Collaborative Management Research

Collaboration, Management and Research

CMR occurs in a natural setting within a specific business and industry context, involves true collaboration between practitioners and researchers, addresses an emerging specific issue of concern, uses multiple methodologies that are scientific, involves the creation of a learning system via the establishment of learning mechanisms, improves system performance and adds to the scientific body of knowledge in the field of management. At the core of CMR, one can find three terms or pillars: collaboration, management and research.

Collaboration is about a full range of relationships amongst individuals within and outside the boundaries of a system. In the context of CMR, collaboration implies research efforts which include the active involvement of managers and researchers in the framing of the research agenda, the selection and pursuit of methods and the development of implications for action (e.g. co-determination of the research, co-evolution and co-interpretation). Collaboration does not impose the requirement of an equal partnership in each of these activities, although it is assumed that a more equal partnership would be preferred. At the heart of this endeavour is ‘collective inquiry’, which is the joint pursuit of answers to questions of mutual interest through dialogue, experimentation, the review of knowledge or other means. To be more precise, management engages in collective inquiry to get a better understanding of a certain issue or phenomenon by means of input of scientifically valid knowledge from researchers. Similarly, scientists engage in collective inquiry in order to get a better understanding of a certain issue or phenomenon by means of practically valid knowledge from practitioners. If two parties don’t share a fundamental interest in learning, there can be no collective inquiry and no collaborative research.

The second pillar in the term, management, should have the same meaning to most. Yet this is not necessarily the case, nor can the meaning of management be fully explored within this entry. For some management is a noun: an individual or collective group of actors who aspire to influence the behaviour or performance of a system. Management (or managing) can also be a verb: the practice of those actors—in other words, what formal or informal managers actually do to achieve their intentions. In addition, management signifies an art or a practice or, otherwise put, what managers tacitly or explicitly know and believe about how to go about managing an organization or a complex system. One can envision a three-dimensional matrix, in which one dimension focuses on the actions of different types of managerial actors (e.g. individual, organizational and systemic), the different settings are the second dimension (e.g. a single organization, networks of organizations, systems, regions or communities) and the third dimension is the aspect of management studied (e.g. specific managerial actions, systems of management processes affecting the organizational culture or performance and the co-ordinating mechanisms among networks of organizations). One can also add to this complexity by inserting additional dimensions, such as managerial roles. Thus, the question of what is management and how one should approach its study is open to debate, experimentation and discovery.

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