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Academic-Practitioner Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing
Academic-practitioner collaboration refers generally to relationships between academics and practitioners in which they share and/or co-construct knowledge with the purpose of creating positive scholarly, individual, and/or organizational outcomes. There are disagreements regarding the extent to which such collaboration can truly succeed. Nevertheless, attempts to create such collaboration take a wide variety of forms, several of which are described below. Academic-practitioner collaboration is particularly important in management. This is due in part to management faculty members serving as sources of managerial training and the multiple consultants who attempt to create bridges between academia and practice. It is also due to the fact that management is by its nature an applied field. It is also important for management theorizing, because the type of knowledge that arises from joint academic-practitioner research can be used for theory testing and building. This entry will include discussion of some barriers to successful collaboration and focus on several methods developed to accomplish it. These methods consist of multiple types of collaborative research approaches as well as bridging institutions, roles, and journals.
Fundamentals
There is ongoing disagreement among academics about the extent to which faculty can truly share research knowledge with management practitioners. There is also ongoing disagreement regarding whether rigorous scholarly research can or should be relevant to managers and other practitioners and whether or not rigor and relevance are mutually exclusive. Further, while both academics and practitioners theorize, the types of theorizing they do differs; academics attempt to create generalizable theorizing and knowledge, while practitioners attempt to create knowledge aimed at helping them succeed in their local situations.
Thus, there is recognition that academics (with regard to their research) and practitioners (with regard to their practice) typically have different aims and different communication systems. This difference is pronounced when the scholarship that academics conduct is based on a positivist epistemological framework. Some scholars believe that the communication systems associated with scientific research are so different from communication systems associated with successful practice that it is not possible to transfer knowledge between them.
Regardless of these tensions and disagreements, multiple means exist for trying to foster collaboration between academics and practitioners. These means rely on the assumption that knowledge truly can be transferred between, or translated across, academic-practitioner boundaries. But in order to accomplish successful translation, most of the means are also based on the assumption that there must be sharing of tacit, not just explicit, knowledge between academics and practitioners. This implies personal relationships between academics and practitioners.
Means that have been developed for academic-practitioner collaboration include multiple research approaches, including action research, insider-outsider team research, Mode 2 research, design science, engaged scholarship, and evidence-based management. The means also include types of bridging functions, including institutions, such as centers, bridging roles, and bridging journals.
Collaborative Research Methods
Action research.
Action research is a research method developed originally in the 1940s by Kurt Lewin and colleagues. As originally designed, it involves participants in a social setting collaborating with an intervener, often an external researcher, in diagnosing problems in the setting, jointly constructing ways of assessing the problems and their causes, designing ways to ameliorate these, and assessing the impacts. The original assumption was that in addition to ameliorating the problems, scholarly writing about what had occurred would contribute to academic knowledge. Several means of conducting action research have developed in recent years, including action inquiry, action science, participatory action research, and participatory research. In recent decades, at least within management, focus has tended to be less on scholarly outcomes of action research than on impacts within organizational settings. Also in recent decades, there have been developments of action research, such as appreciative inquiry, that are based on beginning with the positive in a system rather than problems.
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- Nature of Management
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