Community engagement in project organization research: the contextualization of the research process

Abstract

In recent years a growing number of academics have proposed new ways of engaging with practitioners and other individuals and groups outside the academic world. The main aim of the movement towards more engaged research is to foster and establish forms of knowledge production in which different professional communities interact and co-operate. Community-engaged research seeks to overcome the separation of the knower from what is to be known and, by doing so, to produce knowledge that advances both science and practice. The paper reports on the experiences and insights gained during the adoption of community-engaged research at the Dutch Highways and Waterways Agency. It develops the argument that any form of community-engaged research in engineering project organization research is a dialectal and reciprocal learning process of academics and practitioners embedded in the changing context of practice. Research activities and engagement phases interactively evolve and through this interaction the research process becomes contextually dependent.