Westminster Business School Blog One summer of an academic

One summer of an academic

September 17, 2014
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Welcome back to all at the start of an exciting new academic year. At this time of year with students all arriving from undergrads to taught masters and doctoral students, we are all busy cranking the new year into life and settling into the routine we are all familiar with. Of course, we all work together and our labours are visible within the traditional structure of the teaching semesters, but often less visible, and more isolated, during the periods outside that. Some colleagues and I were discussing the activities that we had been engaged in during the summer and thought it might be an idea to share some of those stories, starting with myself.

Research Activities

Summer is the traditional time, while the university is quieter, to concentrate more fully on research activities, although the work of research director carries on. Tasks and events need to be planned, a period of reflection on past tasks and events can be undertaken, and of course the centre continues to operate in terms of requests for information, planning for the new academic year and ongoing issues. In terms of professorial duties, research students are also busy in the summer, and need to be supported and supervised and of course the requirement of this role to produce research and generate income has to be fulfilled. In terms of this, this summer has been quite bizarre. Last summer the REF dominated my summer activities, both in terms of being on the university REF (Research Excellence Framework – a UK-wide audit and funding exercise) committee as one of the panel C lead’s deputies, and in terms of preparing our faculty submission as Unit of Assessment 19 (Business and Management) lead. This means that this summer I felt I was already very behind in terms of my personal research, particularly being up-to-date with all the relevant journals and developments in my field. This was my first priority research wise, and I did what can only be described as a bulk reading of those journals, being selective in relation to the specific areas I am researching, but also looking at those journals to see the papers that are most read/cited which might not be directly in my area. It’s a good idea to spot what’s hot!

Another major research task this summer was a journal revision for a 3* journal in my field (Journals are rated 1-4* so publishing in a 3* journal is very demanding). The paper is about how child sibling relationships influence family consumption patterns and we submitted the paper originally in early 2013, having done the research using funding we won from the Academy of Marketing in 2012. We got what the journal called a “high risk” revise and resubmit decision and to be honest, the reviewers were spot on with its shortcomings so we decided we needed some considerable rethinking about the theoretical and empirical contributions, which took, with the rewrite, about 10 months to complete. This came back this summer with a minor revisions decision. However, the minor revisions were not as minor as I might have hoped, but required a restructuring of the paper, so this was a summer task, just submitted back to the journal for the next decision, so fingers crossed!

Research Funding

During this process myself and my co-authors also started to put together the bones of a research proposal on this topic for a bid for research funding, focusing on one particular area in-depth. We became very interested in situations where children were treated differently by their parents in terms of consumption purchases. Sometimes, we found, children accept differential treatment by parents, particularly if they could see a clear reason behind it and this seemed to result in closer, more harmonious sibling relationships. However, in some cases this differential treatment seemed to have a more negative outcome and resulted in heightened sibling rivalry, even sibling bullying. We want to explore these two outcomes of family consumption patterns in more depth, and with a larger sample and as such we need some research funding.

Consumption decisions within families supporting a dependent elderly parent, a growing trend given our ageing population

During this summer I also got involved in two new research projects, the first is looking at consumption decisions within families supporting a dependent elderly parent, a growing trend given our ageing population. I am not leading on this, but my involvement resulted from going to a conference late last academic year and striking up a conversation about a working paper I had seen presented. The authors subsequently approached me to collaborate with them, as they needed specific help developing the theoretical contribution towards submitting to a journal and I agreed. After a very lively meeting this is progressing nicely, and I’ve managed to construct a theoretical contribution to the identity theory literature that I think fits well with the data and literature. I always welcome opportunities like this, as my strength I think is in theory development and if that is my “job” within the project I feel very content!

Effectiveness of social marketing campaigns aimed at men’s health

The second new project developed this summer is about the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns aimed at men’s health, this is a relatively new area for me, stimulated by a new research colleague and so I have had to do a significant amount of reading around the subject this summer to develop this work. The proposed project has just successfully completed our ethics application system, via the VRE. The ethics procedure seemed onerous at first; especially when parts A and B are involved, as with this project. However, the questions asked have resulted in an improvement of the project’s aims and the proposed methodological procedures I think. Overall it was a positive process.

My main writing colleague and I have four different projects at present at various stages, the sibling research outlined above, technology and children , the home production of food and family consumption and obesity. As such we have had regular meetings throughout the summer to discuss and progress them in turn. All of them have been to conferences at the end of last academic year, and have performed well apart from our project on family consumption patterns and obesity, focusing on “yo-yo” dieters, this needs a complete rethink and new data to be collected, I don’t think people got it. My ‘secondary’ research writing groups have two projects ongoing, (social marketing and men’s health, elderly parents and family consumption), also at different stages and we also met over the summer to move these forward. The summer is a good time to set aside a day or two exclusively to blitz a specific project, a luxury we often do not have during the rest of the year. I find these intensive days incredibly useful and productive (and enjoyable).

Academia is based in part on academic “gift giving” without which the whole system would collapse, so the summer is a good time to engage in the activities which fit within this category, e.g. catch up with writing peer reviews for journals, chair at/co-organise conferences, guest edit journals (or seek out opportunities to). In terms of this activity this summer I caught up with no less than 12 peer reviews (!) and I also voluntarily counselled a couple of PhD students, supervised by people I know within the discipline, who needed help developing a specific theoretical contribution. I also agreed to contribute to an edited volume on Actor Network Theory, so began to sketch out a chapter. Although there is no direct payback for engaging in gift-giving activities I find that any discussion (even in that strange peer review process form) about research helps me to think through my own work, and clarifies issues for me, or stimulates new thinking.
Research, for me, and I suspect for most people, works in several cycles at which any given project goes through the cycle – hopefully all the projects are at different stages. My preferred cycle for research is idea generation, reading, data collection, reading, writing up as a working paper and presentation or poster, presentation to various friendly audiences, reading, re writing up as a full paper, conference submission and presentation, reading/rewriting as a journal article, submission to a journal/resubmission/rewriting/resubmission (and so on!).

I have projects at most of these cycle points and the summer is a good time to step back and review my research activity as a whole, how does it fit together? Is it sustainable? Is it practical/doable? Do I have enough work coming through the cycle to be on target for REF submission? Do I need any new projects? Where are they coming from? Where do my PhD students fit in? Where do my various writing colleagues fit in? Might research councils be interested in funding this? Does it fit with specific research council’s priorities? How might I adapt it to make it so? I would probably add to this now, as the research world moves forward looking for impact of research, what other audiences might be interested in my research? Who are they? Is it interesting or valuable outside academia? These newer questions, for me at least, are areas I’m engaging with in my own professional development as a researcher.

At the end of the day, I find the summer is a great time to do all of the above, but it’s also important to have some downtime, recharge the brain cells and switch the computer off, hence my other summer activities of a road trip up the East Coast of Scotland, and a week “staycation” in the wonderful city of Leeds. These were also most welcome and enjoyable!

This blog is written by Shona Bettany