The Challenge of Delivering Impact: Making Waves Through the ODC Debate

Abstract

This article articulates the nature of the challenge of the academic-practitioner "divide" as one of delivering impact. While measurable impact of research on organizational practice is a key indicator of the value of academic work, the authors explore possibilities of sustainable impact by exploiting and maintaining similarities and differences that characterize academic and organizational practice. Drawing on a metaphor of making waves, they suggest that possibilities of academic impact emerge from day-to-day engagements between scholars and organizational practitioners whose efficacy depends on the creation of shared understandings and personal relationships. This also emphasizes the maintenance of differences in perspective, which alert managers and researchers alike to different aspects that lay hitherto concealed in everyday practice. The authors draw insights from organizational development and change research to distil lessons about ways in which collaborative research practice could make waves that energize responses that extend both theory and practice.

Community engagement in project organization research: the contextualization of the research process

“…Brown and Duguid, 1991;Lave and Wenger, 1991;Wenger, 1998) and emphasizes the shared interest of a group of academics and practitioners in a topic, problem or phenomenon which this group perceives to be important to interactively generate knowledge about it. The call for academic-practitioner communities or 'communities of inquiry' (Lorino et al, 2011) rests on the argument that actionable knowledge emerges from and is embedded in the context within which research is conducted and is not a matter of appropriate diffusion and communication channels between industry and academia through which academic knowledge can be put into practice independently from space and time (Knights and Scarbrough, 2010;Antonacopoulou et al, 2011). This view is in line with socioculturalism a theoretical strand of psychology which understands learning as unfolding from social interaction.…”

Designing and assessing a course on prioritization and importance assessment in strategic non-routine requirements engineering processes

“…These tips are partly based on our own experience with introducing our course and partly on Antonacopoulou [3], Polzer [50], and Posner [51].…”

Service-dominant logic as a framework for exploring research utilization

“…Nenonen et al (2017) call for more research into this type of collaborative theorizing, but also call for research into situations where other approaches for achieving academic rigour and relevance are more suitable. This is an important point; the reality of day-to-day engagement between scholars and practitioners is likely to involve a number of different ways of working together (Antonacopoulou et al, 2011). The idea that research in management falls neatly into M1 or M2 is said to be simplistic (Bresnan and Burrel, 2012;Huff, 2000) and normative (Hessels and van Lente, 2008;Kieser et al, 2015).…”

“…This is an important point; the reality of day-to-day engagement between scholars and practitioners is likely to involve a number of different ways of working together (Antonacopoulou et al, 2011). The idea that research in management falls neatly into M1 or M2 is said to be simplistic (Bresnan and Burrel, 2012; Huff, 2000) and normative (Hessels and van Lente, 2008; Kieser et al, 2015).…”