‘When shall we three Meet Again’ PPRIG as a Practitioner–Practitioner–Researcher Collaboration Approach

Abstract

This paper presents, discusses, and illustrates the practitioner–practitioner–researcher inquiry group (PPRIG) as a novel collaborative research approach involving practitioners as active partners instead of passive informants. Based on involvement of inside and outside practitioners vis‐à‐vis a particular organization, PPRIG taps into outside practitioners' specific potential for alternative ways of observing, reflecting, and sense‐making, to better explore and understand the how and why of management phenomena and to develop practical solutions. By systematically adding an outside practitioner perspective to the widespread insider (practitioner) and outsider (researcher) perspective in collaborative research, PPRIG responds to certain key criticisms of collaborative methods by giving precise guidelines for achieving such collaboration. PPRIG thus complements and extends existing research methods in the field of collaborative research. Moreover, by addressing the communication and collaboration challenges with a structured three‐step approach, it addresses key criticisms and answers fundamental questions about how to conduct collaboration between researchers and practitioners.

Contextual Expertise and the Development of Organization and Management Theory

“…In addition to the capabilities of individuals, we have stressed the importance of research team composition, polyphony, and practices in the overall understanding and analysis of the research setting. In particular, complex problems often surpass the limited capability of individual researchers and thus require acquisition of knowledge by other researchers, practitioners or research assistants (Van de Ven, 2007, 2018; Avenier and Cajaiba, 2012; Kowal et al ., 2017; Schumacher, 2018). While research has shown how teams can share data gathering work and coordinate data analysis across jurisdictions, boundaries, and fields (Köhler et al ., 2012; Jarzabkowski et al ., 2015; Smets et al ., 2015), we stress the significance of a fit between team capability and research setting complexity.…”

Methodology Matters; Even More

“…EURAM aspires to be a community of engaged scholars, generating useful knowledge for broader constituencies. Schumacher's (2018) article showed an effective way in which academics may work with managers. Yet organizations do not only affect managers, nor are they only affected by managers.…”

“…It is less than two years since I (Lee, 2018) had the pleasure of introducing the first article to be published in the Methodology Matters section of the European Management Review ( EMR ); namely Reissner's (2018) idea of a conversational space map to aid reflexivity for researchers whose capacity for visual perception was greater than their capability for textual recognition. Since then, there has been the publication of papers by: Schumacher (2018) who proposed a practitioner‐practitioner‐researcher inquiry group as a means of promoting academics and managers' collaboration in industry; Cassell and Bishop (2019) who discussed the different types of understanding of the same qualitative database that may be obtained by applying metaphoric, story‐telling and thematic forms of analysis; and Li et al . (2019) who reflected on the merits of some of the assumptions that are made in statistical analysis.…”

“…Methodology Matters has certainly realized its objective of pluralism, already including papers on quantitative (Li et al ., 2019) and qualitative methods (Cassell and Bishop, 2019). It has also realized the objective of looking beyond the technicalities of methods to the environment in which people conduct research as illustrated by Reissner's (2018) discussion on the capacities of different researchers and Schumacher's (2018) consideration of academics' collaboration with practitioners. This plurality and contextualized understanding is also evident in the range of papers that appear in the extended Methodology Matters section below.…”

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

“…Studies have shown that researchers and practitioners often have different expectations as to the purpose of management knowledge, strategies for handling problems that arise, and time orientations (Shapiro et al ., 2007; Bansal et al ., 2012; Schumacher, 2018). While management scholarship has widely discussed the research‐practice divide, both in European and in North American Academies of Management (e.g., Vicari, 2013; Kieser et al ., 2015; Tsui, 2019), this study emerged out of our discovery that the literature did not reflect the tensions we experienced in attempting to bridge the divide as we took up engaged scholarship in our PhD studies.…”