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OHN is 10 years old! (more or less)

So that seemed a good moment for some reflections on academic communities

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Nov 21

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I should really check when I first set up and posted on OHN… but I dare say it was pretty much 10 years ago, so I am declaring today’s post the 10-year anniversary post. (But it may be 11, or an unknown number of months between them.) And in light of this feat of personal endurance, I wanted to write a more reflective post, prompted by an article I recently read online.

It’s a tricky experience entering a new field, especially if you are a new researcher. But even established researchers, over the course of their career, will find themselves entering, or at least engaging with, new research fields or “epistemic communities”. With that comes a new language, new “authorities” or canonical references, and the rather curious social dimensions of how communities build up shared trust and ways of doing things that can be idiosyncratic at best and potentially hostile at its worst.

While the attendant “lingo” may appear unnecessary, much of the knowledge built up in epistemic communities seeks to solve issues that emerge from addressing new problems, questions, methods and data. Not only is this common in business and management subjects – both in terms of the big subject areas or disciplines, and the smaller communities within (or indeed cutting across) them. It’s also more common to engage with more than one community, either briefly or in a sustained career move into a new field, or as part of a commitment to interdisciplinary research.

Enter academic boundary work

Any researcher going beyond the (often narrow) confines of their own field (which, realistically are a lot of us) will have experienced something else that comes with epistemic communities: boundary work. This does not just refer to the policing of who is in or out of a community, but also to the complex work of researcher identity: what communities do you belong to and how do you signal this. Purely by chance I came across a really good post/article the other day discussing this subject:

Gunn, H. K. (2020). Reflections on Boundary Work on Social Epistemology. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 9(8), 1–12. https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-5fH

“Boundary work” refers to the practice of establishing and defining research areas, which in part involves locating research questions or topics within particular disciplines. … Boundary work establishes the norms and the common ground between researchers, for example, by specifying some substantive commitments around topic, method, or theoretical framework.

A lot of what this article described sounded very familiar to me, even though it referred to the field of social epistemology – even a field that investigates knowledge production shows its own “tribal” patterns of knowledge production.

What I found particularly interesting about the piece was how much of it hinged on the interpersonal elements of boundary work: how much of the knowledge we create, disseminate and adapt is subject to social factors. Obviously, not a new insight, but it is not something that we foreground in academic writing. It provides the rich backdrop to academic life that new scholars and those with interdisciplinary research careers have to negotiate anew all the time.

After the paywall, we go into the good and the bad of academic boundary work (overall more good than bad) — and a lot of it is more general than we might think...