Introduction

This chapter draws on data from a UK research council-funded project ‘The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics Writing in the Contemporary University Workplace’. The field that has come to be known as ‘academic writing’ has largely focused on student learning and support. We took a different, workplace approach, exploring the writing that staff in a range of higher education institutions do as part of their work, interviewing and observing people from different disciplinary and career backgrounds. We worked with full-time academics and administrative staff at different career stages, across three disciplines (Maths, History and Marketing) and three institutions chosen to illustrate the range that exists in the UK. In this chapter, I focus on the data from academic staff, but the division of labour between academics and support staff is an important aspect of the working context, especially in relation to digital technologies.

Writing work is at the heart of knowledge production in many cultures, and the university has traditionally been a pivotal and highly valued site for this. We argue that writing practices offer a window through which the changing institutional environment, values and strategies that constitute academic work can be explored (see Tusting et al, 2019). These writing practices are, in part, professional (assembled within wider disciplinary networks) and, in part, institutional (assembled through immediate university affiliations and employment), and while we did not ask directly, we expect our data to be able to tell us something about resistance and complicity.

We interviewed people several times, exploring their practices, their life histories, their institutional and disciplinary contexts, and the tools and resources that they draw on as they write. We documented the activities in which people engage on a day-to-day basis, including teaching, administrative and service-related writing tasks. We took a socio-material approach to our study (see Edwards et al, 2015), looking at both physical and discursive aspects of academics’ experience and the networks that sustain these. We looked at material artefacts handled and produced by staff, not only written texts, but also devices like mobile phones, and we observed the buildings and other spaces where academic teaching and writing work was carried out. While the research-based book or journal article is the ‘gold standard’ for success as an academic, participants mentioned a wide range of writing activities in their interviews with us (see Box 9.1).