Improvising in Research

Abstract

If today’s professional training “does not prepare practitioners for working outside established organizational practices” (TLRP, 2009, p. 17), this is because it seeks higher levels of standardization on the presumption that order, coherence and similarity should overcome difference. Its research economy is uncreative, and, afraid of exposure to an “outside”, professionalized practices are frequently preoccupied with “cycles of repetition and self-serving arguments” (Cole, 2009, p. 121). Central to this is the pressing issue of freedom to actually think about practice without becoming what Brossat and Rogozinski (2009, p. 35) call “the good little drones of blueprinted ‘research’ ”. The same concern also informs Stronach and Clarke’s (2011) call for more innovation and creativity. Professional competence, they state, is no more than a palliative slogan which evades the central problem of the heterogeneity of the real, thus failing to prepare practitioners for it. The heterogeneity they see in complexity demands an ability to respond to the unpredictable by improvising, where improvisation describes the activity of responding creatively to unpredictable events.