ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the inevitable, doubled-edged nature of the process of identity construction that flows from the writing of academic accounts, and in particular to query some of the multivalent discursive conditions that both frame and are reproduced by academic work. It is intended less as a conclusive account of the performance of particular identity-politics and ethics through academic research than as the delineation of an area that seems to be underdeveloped in planning scholarship but has significant potential to contribute to our understanding of what has become known as the theory practice gap. Such attempts at impact are susceptible to being pulled either towards an instrumental role within local planning, which has little real influence on the big planning questions, or to being marginalized by the proliferation of think tanks and consultancies capable of achieving impact as a consequence of their freedom from any form of disciplinary self-government.
