three - A radical take on co-production? Community partner leadership in research

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter, we examine a research collaboration between Susanne Martikke, Research Officer at the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation (GMCVO), and two academics from the University of Brighton, Andrew Church and Angie Hart. Because all of the partners were professional researchers, the research collaboration has to be seen as a very specific case. It would have been more challenging for someone who was not a professional researcher to play the role Susanne played on the project. However, it must also be acknowledged that being a researcher in a voluntary and community sector (VCS) organisation like GMCVO differs from being a researcher at the university in several ways:

• •The operating context and expectations placed on research are different.

• •The nature of research undertaken differs.

• •The nature of publications does not follow the same conventions.

• •Although Susanne had 10 years’ practical experience of researching the VCS, she did not have an academic qualification in social research or a PhD. Therefore, from a traditional academic perspective, her credibility as a researcher was constrained.

Initially Susanne's lack of traditional academic credibility automatically placed her into a subordinate position in the hierarchy of project partners. As a result, despite its differences, this community-university partnership (CUP) still had some of the same power dynamics as other CUPs. It was necessary for those involved to overcome these unequal power relations.

The project was part of the larger Imagine study. This collaboration was a CUP, and the subject of the research was also CUPs. Therefore, this project afforded us the opportunity to study 23 cases of CUP working across England and Scotland while also reflecting on our own partnership research practice.

Public engagement through CUPs can take various shapes, with research collaborations being one of many possibilities. In this chapter we are interested in exploring the research aspects specifically. The majority of our case studies also contained a research dimension.

In recent years there has been an increase in partnership working between sectors internationally, for example, between the VCS, and the public and private sectors (NCCPE, 2011). In the UK specifically, since the election of Tony Blair's New Labour government in 1997 the voluntary sector had increasingly been perceived as an attractive partner in the delivery of public services (O’Brien and Matthews, 2015).