SSPEL Newsletter: Research and Scholarly Activities

Gareth Long and Jamie Oxley attended the 4th UK Coaching Summit in Glasgow April 28-29 attending a range of workshops addressing the current issues, models of good practice and research relating to 'The UK Coaching Framework'. The conference marked the completion of the 'building the foundations' stage of the UK Coaching Framework 3-7-11.

On day 2 the presentation of the Coaching Workforce 2009-2016 document to all the 500+ delegates saw the official launch of the next stage of 'flight 3-7-11' (Duffy 2009), Delivering the Goals.

The event proved very informative for both Gareth and myself with a considerable amount of information to digest and disseminate. It was also a great opportunity to network catching up with new and old faces with some excellent contacts made to support the development of coaching at UCP Marjon.

Jamie Oxley

This was a nice small and manageable conference hosted by Plymouth Uni. It offered some presentations and some roundtable discussions to a nice mixture of senior and junior avcademnics and postgrad students - -and one interloper (me). They were very welcoming to interlopers, and even invited me to their shared evening meal (but a very painful Achilles tendon meant I had to slope off home and take some painkillers).

I particularly enjoyed a presentation on Cornish studies by J Willett of Exeter University, which covered issues such as economic regeneration of Cornwall through tourism heritage, authenticity and the like ( although in slightly different terms). The ensuing roundtable discussion on objectivity led by G Letherby, J Scott and M Williams, talked of objectivity as a relative term and as a subjective accomplishment. The audience was engaged and insightful. Next day we had an excellent presentation on visual methods and their uses in research, which included examples in leisure and tourism.

Marjon students on the MA SPD could do well to attend future versions. University colleagues made clear they would be very welcome.

Off to sunny London to celebrate the launch of the new book by Baker D and Evans W on digital library economics, published by Chandos. The launch was held in the New Academic Building at the LSE (I went there -- nice to see the old place doing so well). More delicious anomie for me, but I had a useful time chatting to the contributors, who turned out to be a pretty high-powered bunch. I found myself swapping ideas for research (again) with Principals and Professors. This book is a major event beyond any doubt.

I also chatted up the publishers' reps, as always, to find out what was selling well and if there were any gaps in the market.

We also talked about e-book readers and which one was likely to win the battle of the formats. I like the elegant Sony, but smart money seemed to be on the Kindle as soon as Amazon get their UK act together and find someone to host their online ordering system (a kind of i-tunes for books). The Chandos people also said publishers are changing to suit e-reading - publishing individual chapters, for example, so you could search for all the relevant stuff on, say, digital libraries in the EU and download six or seven chapters from different books. Can't wait! I also said I fancied reading fiction that way too -- a chapter of Jane Austen then a chapter of Moby Dick, maybe mixed with a chapter from Capital Vol 1 -- but they looked at me as if I were strange

As part of my onerous duties, I had to attend a conference run by The Quality in London. I am not a quality person, and I felt deliciously anomic, but I picked up some tips about the key documents used by QAA to guide their institutional audits. They include an interesting FHEQ (everything is acronyms in Quality Land) -- a Framework for Higher Education Qualifications, which defines what counts as a PhD as opposed to a Masters degree etc. We also had some practical tips for getting through an institutional audit.
Every bit as useful was the chat I had with colleagues from big active unis on how they had managed to get research going and growing. Huddersfield especially seemed very successful.
I also got some advice on things like which open repository software to consider (a database that we could use to publish our research outputs). The main choice seems to be something called EPrints,although there is also some kit called IntraLibrary. I use the OU's one quite a lot and the sooner we get one the better.

Sociology conferences used to be lively counter-cultural affairs in the 1970s, when I first went to one. A well-known American professor of sociology used to have parties in his (student) accommodation every night. In the interests of positive discrimination, he would often make sure that young and attractive girls were over-represented. One evening, moans, groans and appeals to the Almighty were heard in the early hours, and his neighbours simply assumed that the party had escalated to a new level. In fact, the professor had fallen in his shower and broken a leg. He was found next morning and treated before dying of exposure.

The 2009 conference was a much more sedate affair, held in the Victorian splendour of Cardiff City Hall. Victorian splendour used to just look rather comically self important, but this year there was an unfortunate undertone of unearned wealth and bankers' bonuses. Attendance was rather thin. Although the conference had a main theme – globalization – other streams were well populated. My own paper (Work and Leisure in Higher Education) was given on the first day, and attracted a small but enthusiastic audience, and that left me free to enjoy the rest of the event. My co-presenters in the same session reported findings from their own project on the impact of university expansion on city regeneration. There seem to be interesting contradictory effects: on the one hand, university expansion brings jobs to city regions; on the other student ghettos arise and this introduces unwelcome fluctuations in property values and community life.

For many, the highlights were the sub-plenaries. I chose the ones which focused on my specific interests. Alan Warde led the session on his interests in consumerism and the sociology of culture, and reported some of the findings from the long running ESRC project which sets out to apply the work of Bourdieu to modern Britain. This project has finally produced a substantial book as well, available only in hardback so far. Several other contributory elements have led to publications in the journal Cultural Sociology (e.g. Warde et al 2007) . Brown and Lauder reported their findings of their long running ESRC project on the notion of the ‘knowledge economy’ in another sub-plenary. This project has also been reported in several publications already (including an online ESRC Report) , and offers a sceptical discussion on current government policy to use the education system to generate highly skilled graduates who will compete in the global economy (Brown & Lauder 2006). Both of these substantial projects seem to me to reflect the classic concerns of sociology such as social stratification, and its effects on education, jobs, and culture.

Among the other sessions that I attended was a very interesting discussion on the problems of teaching research methods. I found myself in a group of people who teach to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate audiences, by no means all of them sociologists. Those who still teach in elite universities to single honours sociology students were actually rather surprised to find that the rest of us were encountering serious difficulties and that methods courses were deeply unpopular. When we eventually got on to the sorts of solutions that would meet our concerns, a number of interesting possibilities arose. There seemed to be general consensus that methods courses should be practical and hands on. There was also widespread interest in online resources as a solution to one of the major problems of research methods courses – covering a wide enough syllabus without boring student specialists. I passed on a link to my own online research methods database on the Conference Forum.

Finally, I attended a session on methodological innovations, focusing especially on the notion of social networks and how to research them. I became interested in this topic having reviewed some work on visual methods, and having come across various methodological ‘turns’ in the process, especially the ‘narrative turn’, and the ‘performative turn’. People presenting in this session used techniques such as ‘walking fieldwork’ for example, where a researcher learns about the subjective dimensions of networking and place by walking round the area with a resident, and listening to accounts triggered off by visiting particular places.

Other than the sessions attended, I spent the usual time networking, chatting up publishers, asking them what their best sellers were in particular fields, and where they thought the new trends in the market would go. I also met one of two of the Great and Good, had a chat, and picked up a few bits of intelligence about research and publication.

It is a sign of having had a good conference that one returns determined to follow up some of the issues. Since leaving Cardiff, and processing my notes, I have traced the course of the two major ESRC projects I mention and acquainted myself thoroughly with both of them. Both are very important. I have swapped notes and emails with several other colleagues about teaching methods, and I have been thinking about using walking fieldwork in a small project of my own in the local area. That small project will be a contribution to a local community regeneration effort – an unusually ‘practical’ outcome for me!

I hope the presentations will be available on the conference website in due course.

Dave Harris

References

Brown, P. & Lauder, H. (2006) 'Globalisation, knowledge and the myth of the magnet economy', in Globalisation, Societies and Education 4(1): 25-57

Warde, A., Wright, D., & Gayo-Cal, M. (2007). Understanding Cultural Omnivorousness: Or, the Myth of the Cultural Omnivore. Cultural Sociology 1(2): 143—64.