PRACTISING RESEARCH; RESEARCHING PRACTICE. ABSTRACT - BY IKENNA AGINA Good day everyone, my name is Ikenna Agina, a writer, a singer and a music practitioner. The first question that comes to mind as pertinent is: Do practice and research go hand in hand? The answer seems to be an obvious “YES”. Research should necessarily flows from practice, especially for the purpose of deepening practice or expanding the frontiers of practice by deepening at least one area of one’s practice. So, in a sense, research and good practice are essentially interwoven, and is ideal. But the reality is that practitioners of professions are largely business people or work within the commercial environment in which survival and profit are the chief focus of all activity of business. So, “research” being an expense head with no certifiable contribution to the current survival or profits of a business entity is not encouraged. To this extent it would be right to say that practitioners do lose touch with research, because the world of business and profit rules the business of professional practitioners. At the most, practitioners of this sort generally apply the work of researchers to the business of making survival, growth and profits possible for their organizations.
On the other hand, researchers are more or less in the academia, that is, in institutions of higher learning where one of the main pre-occupations is the breaking the frontiers of knowledge exclusively by research processes. In these institutions, researching is, therefore, an institutionalized way of life. Invariably most researchers, being out of the world of business and commerce, have no space or time for practising their profession. It is obvious therefore that practitioners in the professions, necessarily lose touch with research because of the survival and profit motive inherent in the business of their practice, and researchers mostly neither have the space nor the time to practice their profession. This is one of the main reasons why the practice-research divide is perpetuated in very age. There is more to say, but then there is a limit to this text. Thanks.