Pracademics

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Pracademics help increase our understanding of intrinsic, instrumental, and collective case studies. On the one hand, Bruce Berg argued that intrinsic case studies are not used to gain understanding of, or to develop, theory; they are used to increase [Page 721]understanding of a specific case. It is instrumental case studies that are used to shed light on theoretical postulates. Collective case studies are studies of multiple instrumental case studies. The use of pracademics transcends intrinsic case study analysis into instrumental analysis when practical activities are analyzed against academic theory, and vice versa. Concomitantly, pracademics inherently establishes the combination case study of intrinsic-instrumental because the researcher cannot be separated from the praxis of her or his world before and during the case study.

Regardless of the researcher's purpose, in case study research secondary data collected from literature reviews and primary data collected from interviews and observations all facilitate findings that are evaluated against naturalistic research tenets of truth value, applicability, and neutrality.

Pracademics serves to augment thick descriptions of individual activities and organizational operations so that identification of relevant and correct academic theory actually in evidence could be more easily, and more accurately, deduced from the case study data. In this context, it is the truth value that is augmented by pracademics because it helps validate interpretations of and findings from all source data. For instance, member checking would have research participants evaluate the accuracy of the researcher's data reporting, including but not limited to case study content. Pracademics generates truth value by checking both primary (i.e., if the theorist is interviewed for the study) and secondary data (i.e., theories) against primary data (i.e., practice) originally collected from respondents. The questions pracademics asks are “are participants practicing what the theory indicates, and does the theory state what participants are practicing?”

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