; the Department of Organisation, Copenhagen Business School; the Department of Communication and Psychology and the Department of Philosophy and Education, University of Aalborg; the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen; the School of Social Sciences and Humanities and the School of Communication, Media and Theatre, University of Tampere; the Faculty of Health and Sport, Agder University College; the Department of Human Work Sciences, Lule University of Technology; the Department of Media and Communication Studies, Karlstad University; and the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University.

We would like to thank all members of the network for their active participation and invaluable academic contributions and feedback. We are also grateful to NordForsk for funding the network (project nr. 080149). The book has come about through our participation, as members, in activities organised by the network at Roskilde University, Lule University of Technology and the University of Tampere (see http://dialogue.ruc.dk/). These activities have included several seminars on the topic of the book, a doctoral course, an authors workshop and feedback groups in which members have given ongoing input to the drafts as they have developed. These activities enabled us to bridge the differences between our academic backgrounds and write the book. Together we have walked the talk of collaborative knowledge production and communication. And the steady improvements to our own chapters that we have experienced through the different stages of the collaborative process bear testimony to the transformative power of collaboration across different perspectives.

The case chapters of the book cover a diverse field of empirical contextsfrom the Danish Armed Forces to Finnish NGOs and maternity clinics. We have collaborated with very different partnersfrom Norwegian women suffering from chronic muscular pains to Danish participants in online filmmaking. If these people had not opened their doors to collaboration with us, this book would never have been written. In these different contexts, we met challenges emanating from tensions integral to working across different knowledge interests, but also possibilities of learning with our partners. We are grateful for these opportunities and want to thank all our partners.

In research policy, collaboration is valued and encouraged as part of the dialogic turn in research governance. But at the same time, collaborative forms of knowledge production and communication are routinely given less credit in academic performance measurements. This, we think, points at contradictions in the current mode of research governance, emanating from the articulation of two conflicting discoursesthe discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment and the discourse of the knowledge economy. The discourse of dialogue, participation and empowerment constructs knowledge production as a collaborative enterprise in which we are encouraged to produce interdisciplinary and practice-relevant knowledge in networks with other researchers and practitioners. Contrastingly, the knowledge economy discourse has strong neoliberal elements, and positions us as individually responsible and accountable with respect to meeting the performance requirements of the knowledge economy.

The contradictions arising from the conflict between these discourses are in play in many ways in our everyday research practices. They are present, for instance, in the crosscutting pressures to collaborate with others across subject areas, departments, universities and countries, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to compete with colleagues for funding and publish individual articles in top, international, peer-reviewed journals. In the face of the challenges of doing collaborative research under these conditions, we hope that the productive nature of the process of writing this book and the fruitfulness of the research projects that form the cases of the book represent an argument in themselves for collaborative forms of research.