Engaged Scholarship

Engaged Scholarship

Andrew van de Ven describes engaged scholarship as a participative form of research for obtaining the views of key stakeholders to understand a complex problem. By exploiting the differences between these viewpoints, he argues, engaged scholarship produces knowledge that is more penetrating and insightful than when researchers work alone. Engaged scholarship has a number of facets: a form of inquiry where researchers involve others and leverage their different perspectives to learn about a problem domain; a relationship involving negotiation, mutual respect and collaboration to produce a learning community and an identity of how scholars view their relationships with their communities and their subject matter. Furthermore, the likelihood of advancing knowledge for science and practice can be increased by engaging with practitioners and other stakeholders in four steps: (1) firmly grounding the research problem or question in a real-world scenario, (2) underpinning the research with alternate theories, (3) evaluating these theories through the collection of relevant evidence and (4) communicating and applying the findings vis-à-vis the research problem.

According to this schema, there are four stages in an engaged scholarship project. The stages can happen in any sequence and can be summarized as follows: (1) formulating the problem using the who, what, where, when and why approach; (2) building theory through abductive, deductive and inductive reasoning; (3) devising a research strategy to empirically examine the proposed theories and (4) interpreting and applying these finding to solve the problem identified at the initial stage.

Typically engaged scholarship will fall into one of the following categories: (a) informed basic research, which is normally undertaken to describe, explain, or predict a social phenomenon; (b) collaborative basic research, which comprises greater stakeholder involvement than basic research; (c) design and evaluation research, which addresses practical problems and (d) action/Intervention Research, which involves an intervention to treat a practitioner's problem. In keeping with the theme of this encyclopedia, we will now examine the last category, drawing on a specific form of action research.

Dialogical Action Research

Action research originated from the work of Kurt Lewin during the 1940s and has been summarized as an approach that synthesizes both theory and practice together with researchers and practitioners involved in a programme of change and reflection. DAR is a proposed novel variant of this methodology. In DAR, the scientific researcher does not speak science or otherwise attempt to teach scientific theory to the real-world practitioner, but instead, he or she attempts to speak the language of the practitioner and accepts the practitioner as the expert on his or her organization and its problems. In practice, the approach involves regular face-to-face dialogues between the researcher and the practitioner to examine and remedy the research problem. In their schema, the role of the researchers consists in suggesting actions based on one or more theories taken from their discipline. The implementation of these suggestions is left to the judgement of the practitioners based on their experience, expertise and tacit knowledge, together with their reading of the organizational situation that confronts them.

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