Towards common ground and trading zones in management research and practice

The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates about the ‘academic–practitioner divide’ and attendant remedies for addressing it, including mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence‐based management and design science. In this paper the authors ar...

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Published in:British journal of management Vol. 26; no. 3; pp. 544 - 559
Main Authors: Romme, Abel G, Avenier, Marie-José, Denyer, David, Hodgkinson, Gerard P, Pandza, Krsto, Starkey, Ken, Worren, Nicolay
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.07.2015
Blackwell Publ
Subjects:
Common ground
Corporate culture
Dialogue
Entrepreneurship
Evidence based research
Führungskraft
Hippocratic oath
Landscape
Management
Management styles
Medicine
Personalentwicklung
Pragmatism
Scholarship
Sense of purpose
Studies
Theorie-Praxis-Beziehung
Trading
ISSN:1045-3172, 1467-8551, 1467-8551
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The purpose and nature of management scholarship is contested, evidenced by debates about the ‘academic–practitioner divide’ and attendant remedies for addressing it, including mode 2 and mode 3 research, engaged scholarship, evidence‐based management and design science. In this paper the authors argue that, without a culture of dialogical encounter, management scholarship will never be able to emerge from its adolescence, and management will not develop into the profession that it should and can become. The central proposition is that the highly fragmented landscape of management (practice and scholarship) lacks sufficient capability for dialogue among the plurality of actors situated across that landscape. Developing the dialogical capability ultimately required to break this fundamental impasse demands, first, a shared sense of purpose and responsibility (akin to the Hippocratic Oath in medicine) and, second, institutional entrepreneurship to establish more and better ‘trading zones’. Drawing on the philosophy of pragmatism, the authors further this endeavour by identifying and proposing key elements of a statement of shared purpose and responsibility. Finally, they explore the nature and characteristics of successful trading zones, highlighting particular examples that have already been created in management studies.
Bibliography:istex:FD2D4399E254C2307AAF941CE26D68A6E080E50D
ArticleID:BJOM12110
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The authors are grateful to Joan van Aken, three anonymous reviewers and editor Geoffrey Wood for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The authors also would like to acknowledge the participants in a workshop conducted at the BAM conference in 2013, during which the idea for this paper initially arose. Our attempt in the first half of this paper to define a shared norm can be considered as an alpha test as to whether a group of seven scholars and practitioners with highly different backgrounds and epistemic preferences could subscribe to such a norm.
The copyright line for this article was changed on October 11, 2016 after original online publication.
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ISSN:1045-3172
1467-8551
1467-8551
DOI:10.1111/1467-8551.12110