دانلود مقاله ISI انگلیسی شماره 2250
ترجمه فارسی عنوان مقاله

ارتباط و خلاقیت از طریق تحقیق اقدام طراحی محور :آشنایی با بسندگی عملگرایانه

عنوان انگلیسی
Relevance and creativity through design-driven action research: Introducing pragmatic adequacy
کد مقاله سال انتشار تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی
2250 2011 17 صفحه PDF
منبع

Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)

Journal : European Management Journal, Volume 29, Issue 3, June 2011, Pages 217–233

ترجمه کلمات کلیدی
حقیقت - فاصله ارتباط - علم مدیریت - تئوری های مدیریت - تئوری سازمان - پراگماتیسم - اقدام پژوهی - علم طراحی -
کلمات کلیدی انگلیسی
Truth,Relevance gap,Management science,Management theory,Organisation theory, Pragmatism,Action research,Design science,
پیش نمایش مقاله
پیش نمایش مقاله  ارتباط و خلاقیت از طریق تحقیق اقدام طراحی محور :آشنایی با بسندگی عملگرایانه

چکیده انگلیسی

This study presents a meta-synthesis (1904–2010) of seminal voices on the ‘relevance gap’, the abyss between management science and management practice, and on remedies proposed. We then discuss dominant paradigms about truth and meaning and demonstrate how they can lead to irrelevance. We discuss relevance and its implications. We revisit basic notions of pragmatism and suggest how they might influence the meaning of management science. We seek answers in action research and, more specifically, in design-driven action research methods. We introduce the notion of pragmatic adequacy to explain how design-driven action research approaches can reduce the relevance gap, facilitate change and enhance creativity.

مقدمه انگلیسی

Management innovation is happening everywhere and at a breathtaking pace. Everywhere that is, except in academia. Management science still functions by and large in splendid isolation from praxis, over a century after Dewey (1904) detected fundamental tensions in the “proper relation” between theory and practice (too), and over forty years after Koontz deplored the “Management Theory Jungle” (Koontz, 1961) and Odiorne wrote his salient animadversion: “There are many indications that a serious breakdown is present in management and business theory in the western world. At the very time there is a desperate need for sound and appealing explanations of the nature of administered capitalism, and the leaders in it, academic management theory seems bankrupt. There are no plausible syntheses, and the behavioral theories require a kind of salesman (…) to try to persuade managers that their wares are the tools of salvation. Quantitative models of management theory contribute obscure tautologies covering the least significant fraction of the business environment. The empirical searchers for uniformities…reach for ponderous principles that generalize into proofs that which is merely indication taken from artefacts. Such studies of course have their place, but they have meaning only when they pervade the world of concrete experience as well as the special fields of science and theory.” (1966, p. 109) While there is longstanding and intense awareness among both academics and practitioners of what came to be called a ‘relevance gap’, i.e. that the output of theory often fails to have impact on what practitioners do (see e.g. Ghoshal, 2005, Grayson, 1973, Hambrick, 1994, Huff, 2000, Miller and Feldman, 1983, Priem and Rosenstein, 2000, Rynes et al., 2001 and Weick, 2001, and especially Rynes, Giluk, & Brown, 2007), and while there is debate on what the problem really is (Bunge, 1967 and Davies, 2006) and possible solutions to deal with this issue (McKelvey, 2006, Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006 and Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006), no substantial rapprochement can be noted. An exhausting – but by no means exhaustive – meta-synthesis of voices on the theme is presented in Table 1 which, due to its substantial length, is placed at the end of the paper.Many believe that bridging this gap starts with re-examination of the ontological status of management science and more broadly of its philosophical foundations (Mingers, 2003). For them, the dilemma is that “…organisational researchers live in two worlds. The first demands and rewards speculations about how to improve performance. The second demands and rewards adherence to rigorous standards of scholarship” (March & Sutton, 1997, p. 698). McKelvey, 2002, McKelvey, 2003a and McKelvey, 2003b addresses the issue by a call for a rapprochement to truth, as he purports the reinvention of organisation science through methods that better justify beliefs, i.e. that rest on more plausible truth findings without ignoring the complexity of the intricate, multi-causal reality of managers. His proposal is based on a merger of complexity and a post-modernist ontology embodied in what he calls “Cambellian realism” and agent-based modelling. Recently he also emphasized the need of management research to focus on extreme events because “managers don’t worry about averages; they live in a world of extremes, and they want more of the good ones and wonder how to better avoid bad ones” (McKelvey, 2006, p. 828). We agree that the relevance gap is a natural consequence of the prevailing paradigms of management science. Social phenomena are not physics and therefore need to be studied differently. However, ontological adequacy is probably not the main issue. In some sense it does not matter what is out there in the world. The main issue is epistemological: what can we know? Naturally, this is related, but one can disagree on the ontological status and still agree on what a good reason is, or what is relevant for management science. The relevance gap is therefore about how we can close the gap (epistemological) between us and the entities, whatever their ontological status. McKelvey’s agenda centres on making management science more scientific and does not fully address the question of relevance to practice. To focus on extreme events can improve the practical pertinence of produced knowledge. But it does not fully resolve the relevance gap. In this paper we start by showing that, how and why dominant paradigms about truth and meaning can lead to irrelevance, and we discuss relevance and its implications. We then revisit some basic notions of pragmatism and suggest how they might influence the nature of management science. We follow with some thoughts on the design science paradigm, on action research and on design-driven action research that, we purport, cannot only help to narrow the relevance gap, but favour change and enhance creativity.Many believe that bridging this gap starts with re-examination of the ontological status of management science and more broadly of its philosophical foundations (Mingers, 2003). For them, the dilemma is that “…organisational researchers live in two worlds. The first demands and rewards speculations about how to improve performance. The second demands and rewards adherence to rigorous standards of scholarship” (March & Sutton, 1997, p. 698). McKelvey, 2002, McKelvey, 2003a and McKelvey, 2003b addresses the issue by a call for a rapprochement to truth, as he purports the reinvention of organisation science through methods that better justify beliefs, i.e. that rest on more plausible truth findings without ignoring the complexity of the intricate, multi-causal reality of managers. His proposal is based on a merger of complexity and a post-modernist ontology embodied in what he calls “Cambellian realism” and agent-based modelling. Recently he also emphasized the need of management research to focus on extreme events because “managers don’t worry about averages; they live in a world of extremes, and they want more of the good ones and wonder how to better avoid bad ones” (McKelvey, 2006, p. 828). We agree that the relevance gap is a natural consequence of the prevailing paradigms of management science. Social phenomena are not physics and therefore need to be studied differently. However, ontological adequacy is probably not the main issue. In some sense it does not matter what is out there in the world. The main issue is epistemological: what can we know? Naturally, this is related, but one can disagree on the ontological status and still agree on what a good reason is, or what is relevant for management science. The relevance gap is therefore about how we can close the gap (epistemological) between us and the entities, whatever their ontological status. McKelvey’s agenda centres on making management science more scientific and does not fully address the question of relevance to practice. To focus on extreme events can improve the practical pertinence of produced knowledge. But it does not fully resolve the relevance gap. In this paper we start by showing that, how and why dominant paradigms about truth and meaning can lead to irrelevance, and we discuss relevance and its implications. We then revisit some basic notions of pragmatism and suggest how they might influence the nature of management science. We follow with some thoughts on the design science paradigm, on action research and on design-driven action research that, we purport, cannot only help to narrow the relevance gap, but favour change and enhance creativity.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

There is a considerable diversity in recent proposals to address the relevance gap (e.g. Clegg and Ross-Smith, 2003 and Czarniawska, 2003), ranging from better communication (socialisation, translation) of extant literature (Davies, 2006 and Kelemen and Bansal, 2002) to modest attempts at enhancing ‘managerial implications’ sections of scholarly articles, to calls for better cooperation between scholars and practitioners, to radical manifestos for the redesign of academia (e.g., Ghoshal, 2005, Gosling and Mintzberg, 2004, Mintzberg, 2004, Pfeffer, 2005, Romme, 2003a, Romme, 2003b and Rynes et al., 2007). We adhere to many of these proposals and suggest some more, namely a stance rooted in pragmatism, and many creative variants of rapprochements between academia and practice, with the clear purpose of interference, co-design and co-construction. With Romme, 2003a, Romme, 2003b and van Aken, 2005 we purport that organisation science might be advised to include design-driven research as one of the primary modes of engaging in research and developing theory that is meaningful to professional practice. Design is: “…characterised by its emphasis on solution finding, guided by broader purposes and ideal target systems” (Romme, 2003a and Romme, 2003b). The process of evolution in the natural world can be seen as driven by response to surprise, rather than a gradual evolution of “a phenotype and genotype in an ever closer approximation to an optimum in the fitness function” (Dorst & Cross, 2001, p. 14). While many academics may still frown upon the practice of action-related research and upon the development of design methodologies, this is regrettable and leaves the field open to gurus, consultants and professional bodies. There is still much reluctance to working with fortuitousness and/or to committing the simplifications of theory that are needed to achieve practicable results. Yet, once implemented, many such approaches acquire the status of an organisational phenomenon that is a valid subject of scientific inquiry. We postulate that this kind of a distance is unnecessary: not only does it deprive organisation and management science of many learning opportunities, it also overlooks the fact that there is a scientific way of doing design. Ackoff (1971) and Churchman (1968), close friends and collaborators schooled in pragmatism, decided that it was not possible to live lives of philosophers without getting involved with what they then called “operational problems” (see also Sachs, 2003). They became important pioneers of operations research (Ackoff, 1962), only to abandon it when in their view it became too much driven by tools and algorithms rather than by problems of practice (Ackoff, 1979). They also perceived the need to use broad interdisciplinary frameworks to deal with the increasing complexity (“messiness”, see Ackoff, 1981) of practical situations, founding a new academic stream that they referred to as the systems approach (Ackoff, 1971 and Churchman, 1968), resembling in many ways the arguments advanced today by proponents of “engaged scholarship” (Van de Ven, 2007 and Van de Ven and Johnson, 2006) and organisational coevolutionists (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997, Dove, 1993, Eisenhardt and Gahmic, 2000, Helfat and Raubitschek, 2000, Lewin and Volberda, 1999, McKelvey, 1997, Van Den Bosch et al., 1999 and Volberda and Lewin, 2003). While they studied with interest the scholarly work of proponents of the better-known general systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968) and of cybernetics (Ashby, 1956, Beer, 1966 and Rosenblueth et al., 1943), which sought the development of a ‘unified science’, they demarked themselves through emphasis on action research, and design, as a purposeful act aimed at controlling the future. Greater collaboration between research and praxis can bring about better understandings of respective working practices, better and more creative solutions and better theoretical integration. We purport that such theoretical integration between academics and practitioners can be more easily achieved in a design sciences paradigm. Explanatory science is concerned to explain extant phenomena, while design science aims to provide solutions to extant or future problems (Davies, 2006). In a design-driven context, rather than through an abstract approach, both problems and solutions, and even utopias, can be co-designed, because such a context permits confrontation within one same paradigm between hitherto separate worlds and thus provokes both practical and creative approaches. Such ad hoc integration may not often be a basis for a ‘generalisation’, that is for something applicable in future design work. Work on practical problems sharpens the focus, imposes limitations on time and other resources and therefore encourages taking shortcuts that might be frowned upon by a more canonical scientific approach. On the other hand, it allows for chance, surprise and desire to be considered. In this vein, we propose a theoretical framework (Figure 1), in which the (iterative) research process is based on design and artefact, rather than on model and phenomenon, permitting to deploy the generative, projective nature of design-driven action research, allowing participants to (co-)project their thoughts, and desires, as constructive techniques, providing design elements for users to play with. We suggest to use the term ‘pragmatic adequacy’ rather than ‘ontological adequacy’ to reflect the pragmatic intent of implementation. Our contributions are synthesised in Table 2.