Bridging Scholarship in Management: Epistemological Reflections

Abstract

If the relevance gap in management research is to be narrowed, management scholars must identify and adopt processes of inquiry that simultaneously achieve high rigour and high relevance. Research approaches that strive for relevance emphasize the particular at the expense of the general and approaches that strive for rigour emphasize the general over the particular. Inquiry that attains both rigour and relevance can be found in approaches to knowledge that involve a reasoned relationship between the particular and the general. Prominent among these are the works of Ikujiro Nonaka and John Dewey. Their epistemological foundations indicate the potential for a philosophy of science and a process of inquiry that crosses epistemological lines by synthesizing the particular and the general and by utilizing experience and theory, the implicit and the explicit, and induction and deduction. These epistemologies point to characteristics of a bridging scholarship that is problem-initiated and rests on expanded standards of validity. The present epistemological reflections are in search of new communities of knowing toward the production of relevant and rigorous management knowledge.

Knowledge for Theory and Practice

“…As such, managers develop a deep understanding of the problems and tasks that arise in particular situations and of means-ends activities that make up their solutions (Wallace, 1983). Knowledge of management practice is typically customized, connected to experience, and directed to the structure and dynamics of particular situations (Aram & Salipante, 2003). In contrast, scholarship is committed to building generalizations and theories that often take the form of formal logical principles or rules involving causal relationships.…”

“…"Scientific knowledge involves the quest for generality in the form of 'covering' laws and principles that describe the fundamental nature of things. The more context free, the more general and stronger the theory" (Aram & Salipante, 2003: 1900.…”

From the 3 Rs to the 4 Rs: Toward Doctoral Education that Encourages Evidence-Based Management through Problem-Focused Research

“…It is an everyday practice among managers, since they continually generate their own practical knowledge in a manner consistent with Dewey's (1929) work on pragmatism (Aram & Salipante, 2003). This knowledge always arises from a practical, real-world problem.…”

“…Rather than melding the nature of the knowledge production in which practitioners and scholars engage to create a hybrid, we assert that new forms of scholarly inquiry be considered. Specifically, problemfocused research should be recognized as a model of knowledge generation with its own epistemology and methods, prizing and producing both particularized and generalized knowledge (Aram & Salipante, 2003) by synthesizing relevant theories around a reality-framed problem of practice. In the sections below we develop the claim that, although rich scholarly traditions have been built upon exploring problems of theory and should be continued, only inquiries into problems of practice (with their amorphous, transdisciplinary and sometimes baffling dimensions) will yield evidence-based solutions that match senior managers' needs.…”

“…The candidate then combines this specification with a multi-theoretical, often multi-level conceptualization, producing a model of the problem and its associated managerial, organizational, and institutional processes. In this way, the research is both problem-driven and theoretically informed (Salipante & Aram, 2003). From the model, the doctoral researcher specifies an overarching research question that is both problem and context-specific, and then investigates it through the sequence of qualitative and quantitative inquiries as described above.…”