Engaged scholarship in small firm and entrepreneurship research: Grappling with Van de Ven’s diamond model in retrospect to inform future practice

Abstract

This article explores the dynamics of initiating and implementing an engaged scholarship approach by taking a current research project relating to small business development and employing Van de Ven’s diamond model to frame a personal critical reflection of our research process. We explore the scholarly and practical debates implicit in Van de Ven’s method of Engaged Scholarship before unpacking our research project to illustrate the challenges that scholars pursuing engaged forms of scholarship have no doubt faced, but journal article formats do not usually allow authors to explore, thereby providing lessons for scholars wanting to embark upon such projects. We make the argument that engaged scholarship and interactive research methods are well suited to the entrepreneurship and small firm field, but find that tensions are likely to be faced in respect of personal motivations and identities, gaining and maintaining stakeholder engagement, and balancing and managing relationships within diverse research teams.

The role of diagnostics as a means of engaged scholarship and enhancing SME research

“…Finally, existing research faces deficiencies in terms of impact. Here, objectives of building theory achieve unsuitable outputs in relation to business needs (Marzo-Navarro et al, 2009; Simba and Ojong, 2017), limiting the extent to which research informs organisation and policy practices (Bansal et al, 2012; Barge and Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Scott and Mole, 2012) and encourages SMEs to share important and accurate information (Darabi and Clark, 2012; Whitehurst and Richter, 2018) (Figure 1).…”

“…Established tendencies within engaged scholarship however fail to address two specific issues with this question of problem formulation. First is engagement, cognisant of both time-resource limitations of the SME community (Whitehurst and Richter, 2018) and trust-based requirements of such dialogue (Vangen and Huxham, 2003). Second is abstraction, as the case study setting of much engaged scholarship risks ongoing accusations around qualitative subjectivity and thus broader relevance (Hill and Wright, 2001).…”

“…Combining both sets of data and the resultant understandings provide a strong foundation from which skill, behaviour and competency requirements can be extracted and thus form future workshops and interventions. In terms of research quality, the reciprocal nature of the diagnostic creates an environment where firms have a vested interest in sharing and interpreting accurate data and where the reflective nature of the process contributes to individual development rather than simply being an isolated academic exercise (Darabi and Clark, 2012;Whitehurst and Richter, 2018). Take the example of IT Software Support Co.…”

Introducing the book: the what, why and how of relevance and impact

“…We start with a quick look at what constitutes relevance and impact. There has been a flurry of articles, books and editorials on relevance and impact of research over the past decade, showing that scholars have started to care, once more, about the outcomes of their research and the value they may generate for businesses, managers, society, or economic and social development (to name but a few from management and entrepreneurship: see Flickinger et al 2014;Frank and Landström 2016;George 2016;Kieser et al 2015;Landström et al 2017b;Van de Ven and Johnson 2006;Whitehurst and Richter 2018). This literature also illustrates how difficult it is to disentangle the two concepts: relevance and impact.…”

The practice of “we”: A framework for balancing rigour and relevance in entrepreneurship scholarship

“…However, as the authors note (ibid. ), the practice of "we" by entrepreneurship scholars may be difficult, especially given the broader institutional challenges surrounding the rigour-relevance divide (see also Drakopoulou Dodd et al, 2016;Alvesson et al, 2017;Whitehurst and Richter, 2018;Tourish, 2019;Kulik, 2020), and the choices made by individual scholars to operationalise a design-science process in entrepreneurship research in particular (e.g. Dimov, 2016;Shepherd and Gruber, 2020).…”