Writing in its various forms and formats is an essential feature of academic labour and of creating and recording impact. Yet finding and making best use of precious time to write emerges as a major challenge for many academics, especially for those in the earlier stages of their careers. For that reason, we have chosen in this chapter to explicate ways in which we conceived, approached and carried out this writing project.
What we hoped for did not quite turn out to be the case. In this chapter we discuss both those hopes and unanticipated realities, and the connections between the two as the book progressed. Research projects never quite go to plan, and this was certainly so here. The turbulence that we faced during this publication project is not unique in higher education today, particularly in smaller institutions, where the freedom to take on projects that are regarded as tangential to the ‘day job’ becomes seemingly harder to justify or assert. It is for these reasons that this chapter reads more like a story set deep in the subjective work of getting this book published, rather than about the objective neatness that one often finds in discussions of methodology and methods.
As co-editors, our general invitation to contributors was to write about ‘what you know’, or in phenomenological terms to explore their lifeworld (Bernet et al., 1993). That said, we were sceptical of the idea of ‘bracketing out’ (Gearing, 2004), or suspending our preconceptions, that is often associated with phenomenology in order for people to explore experience. Rather, we assumed that we all act, learn, react and carry on as individuals, and that ‘bracketing out’ would downplay the social and ethical nature of our endeavour. We are drawn to the notion of the individual and social being part of the same process of human interdependence in ways that are explored by Ralph Stacey and colleagues (Stacey & Griffin, 2005), who draw on the work of the pragmatist philosophers George Herbert Mead (Mead, 1934) and John Dewey (Dewey, 1934). In this way, we treated inquiry and writing as social processes that can enhance noticing and exploration of what we find obvious in our everyday practices, accentuated through the interest, encouragement and curiosity of others.
Many of the methods we have chosen to illuminate here aim to show how various strands and relationships come together to create impact within the business school, locally and beyond. We made a conscious decision to encourage contributors to focus beyond what is currently seen to have official value, for example, the number of publications in star-rated journals, or students who are in graduate employment a few months after leaving university, or prominent positions in the various league tables. Throughout, we have encouraged contributors to adopt a rigorous, critically reflective and reflexive perspective, in keeping with the spirit of ‘writing differently’ (Gilmore et al., 2019). Reflecting trends in ‘the digital turn’ (Kergel & Heidkamp, 2017)1 we aimed to give voice to multiple perspectives from people (not only from ‘academic staff’) who are sharing their own lived experiences of being associated with their local business school in a variety of ways.
This chapter does not include a discussion of the specific methods used by other chapter authors, which are addressed appropriately in their respective chapters.