Introduction to the Special Issue on Bridging the Scholar–Practitioner Divide

Abstract

The scholar-practitioner divide has been an enduring feature of both organization change scholarship as well as of the broader management field. After several proposals of how the divide can be bridged, over several years, a gap still remains however as evidenced by continued interest in this theme, stated missions of journals, article and book publications, and special issues such as the current one. As with the challenge itself, the sources of the challenge (which simultaneously act as persistent barriers to addressing it) are also multidimensional. They are based on interrelated and mutually re-enforcing institutional factors (for example, the privileging of thought and analysis over action in Western philosophy), organization-based factors (such as perceptions of universities as bastions of knowledge, and their support of pure research) as well as individual factors (such as the training and preferences of management scholars and the nature of their career paths and incentives). Given the nature of the challenge, proposals for addressing it would necessitate a long-term outlook, and solutions to be employed within gestalts rather than singly. The papers selected for this special issue address different angles of the challenge and offer useful and well-considered avenues for addressing it. The themes range from addressing the nature of OD interventions in a way that privileges theory/practice interrelations (Romme, 2011), enhancing impact through collaborative research practice (Antonacopoulou, Dehlin & Zundel, 2011), identifying incongruencies in management scholars’ and practitioners’ views of relevance that may compromise joint efforts (Nicolai, Schulz & Gobel, 2011), reconceptualizing organization development as a process of engaged inquiry (Hutton & Liefooghe, 2011), examining whether practice-based strategy research indeed leads to relevant knowledge (Splitter & Zeidl, 2011), to arguing for a radical shift in the conceptualization of the challenge itself (Markides, 2011). The opening paper by Romme offers an “artifaction” perspective to organization development interventions (based on the view that organizations are socially constructed