katja kliemann wrote:
> my experience (doing CRM in ontario, england and germany) is that the people
> in the field don't have the time/resources to keep up-to-date, however much
> they'd like to
Resources I think must be a significant difference here, but I'm not so sure
about time: the academics I know are under pretty major time pressure as well,
and I tend to find that paper-writing happens after about 40 hours of other
duties are over.
> coming back to university only last fall (after a 12 year hiatus), i realise
> just how out-to-lunch they can be anyway: we don't discuss legislation,
> management problems, budgeting of time/resources, how to negotiate with
> clients, etc. - anything which really seems important -
It would be useful to look at cases in which such issues have been integrated
into university curricula -- my only direct experience with such was Barney
Reeves' CRM course at UCalgary. But isn't perhaps one of the nubs of the issue
here in that last phrase? If theory is not really important (and you don't
appear to think that it is so), then it's not surprising that people working in
CRM won't publish much on theory. Perhaps a more interesting question in that
case is: does such a lack of interest in theory discourage people working in CRM
from publishing academic papers more generally? After all, one -- I think really
important -- problem than Andrew Schoenhofer identified in Ontario was a lack of
CRM-based analytical or synthetic articles more generally.
FWIW, I do think that theory in archaeology is important, although that
importance can be inflated in some of the ways that Robert Jeske talked about.
Scott MacEachern
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