A Tasty Encounter with Routine Dynamics Ideas

Abstract

On Friday 9th April 2021, I attended my first conference with the Routine Dynamics research community. As an interested newcomer to this scene, the event inspired some personal reflections for my own work. To go beyond these personal benefits though, I was also inspired to share the new thinking and wider research directions from this research encounter, with our Exchanges readership. The emerging thoughts and practices from the Routines Dynamics community seems to be a welcoming and inclusive oasis, in the latticework of ideas being developed across our natural, social, and humanities worlds of scholarship. What follows is my attempt to make a little difference to the work of colleagues, in sharing the impact of this intellectual encounter for a wider audience. In reflecting on the events of this conference, I was guided by Johnson (2018)’s suggestions for possible structure and content for this type of article (as distinct and different from original empirical contributions).

Reflections from Research Practice

“…In terms of the 'causal powers' analyses and syntheses encouraged by critical and scientific realism, changes relating to the entities we observe can be explained as due to the causal powers available from the current properties or features of other 'relatively enduring generative mechanisms/systems' (Mingers & Standing, 2017) -to circumstantially generate the observed changes in quantity or quality documentable in the Empirical strata in naturalist or laboratory settings. An example of such a property is a 'researcher Mechanism's qualification in some academic field, leading to their improved powers to learn more academically and generate higher quality quantitative or qualitative ways of seeing and knowing -for example in coming into possession of the 'personal feature' of being newly qualified in an emerging academic knowledge discipline such as Routine Dynamics (Huang, 2021); in terms of the Aristotelian theory of change/causation reviewed earlier, the idea of 'causal powers' can be regarded as a contemporary case of his reasoning around 'efficient causes' for how and why things are the way they are. In this case the learner becomes 'disciplined' into those intellectual, technological, and normative practices of the underpinning profession or knowledge discipline due to their interaction with other key entities in academic training and postgraduate academic learning -e.g.…”