Bridging Research‐Practice Tensions: Exploring Day‐to‐Day Engaged Scholarship Investigating Sustainable Development Challenges

Abstract

This paper adds to literature on engaged scholarship by exploring how previous experience, study expectations, and multiple identities are key factors that shape how management researchers perceive and experience the research-practice divide in sustainable development research. Highlighting ways to navigate tensions in engaged scholarship, the authors identify five major strategies: remembering the purpose of the research, emphasizing relationships, engaging in self-learning, practicing reflexivity, and framing emerging results. To do so, the authors draw on findings from three management research projects which sought to use engaged scholarship to address the sustainable development challenges of homelessness, Indigenous approaches to economics and development, and sustainability reporting in higher education. Taking a collaborative auto-ethnographic approach to analyzing their experiences as researchers, the authors demonstrate the potential for future management researchers to utilize a similar methodology to improve engaged scholarship research focused on sustainable development challenges.

Facilitating Collaboration for Responsible Management Education: Voluntary Brokerage in the PRME Network

“…We assert that the methods used in this study, collaborative autoethnography, allow a unique, firsthand view on the dynamics of sustainability collaborations facilitated by an intermediary actor. While autoethnography, and to a lesser extent collaborative autoethnography, is slowly becoming more present as a method to study the management field (e.g., Cohen et al, 2009; Easter et al, 2021; Empson, 2013; Karra & Phillips, 2008; Learmonth & Humphreys, 2012; Peticca-Harris et al, 2016), to our knowledge we are the first ones using the latter method to study how sustainability collaborations unfold in practice. Even in the field of network brokerage, studies on the dynamics of brokerage in practice have been rarely based on empirical evidence of actual brokerage behavior in real-life situations (Zhelyazkov, 2018).…”

“…Our autoethnographic approach was collaborative (see also Cohen et al, 2009; Easter et al, 2021; Winkler, 2018), as it reflected on the individual and joint experiences of three authors in their journey as Chapter Steering Group members. Collaborative ethnography helps avoid the risk of privileging only one perspective of an experience in a particular setting and adds multiple voices to (autobiographical) stories (Winkler, 2018).…”

“…More specifically, we investigated our own experiences, observations, notes and joint discussions about events, processes, developments and activities of the Chapter covering the 2017–2021 period as well as written documents detailing the activities and governance mechanisms. Individually, we wrote autobiographical accounts of our experiences related to the research question (in line with Cohen et al, 2009; Easter et al, 2021; Peticca-Harris et al, 2016; Williams et al, 2019). They were based on a number of questions we jointly developed around research topics which we deemed important to help surface and explicate our lived experiences.…”

“…They were based on a number of questions we jointly developed around research topics which we deemed important to help surface and explicate our lived experiences. Afterwards, we held multiple autoethnographic conversations (Cohen et al, 2009; Easter et al, 2021) among the three authors, by e-mail and mainly via Zoom conversations, where we searched for similarities and differences in our stories and identified important and recurring categories and themes (Cassell & Bischop, 2019). This approach allowed us to analyze the meaning of our experiences in connection to those of others (Hibbert et al, 2014; Peticca-Harris et al, 2016), and to relate our narratives to each other’s notes, observations and existing documents (Williams et al, 2019).…”

“…For autoethnography specifically, this means moving back and forth between experiencing and examining ‘the self’, since we are ‘the informants’, and revealing the broader context of our experience (Ellis, 2007). This process requires carefully practicing researcher reflexivity and being mindful of our role in the research project (Easter et al, 2021; Hibbert et al, 2014).…”