The Craft of Scholarship and Research in a Changing University and Civic Context

This editorial describes a January 2023 initiative by the Human Service Organizations Journal to identify elements informing the future craft of scholarship and research in a changing university and civic context. The initiative is couched in the need for more diverse approaches to scholarship and research in university and community-based practice settings. Fundamentally, the initiative seeks to be attentive to the context, content, and consequences of knowledge development and sharing. Contextually, it acknowledges that the number of faculty positions may be declining, and the scholarly and research demands being placed onto academics may be growing; while the number of non-faculty positions in public and private research institutions, and their scholarly and research interests and needs, may be rising. The initiative also recognizes the content-based need for a more responsive and inclusive scholarship and research that seeks to address longstanding and new practical dilemmas in the human services. Finally, it seeks to identify consequential opportunities to support future contributors who are drawn from academic and non-academic settings, and more diverse types of contributions.

The initiative is couched in the overarching question of “What should and can academic journal editors do?” Our assertion is that editors should anticipate and address the emerging needs of future contributors, whose scholarship and research should be attentive to changing societal, institutional, and local demands and interests. Our stance also reflects a belief and a value that academic journal editors and their boards need to be both reactive (in reflecting upon past and current scholarship and research) and proactive (in envisioning and investing in future scholarship and research). The orientation reflects a basic approach to the development of organizational initiatives and the support of the managers and leaders within them, in order to be responsive to changing needs and times. For example, in the human service sector, consideration is given to the identification and development of an inclusive and responsive workforce, in order to sustain the design, development, and delivery of effective human services. Analogously, in academic scholarship and research, attention is paid to the cultivation of current and future contributors, and to the support and advancement of their craftspersonship.

We recognize that from the traditional vantage point of academic journals, this orientation may seem unusual if not radical. However, this journal has on occasion identified the need to break from historical precedents in an effort to acknowledge current realities and anticipated future growth needs. A current example can be seen in the rebranding of the journal from Administration in Social Work to Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership, & Governance. The effort acknowledged the need to be responsive to changing understandings of the mission of the journal (from its original focus upon U.S. social work organizational practice, to a broader emphasis on international perspectives on human service delivery at multiple levels of interprofessional practice) and its contributors and readers (including academic scholar-researchers as well as leading practitioners engaged in human service work). Yet amidst these developments, the core goal of the journal in reflecting upon major scholarly and practice contributions, and identifying future opportunities, has remained.

Our January 2023 initiative therefore engaged with established contributors to this journal, in order to support the future efforts of scholar-researchers in university and community-based settings. The initiative took the form of a qualitative needs assessment that involved the sharing of open-ended survey questions with our journal’s Editorial Advisory Board concerning the following research questions:

1. How should academic faculty and community-based scholar-researchers prepare themselves to be successful in the new university and civic environment?;

2. What strategies do scholar-researchers use in starting or changing research projects in response to new opportunities and challenges?; and

3. What practical suggestions can be offered to help faculty and community-based investigators carry out scholarly and research projects?

Qualitative analyses of the open-ended responses have led to the development of three editorials across Issues 3 through 5 of this current volume.

The editorials on the three research questions lay out an array of reflections and strategies that many have found to be useful in organizing their research and scholarship in response to the challenges of collaborating with agency-based partners amidst increased grant-seeking and publication pressures. These editorials are designed to provide inclusive and practical perspectives for early-career and more experienced investigators, as they are framing their scholarship and research from their bases in academia, and as community-based collaborators focused upon human service settings.

In the next section, we provide a basic rationale for the initiative that focuses upon the need for academic journals to be attentive to the changing craft of scholarship and research. We then describe the implementation of the initiative and identify the survey questions asked; these survey questions support forthcoming editorials in this volume. We conclude by proposing ways for the future editorials to support current and future scholar-researchers and those leaders who are responsible for knowledge development and sharing in academia and community settings.

Academic journals should assess the evolving needs of contributors

Among contributors (including peer reviewers and authors) and readers of the journal, the shared aims of the journal have been clear. They involve: (1) advancing the contributions of past and current scholarship and research (often embodied in the careful review, critiquing, and improvement of key literatures and studies); and (2) exploration and analysis of the practice-based needs and challenges expressed by public and private (often nonprofit) human service organizations, and those individuals and groups within and surrounding them.

These two aims are reflected in the longstanding partnership of the journal with the Network for Social Work Management. They can also be seen in our encouraging of manuscript contributors to ensure that manuscripts for this journal reflect the central preoccupations of human service organizational and management scholar-researchers and practitioners. It should be noted that journals such as ours often require sustained reflection to determine whether a specific manuscript is on an important, relevant, and timely topic. Journals thus reflect the presence of the past and present, with little attention to future considerations paid to articles other than the brief comments in Discussion sections on “Implications for Future Scholars, Researchers, and Practitioners.”

Yet for journals such as ours to thrive, they must find ways to be relevant to future scholar-researchers and practitioners. To sustain itself, it is important for a journal to (3) anticipate future scholarly, research, and practical needs and find ways for contributors to address them. This third aim has a focus upon the identification and support of future contributors. Put simply from a supply-chain management perspective, without a steady stream of contributors of high-quality manuscripts and peer reviews on vital and novel topics, a journal may be threatened with irrelevance, consolidation, or extinction. An example of this journal thinking ahead to future needs can be seen in the special issue on the future of human service organizational and management research (McBeath & Hopkins, 2019; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23303131.2019.1680023). The 10 commentaries comprising the special issue identified critical challenges facing organizational and management practitioners, and proposed ways to advance future scholarship and research.

Since the publication of the special issue in 2019, the need to support the future scholarly, research, and practice-based needs of contributors has only grown in response to COVID-19, further evidence of racism and economic inequities, and rising calls for anti-oppressive practice in academia and in community settings (Hudson et al., 2022). In social work, journal editors and leading authors have started to find ways to engage with a more practical scholarship and research that reflects the essential forms of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (Herrenkohl, 2022). Such commentaries have sought to frame the scholarly and research enterprise around “just research” (Waller et al., 2022) and have invited scholar-researchers to transition from “scientific technicians to changemakers” (Delva & Abrams, 2022). Other reflections have encouraged academic and community-based institutions to develop needed policies, programs, and practices in order to redress longstanding gender- and race-based disparities in the development and sharing of scholarship and research (Mogro-Wilson et al., 2022). The goal of making social work and applied social science scholarship and research more just and equitable cannot be in dispute. Nor is the aspiration that journals should cultivate the critical efforts of emerging and more experienced scholar-researchers.

What remains unclear, however, is how journals can nurture the critical efforts of emerging and more experienced scholar-researchers. During the pandemic, being supportive has involved working with individual peer reviewers and contributors, often by extending review times for reviews and resubmissions. For our journal, being supportive also involves the identification of the scholarly, research, and practical needs of contributors who seek to partner with and support human service organizational leaders and their stakeholders.

Academic journals are much too unwieldy and have access to too few resources from publishers and university sponsors to carry out systematic needs assessments in a timely fashion, particularly those that involve multiple perspectives and forms of assessment. Therefore, our initiative to identify the anticipated needs of scholar-researchers involved a brief, exploratory needs assessment organized around the perspectives of contributors to the Human Service Organizations Journal. It was important to explore how diverse authors and peer reviewers see their practical scholarship and research changing; how they pick and change research topics; and how they carry out scholarly and research projects to fruition.

We therefore decided upon a purposive sampling frame of the members of our distinguished Editorial Advisory Board, who have written for our journal and served as peer reviewers for full-length research articles, Learning from the Field case presentations, and editorials and essays. It should be recognized that the sample primarily reflected university-based professors and community-based investigators, all of whom have significant expertise and experience as scholars, researchers, and practitioners in human service settings. This sampling strategy was intended to give members an opportunity to reflect upon their institutional contexts in research- and teaching-focused universities and affiliated research institutes who are engaged in scholarship, research, and university and civic service.

We hoped that members would share their reflections as scholar-researchers who are increasingly expected to sustain community-based partnerships, and share knowledge with academic bodies and agency leaders, while carrying out other institutional and civic responsibilities. It was expected that the practical perspectives shared – emphasizing the identification of sensible strategies and needed supports – would be of use to current faculty, and future faculty (who include current Ph.D. students), as they explore their own approach to the craft of scholarship and research in a changing university and civic context.

Description of the needs assessment and its relationship to the forthcoming editorials

The needs assessment took the form of a 15-minute Google Forms survey that was shared with Editorial Advisory Board members on January 16 and closed on January 31, 2023. Members were asked to respond to the survey only once. The survey was administered by Managing Editor Amanda Mosby, who subsequently de-identified and anonymized the survey responses. The survey data were then placed into a Google Folder to support thematic analysis by Co-Editors-in-Chief Bowen McBeath and Karen Hopkins.

In preparation for survey implementation, Institutional Review Board approval was received from the Portland State University Human Research Protection Program on December 1, 2022. In mid-December, Editorial Advisory Board members were then appraised of our plan to conduct the needs assessment in mid-January, and were provided with the open-ended survey questions so that they could decide whether to participate.

Survey topics and their correspondence to the forthcoming editorials

In the Google Forms survey, Editorial Advisory Board members were invited to reflect on a total of eight open-ended questions across the following three topics:

1. The changing role of the university professor;

2. How to pick and change research topics; and

3. How to carry out scholarly research projects.

Members were encouraged to not focus only on their engagement in a specific type of research related to human service organizations or social work practice. The survey topics and specific questions were intended to be broader and more inclusive, thereby supporting general reflection to the expected benefit of diverse audiences.

Analysis of the responses to the questions support future editorials throughout 2023 that will reflect the following sections. These sections invited members to reflect upon their understanding of how the craft of scholarship and research may be responding to a changing university and civic context.

The changing role of the university professor (forthcoming editorial in issue 3)

In the brief survey, Editorial Advisory Board members were first invited to consider the following prompt:

The role of the university professor is undergoing change. In general, professors face ongoing challenges, including improving teaching, engaging in scholarship and research, and school and university service. Professors are also facing pressures that reflect new societal demands, community needs, and expectations from institutional partners. Yet professors can also identify opportunities that reflect the changing makeup of higher education and the changing understanding of what professors contribute to society, their communities of care, and their institutional partners. What does a new tenure-track person in your academic unit (school or department) need to know today in order to be successful? Please sketch out the major challenges and opportunities facing the person. Then please describe what you believe will be necessary for this faculty member to be successful.

Members were then invited to consider three questions, and provide open-ended responses that reflect their local university and community-based situation:

• What current challenges face the tenure-track faculty member?;

• What current opportunities face the tenure-track faculty member?; and

• What is needed for the tenure-track faculty member to be successful?

How to pick and change research topics (forthcoming editorial in issue 4)

Editorial Advisory Board members were then invited to consider this prompt:

It can be difficult to decide which research topics and projects to pursue, and when it is time to abandon a topic or project and move on to another one. Scholar-researchers need to develop strategies to deal with these issues during their careers. Please describe in general your overall strategy for dealing with these issues. Then, describe what you like about your strategy. Finally, describe what you wish you had done differently earlier in your career.

Members were invited to consider the following three questions that related to their personal experiences:

• What is your strategy for selecting and changing research topics and projects?;

• What do you like about your strategy?; and

• What do you wish you had done differently earlier?

How to carry out scholarly and research projects (forthcoming editorial in issue 5)

Finally, Editorial Advisory Board members were invited to consider the following prompt:

Having a well-thought-out project is the beginning; we must then do the research. Please share a few challenges in doing research. Please focus on implementation issues such as obtaining funding, gaining access to research populations and sites, effective follow-up, establishing collaborative relationships with agency and community partners, problem-solving with other partners and researchers, etc. Then, please provide tips that you believe would be helpful for faculty members as they embark on new scholarly and research efforts.

And members were invited to consider two final questions that reflect their personal efforts:

• What challenges exist in doing scholarship and research?; and

• What tips could you offer on practices that have worked?

Prospects for the craft of scholarship and research in a changing university and civic context

In this concluding section, we return to the question of how academic journals can better support the critical efforts of emerging and more experienced scholar-researchers. The forthcoming editorials in the Human Service Organizations Journal dedicate attention to needed elements that shape the process or craft of research and scholarship for our main audience of professors, community-based researchers, students, and collaborating agency partners.

The hope is that the editorials will be of use to those who are exploring questions of their own scholarly and research development in a changing university and civic context – regardless of their investments in social work practice or human service organizational research. We hope that the editorials will serve as a springboard for those who are interested in actively contributing to different types of research and scholarship. We note with surprise if not dismay that there has been far too little systematic editorial guidance in this journal to those who are committed to exploring diverse processes of research and scholarship. More broadly, we hope that these editorials will be shared beyond our journal, including with sister journals, doctoral programs, and academic administrators who are charged with the support of faculty scholarship and research in social work and in sister professional disciplines.

While the forthcoming editorials are written with doctoral students and tenure-track faculty members in mind, they are also meant to be shared with more experienced faculty members, non-tenured research faculty, and human service researchers within other institutional settings. As long-serving organizational scholar-researchers located in schools of social work, we recognize the growing importance of extramural funding and publications in high impact factor journals. We also note the need for formal opportunities (i.e., structured mentorship, training) and informal supports for early-career macro scholars, who worry that they may lack sufficient resources and opportunities to pursue such funding and publications. In light of these changing realities, we therefore hope that the editorials can inform the efforts of academic administrators and established faculty members, in order to promote collaboration with students, junior faculty, and community and organizational leaders. More specifically, we hope that the editorials will be a resource for investigators from independent research institutes and centers as well as from the research and evaluation departments of public and private human service organizations.

Finally, we offer our gratitude to the members of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Human Service Organizations Journal, for their generous support of this initiative.