Abstract
In 1970, Bernard Sadow had a brainwave—United States patent No. 3,653,474—better known as, “Rolling Luggage,” (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3653474A/en). As he described it, after hauling heavy suitcases through an airport after a family break, and seeing an airport worker rolling a machine on wheels, “I said to my wife, ‘You know, that's what we need for luggage,’” which is what he did to his travel suitcase when he got home (Sharkey, 2010). He put wheels on a suitcase. Put differently, Sadow brought together his experience and his understanding to create an impactful, useful outcome that we all appreciate and benefit from today. A simple idea put into practice, with broad impact. What he did was not exceptional (or necessarily unique). But given what it represented, this outcome should talk to all of us working in the organizational space because it highlights a known ongoing problem: a combination of practice and knowledge generates practical and useful outcomes. Yet, it is well acknowledged that academe and practitioners increasingly no longer talk the same language—we recognize the value in putting wheels on a bag, and yet some of us have the wheels and some of us hold the bag, and often we don’t put the two together effectively. This problem is bigger than simply acknowledging it and proposing possible solutions (of which there are many recent useful suggestions, e.g., Mirvis et al., 2021; Shani & Coghlan, 2021) because it is increasingly having clear, tangible consequences on our community, in terms of unused ideas (Tourish, 2019) and real missed opportunities on significant issues (Harley & Fleming, 2021).
As we enter our third year as an editorial board, a series of nagging but persistent themes keep on rising, almost stuck in a perpetual cycle. Can academic researchers really (really?) undertake applied, useful, and impactful research in the way that we imagine we can (or promote)? Are researchers progressively giving up on practice-oriented impact because others do this exchange better? Outside of actively cultivating “partnerships” and funding, where is there serendipity in research and practice? And do practitioners understand how academic-based theoretical frames can be used pragmatically (i.e., do we matter outside of our conversations?). Society and its views on the shape of research and on research value are changing, but “so what” anyway, if we don’t engage each other—and do so differently to what current engagement looks like. This editorial raises these ideas on relevancy and the choices organizational scholars need to make to prompt and reinvigorate a better direction for JABS. Having previously noted the ongoing problems and possibilities with future scoping ideas (Schwarz & Bouckenooghe, 2022) and the need for creating practical value through relevant research (Oswick, 2020), applied, scholarly sourced behavioral research needs an active reset. Scholars and practitioners need to talk together. But to do so, we should invite each other to share the same table too, in order to sustain a shared conversation and way forward. Put bluntly, we need to unstick.
It is broadly recognized that applied impact is something that we need to do because it is consequential and useful. It is also increasingly valued by National research funding bodies, such as the UK Research Excellent Framework and its focus on the impact of research outside academe (https://re.ukri.org/research/ref-impact/), Australian Research Council's engagement and impact assessment (https://www.arc.gov.au/engagement-and-impact-assessment), Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council knowledge mobilization (https://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/funding-financement/policies-politiques/knowledge_mobilisation-mobilisation_des_connaissances-eng.aspx), and US National Science Foundation impact assessments (https://www.nsf.gov/od/oia/eac/). Each call for relevance and improving or growing impactful research. And yet, we struggle to do so despite ongoing and making repeated calls for more impact and different applications (Schwarz & Vakola, 2021; Worley & Good, 2021). Scholars do what they do because they are rewarded for their actions. Yet knowing the problem and that this outcome exists, and still not dealing with its root causes is confusing: scholars talking to each other more will not dramatically alter this trajectory.
Put differently, in recognizing the problem of applied, practical research, we have created a newly engrained predicament of (mostly tenured) academics debating each other on knowledge use and then lamenting our relevance (and creating academic insight bodies that promote more discussion on solving practitioner problems). Institutions or research groups calling for relevant application and “responsible” research have become de rigueur.
The net effect of the way we currently approach theory and practice together is narrow academe (i.e., we talk to ourselves, more), leading to a narrow understanding of practice (alienated practitioners), and limiting scholarship (theory-driven, with limited use). This issue is increasingly obvious at JABS with substantially more submissions that are methodologically sound (and valid) but with limiting practice outcomes or add-on practice ideas that are unusable or need more work to make them pragmatic (useable and impactful). Within this domain, there are increasing survey research, and lab experiments, rather than applied field experiments, ethnographies, and observational studies. After all, if academics write for other academics, then doing rigorous scholarly research makes sense—rather than investing in developing advanced, useable, and useful ideas for practical matters. Often this work is inaccessible to those without the theoretical language and understanding, meaning that “ivory tower” theory-driven research trumps “real world” practice-driven problems (Schwarz & Stensaker, 2014).
So, despite its ongoing recognition, the problem is worth raising again—without researchers coalescing around the issue and then talking to others outside the tent, we remain at a crossroads in what applied research led by academic researchers looks like because our interest is in the problem rather than the practice itself (evidenced by the debate on relevance and impact). Raising this theme is a push to introspect on the corner we paint ourselves into; of an attempt (ironically) to cajole less debate on the problem, and in keeping with JABS, more action.
Ironically, the problem with doing applied academic research is the same problem we know exists—introspection leading to the same themes, leading to disconnected, and less useful knowledge. This same discussion has continued for several decades, considered repeatedly with opinions on what the future holds, alongside a set of similar challenges and proposed outcomes (e.g., Beer, 1976; Bradford & Burke, 2005; Coghlan, 2015; Cooperrider, 1996; Pasmore & Woodman, 2017). So, as a community, we acknowledge the issue while advancing the themes raised with more debate, introspection, and theorizing. Paradoxically, more debate promotes more of the same narrowness as we introspect. Thus, we end up with a Hobson's choice: we can ignore the issue and continue researching with added “practical implications” sections that are not very practical and thus thrive academically. Or we can incorporate the problem and deal with it based on known touch points on the need for more collaborative work, leading to unaddressed burning issues and small gap discovery in speciality areas. This latter strategy requires not just a mindset shift. It needs tangible individual actions, such as how we interact with those around us, and possibly radical institutional change, such as a more central placement of social engagement in tenure decisions.
For several generations of business school professors, research has been grounded in the philosophy of science and knowledge—about process, experience, testimony, observation, and experiment that is first and foremost about logic, theory, and theory testing. As Mirvis et al. (2021) highlight, that generation of researchers closely connected to practice entered the academe in a different era and with different motivations. Today, things have changed, and we cite and use applied research as organizational scholarship, irrelevant from a practice perspective. Business schools now pragmatically define themselves on research league tables focused on theory-orientated, peer-reviewed, and research prestige. Practice-driven work is seen as helpful but is not “real” research—seen instead as useful for consulting and helpful to prove engagement bona fides to meet university metrics and goals. The net effect is a system that is good at putting a premium on (and rewarding) knowledge production, but weak in translating this same knowledge into practice, being divorced from relevant applicability.
Paradoxically, this same knowledge basis is the foundation of a far deeper, and now engrained, problem. Given the time we have had with the problem, applied organizational research increasingly risks a similar outcome to long-term problems in Science research and laboratory-based knowledge (on jobs, careers, work limits, and fraud; Stephan, 2012). Knowing the problem exists is one thing—and we do know, recognized in terms of the sheer quantity of ideas on this “interest” aspect, and on theory foundation. But what comes next is the basis of the next epoch in organizational development and practice. Perhaps as a community, we are focused on the wrong line of questioning—that it is not the themes and their application that are the source of these outcomes, but the motivation of the researcher is core. The pressure for research-related job rewards may trump applied social, policy, and educational outcomes. But how much self-examination and internalizing the relevance problem do we need before doing something consistently different? Rather, it is a noting—a recognition—that organizational research and practice are now increasingly two distinct branches of the same thing—and that in this light, the future is increasingly looking different for both groups.
Don’t Give Up…You Have Friends
Recognizing the problem though raises a different, and worrying aside. Given the soul-searching and evaluation of the status and shape of how we debate and use organizational research, it is worth considering the extent to which academic researchers are progressively giving up on applied research; on applied, useful thinking, on getting knowledge to practice, on exchanging and transmitting between knowledge and practice beyond immediate scholarship. That is, not applied research as we research it, but applied to our partners beyond our immediate research needs.
This lack is a confronting idea because it suggests that the rift between academe and practice is here for the long-haul, hard set for a large subset of organizational researchers. We are now comfortable in debating knowledge production and scholarly dysfunctions rather than working on implementing tangible fixes for the problem. More than that, read in this context and diverging from the common narrative, perhaps the perceived difference between theory and practice is irreconcilable. After all, it is built on an impression of what research is, and on identity around “real” research—of where to place theory, of what a contribution looks like, and on the basic need to acknowledge related theory and research, rather than skip to the problem, its application, and where it may all lead. There is little value placed on “unscientific” but interesting practice-driven ideas that provide to-do lists and lists of things to do to correct problems—which is not research but a way toward “best practice” (e.g., Collins, 2001). The problem cuts both ways.
In this context, we may be seeing the subtle demise of connected theory and engaged practice outside of an academic exercise, researching academe into applied obscurity. More confronting, it infers that scholars may have effectively given up on doing things differently.
Without the ability to write differently for both academic and practitioner audiences, it may be difficult to recognize what applied research even looks like (and can we even address relevant, novel problems beyond what is testable). This outlook is relevant because it is real, based on the way early career researchers are trained to publish in order to get tenure, or how academics continue to struggle to convert knowledge into practice accessible publication or ideas, and conversely, recognizing how practitioners are not viewed as “legitimate” members of the community given their scholarly knowledge gaps (or lack of interest in applied knowledge that may not be useable). Accordingly, to the current trajectory, this impasse is the future, as our dual identities deviate. Pragmatically, ceasing to make practice work is not an option given the increasing need by businesses to have translational, evidence-based outcomes that are interactive and dialectical—of coming to business schools to solve business problems; to advance knowledge and enable effective organizational outcomes. But this commitment is a time investment for an uncertain outcome for scholars (beyond simple knowledge sharing with peers). Rather than continue lamenting and resigning ourselves to the situation, let's rather follow Peter Gabriel's (1986) exhortation—“Don't give up/ ‘cause you have friends/ Don't give up/ You're not beaten yet.”
Roll on! Unpack Your Bag
Tapping to Bakken and Wiik (2018) on ignorance, the problem and the solution may overlap depending on approaching this known divide with a far more limited belief in our ability to solve it, conventionally. So, perhaps the solution on a way forward is far more nuanced than we care to acknowledge or have strategized on: There are different variants of scholarly organizational researchers—those purely focused on theory-driven research; those interested in practice-driven collaboration; and those more pragmatically building and refining both theory and practice together. Accepting this distribution and its inherent variability requires us to relinquish dominant views on the ongoing absoluteness in the debate on the relevance and useful knowledge as absolute choices. We need to stop introspecting on relevant themes. It is not helpful or germane to correcting the problem. Such stance is challenging, especially for a journal like JABS, because it might lead to a dual track outcome—those scholars (and outlets) that can apply the practice, and those that don’t or choose not to. At the moment, the scholarly career and publishing model is too definitive to enable both simultaneously. But without confronting the issue, as a community, we simply facilitate more of the same and encourage more reliance on unrealistic and unusable “implications for practice” that don’t provide much useful and actionable insight. Rolling luggage was invented over 50 years ago. Let's now focus on unpacking the rest of what is in our bag.