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.