Changing Better by Sharing Abandoned Work (Relevant May Not Be Enough)

Something went wrong, says the empty house

in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields

say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard

like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,

a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

(Ted Kooser, 1980, Abandoned Farmhouse)

When we focus on something that was, we sometimes lament and become wistful. Because, eventually everything withers, fades away, and becomes used and in decay. An abandoned building, an unused product, or a neglected garden once was ordered, relevant, useable, and important. But as the psychology of timing and memory show (e.g., Block & Zakay, 2008; Schacter, 2011), a focus on the present often ensures that our reality becomes what we see and experience now, and rarely what was. Yet, as work on urban decay (Andersen, 2019), on abandoned places (e.g., Spelman, 1993) or on social isolation (Cacioppo et al., 2011) variously shows, there are lessons to learn in embracing abandonment or its deterioration. This same sentiment exists in how we experience research. And therein lies a lesson for applied organizational researchers. As Broken Windows theory (Wilson & Kelling, 1982) on disorder and repair teaches us, abandoned does not have to mean useless or disordered, but we do need to recognize what is abandoned or lost before we can act on it (Pictures 1 and 2).

Picture 1.

Neglected garden.

Picture 2.

Abandoned building, Downtown.

In our ongoing and appropriate desire to make impact and become engaged and meaningful, for organizations, clients, or entities, we are (mostly) doing useful, important work, although not always good at relevancy and impacts (Schwarz & Bouckenooghe, 2024). While there is plenty of attention currently being paid to why organizational and change research is not relevant and not useable (see Mirvis et al., 2021; Schwarz & Vakola, 2021; Shani et al., 2023), and interest in how to better engage and methods for different types of engagement (Bednarek et al., 2023; Cloutier, 2024), perhaps we are also losing precisely this impactful work through ignoring and not sharing abandoned, lost research work, and its associated outcomes.

Abandoned work refers to a status quo of accepting a substantial amount of research that is performed but never shared and used; that is neglected or lost, or goes unpublished. That is, studies completed and data collected that are never published and never substantively shared. In this sense, and tracing the genesis of OD practice to shared experiences, and group learning (e.g., Argyris & Schön, 1978; Marshak & Grant, 2008), does this abandonment and its related loss mean that something has gone wrong with our impact or our focus and yet we don’t realize this reality?

This future scope editorial pushes what is probably still feels like a radical idea for most of us—that, in not yet sharing our data and ideas enough, we also have neglected opening up our abandoned and lost work to others, condemning possibly good, useful ideas to a slow, bottom file drawer death, while not even aware of this outcome. Given how we are socialized to research (and protective secrecy of our work) and to career advancement, this effect is both logical and expected. While an essential part of advancing knowledge, being relevant and developing applied ideas may not be enough. We need to think differently about how we share our work beyond the ideas itself and to let others benefit from what we can’t or won’t do with those ideas and their associated abandoned data. The overarching question for each of us to contemplate though is, are we even remotely ready for such a commitment, and how do we make this construct work without jeopardizing our own applied research expectations? This issue challenges each of us and our identity as applied researchers and forms the basis of the confronting nature of sharing abandoned work. It also challenges our increasingly conservative institutional conventions on the risks associated with sharing and its practical, ethical considerations. As a set, and given the costs associated with unpublished work, realizing the problem of abandoning rather than sharing raises unanswered questions for all of us to contemplate.

The Problem of Abandoned and Hidden Work

Letting go of our abandoned data and conceptual work to share more freely with others is confronting because it is rooted in identity and perceptions of our value. Consider the scenario: a doctoral student collects sufficient rich, rigorous data to keep them busy for “enough” time to be tenured. But time creeps up and before they know it, they are overwhelmed with new projects and new data, consulting work and social engagement, and teaching and service work, or an inability to publish those data, so that the original datasets sit in varying states in a file drawer and folder, waiting to be used for “that” paper, when there is sufficient time, motivation, money for assistance, or a junior co-author to drive the data collation. Conversely, with grant money, resources, a readily accessible network of colleagues, and given institutional administrative pressures, a senior faculty member ends up with more data than motivation or time to publish. They delegate task to mentees and to doctoral students, but the project drags and much of the data goes unused or is deemed unusable for the project. The net effect of both scenarios is moving on, with a socialization to continue collecting new data, advancing other projects, and developing career, all the while the original set of data remains unpublished and unused, and ostensibly hidden from others (despite the researcher and institutional cost). This effect is the essence of abandoned work—rather than purposefully neglecting or concealing research. Regardless of how useful these data and their consequences may be, without use and scholarship, this research remains stagnant and opaque, never improved.

Still, a call for embracing abandoned work is not simple. While this effect may be easy to typecast as unrealistic given that unpublished data and unused samples are common byproducts of research, the size and scale of the abandoned work problem is immense enough to be a real, creeping problem. As Lakens and Ensinck (2024) note for the sciences “42% of studies preregistered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) are not shared with peers after at least 4 years” (p. 609), a problem replicated elsewhere (Ofosu & Posner, 2023; Willroth & Atherton, 2024). Realizing the impact of this abandonment is stark, with Bowers et al. (2023) noting that for the sciences, the median estimated value of these unused resources per researcher is US$28,857, with a median of just over $5,000 for social science researchers, and unused resources at universities estimated to be approximately $6.2 billion. These numbers are stark given what they represent for institutions facing pressure to generate successful grant funding. Regardless, while these numbers and the consequences they raise helps us appreciate and recognize the depth of the problem we face, given their scope, they become meaningless to individual researchers. The problem for each of us is the real loss of abandoned work and the consequences of its hidden ideas, rather than the sheer scale of abandonment. After all, the diffusion of scientific knowledge is a critical aspect of what we do, how we innovate, argue, and grow. Yet as Nelson (2016) points out, we face a fundamental dilemma in choosing to share what we do and the knowledge that comes from our data because sharing opens our work to others while making that same openness a vulnerability, which then compels a logical secrecy/sharing tension.

This tension rises from the bifurcation present in how we research. On one hand, we are trained and compelled to pursue knowledge and then to share our research with each other, in its varying stages of readiness. Yet on the other, paradoxically we don’t do that effectively because sharing risks exposure of our work because our professional identity, reputation, and careers are tied to the acceptance and validation of our individual academic contributions and metrics, and sharing introduces the possibility of our work undergoing increased scrutiny and challenge. Just like the reluctance to share data with each other due to various uncertainties and fear pervades our field because it scares us—such as fear of data scrutiny or of being “scooped”—we aren’t very good at it yet (Schwarz & Bouckenooghe, 2024).

When it comes to organizational research, we introspect and naval gaze as a form of knowledge building, increasingly rely on meta-analyses that add to this introspection, or collect data that never ends up published and rarely replicated. More than that we consult on ideas that get lost due to institutional pressures and time, losing practice oriented and relevant research, with Mirvis et al. (2021) noting the associated evolution of businesses seeking out practice-relevant knowledge by engaging consultant research rather than academic leads. Although the current publication-focused pathway established in our field, focused on publishing, rankings, and constant debate perpetuates abandoned work, the risk of continuing to do so is about what comes next, given global changes, grand challenges, and evolving views on the place of university-led research and its limiting impact. The abandonment problem is exacerbated because we all have files full of unused data and brewing ideas, but which we can never realistically share given the reality of work/life and time challenges. In effect, without making abandoned work publicly available, transparent, open (e.g., Miguel et al., 2014) and visible (Chawinga & Zinn, 2019), these data go unpublished and disappeared, remaining hidden from our peers and any potential social impact consequences.

The focus of this problem for organizational researchers is about the extent that we do not share our studies and data that we have either completed but not published, undertaken but not completed, or that just remains stuck with us but not publicly visible. As the field and university-based research changes—evident in the increasing number of journals desk rejecting submissions, and our research being increasingly technical and less applied—can we learn from, grow, and benefit in applying practice-based findings and ideas that are not ours, but that we adopt from others? Tangentially, are we even open to the idea of using abandoned work or opening the drawer on unpublished data?

The Loss of Benefit and Advancement

The known value of abandoned research rests on the benefit of sharing, and its logical outcomes for the community. In mitigating the publication bias of file drawer problems (Rosenthal, 1979) shared, abandoned work can enhance research transparency, as others attempt to replicate and validate our results. It can induce efficiencies in helping avoid the duplication of data collection, it can foster more collaboration and new partnerships among researchers, all of which can demonstrate a commitment to openness and ethical research practices (e.g., Houtkoop et al., 2018). As organizational research has evolved into a more empirically driven academic agenda and intellectual field, there is so much research work being undertaken and “out there,” emphasizing that researching and theorizing itself are not the problem. But we lose much of this fieldwork benefit and advancement due to a confluence of issues that have little to do with the data themselves – death, retirement, administrative load, career pivots, lack of attention, new jobs and mental health challenges (e.g., Levecque et al., 2017). The problem with abandoned work is that it is not even on our radar because most of us simply reason this loss is part of researching and career: We collect data and then worry about how to publish and share them, or pivot to what our institutions and journals value.

Perversely, abandonment has become embedded in our researcher identity. Like Gettier's (1963) circular problem on justifying knowledge, how much do we lose as a community undertaking relevant research in not sharing something that we never even knew existed? We only have to look at debates on the fast-paced evolution on knowledge about changing organizations generated from COVID (see JABS Vol 56, Issue 3, 2020) and AI shaping work and change (see JABS, Vol 60 Issue 4, 2024) to understand that not sharing and abandoned work is a known loss, and that using data we don’t own or didn’t collect but is openly available to others generates uncertainty worth pursuing. The loss of benefit and associated advancement from abandoned research should concern all of us given that unpublished studies may contain useful knowledge and ideas for today's problems, with associated improvements for all stakeholders.

In this way, given a constant focus on rigor and method, it is easier to understand what abandoned work looks like and how to measure it than it is to make sense of ways to incorporate its lost benefit. Because this is our lived experience we can each appreciate that data held but not published, letting go of negative results, setting aside orphan data that does not fit, and excess sampling, all represent different types of abandoned work (Bowers et al., 2023). Despite this stance, as the researching community matures, we also recognize the value of community and that our research can have flow-on reproducibility impact, and better data integrity and publication outcomes. This value is pervasive, such as how the development of the COVID-19 vaccine evolved through open sharing of data and genome sequencing and “offcut” data (see Duan et al., 2022). In the era of big data and our evolving, complex data contexts, however, it is confusing that despite the desirability of shared data and resources, debate on abandoned research is still in its infancy amongst organizational researchers, limiting a stigma associated with its adoption. This is the paradox we face – a known problem, with possible sharing solutions found elsewhere, and yet ad adoption of this loss anyway.

Perhaps context is important to the loss of benefit from abandoned work. How we view and absorb ideas on career, progress, contribution, and impact, has evolved alongside generational and outlook differences on work and work orientations (e.g., Lyons & Kuron, 2014; Schabram et al., 2023). While previously advice and direction on these work themes was more definitive – on tenure, career, trajectory, and progress needed for success (e.g., the place of elite publication; acceptable pressures from elite institution; career sacrifices) – this aspect has evolved as the workplace becomes more inclusive and sanctioned. This change in how we view work and the workplace has occurred even if legislated and pulled kicking and screaming towards this goal, and indicatively more family and work/life balanced (e.g., having a “right to disconnect,” e.g., https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/workplace-laws/legislation-changes/closing-loopholes/right-to-disconnect). Still within this domain, despite the consequences of progress on this work orientation, and the evolving discussion from it on what is academic identity, we all need to introspect on the work that we leave behind and abandon precisely because of this advance. This realization highlights that abandoned work does not self-correct without deep questioning on the status quo and open discussion on its loss of benefit.

Without this introspection and change, the result for all of us is that as a scholarly community we will remain more transactional and less trusting, less sharing. The premise of opening up abandoned work is that sharing requires acknowledging the need for a shift from individual ownership to collective stewardship. As a possible correction, a first step to correcting abandoned work is acknowledging the problem and its institutional markers. Often, we don’t share abandoned work because we fear its consequences more than we value its benefit. Why would someone want access to our hard work collecting data? What if they used our data for their own gain without providing credit? What if they found flaws in our data or analysis, and publicly criticized it? What would ethics boards say about shared work? Letting go of abandoned work because of these questions isn’t just about protecting hard work, but also about the potential repercussions of sharing without adequate guardrails. The easiest correction is to plan differently for the collective action that project outcomes require, such as considering how teams engage all the data we collect, or to rethink how we can openly share data publicly and without sanction. Institutions could also better value public data repositories with open access plans, and academic bodies can adopt standardized, accessible data sharing system. Still, it is worthwhile recognizing that this is part of a bigger problem and that the institutional pressures we encounter only intensifies job performance and career stresses that force us to consider abandonment risks over its benefits. In not opening this black box, however, we perpetuate the status quo and the belief that sharing is just too hard, ignoring how our community can deal with abandoned work beyond what we can each individually decide to do.

Impacting Relevant Practice

As scholars progressively address the urgent issues raised by the grand challenges and complex societal problems that require solutions, the work established over several decades by engaged organizational researchers is increasingly relevant. In getting applied knowledge to practice and in creating space for impact, insights into what it is we do and how we engage each other have become normative, even if it is not as relevant as it could be (Mirvis et al., 2021). Missing from this introspection, however, are fundamental changes that scholars have adopted in enabling a knowledge-based and publishing-driven approach to researching, such as how we have been socialized to not share abandoned work. Unlike Kooser's abandoned farmhouse, while “something went wrong” in how we use and share our research, abandoned work gives us the potential to improve and grow, rather than wither and forget. The rhythm of academic scholarship is full of failure and things abandoned. The choices we make in embracing this loss can act as a catalyst for positive change, shaping both our academic community and the broader impact of our work.

In a movement towards creating value in our research, naturally our interest has pivoted towards how better to do research with impact and relevancy. With this future scope editorial, however, the emphasis is that abandoned work alongside how we view impact and engagement may be part of the relevancy problems organizational research currently faces. The institutional pressures faced in undertaking the work we do, only to lead to different forms of abandonment, means that perhaps we have less time to do relevant work than we imagine, creating missed social impact to solve real, grand challenge problems, abandoned when we lose data and don’t share. Despite the pursuit of forward-thinking insight and useful, practical knowledge, the loss from abandoned work may have broader social impact consequences, resulting in increasingly bounded knowledge creation. Without acknowledging the existence of abandoned work, however, we can’t begin to address this issue or its associated limits. The intention of this editorial note is to push deeper thought (and action) on a relevancy loss that we may not even realize we are perpetuating by shrinking our research spread and an ability to create multiple avenues beyond the individual researcher team. A correction that tangentially could grow impact in enabling others to access or value more scholarly knowledge.

With this correction we can progress both relevant idea transmission and its applied theory. After all, breaking the knowledge sharing traditions we have adopted as a field are unlikely without concrete corrective action. Given the status quo on how much research work is abandoned and never shared, a first step is to acknowledge the problem and to openly discuss its basis. Let's use abandoned work as a way to open our file drawer of unused ideas and data, and improve our sharing and its consequences as a way forward. Just like broken windows theory embraced disorder to correct behavior, so too perhaps can an awareness of our lost and abandoned work lead to increased opportunities for organizational researchers, especially those with fewer resources and limited benefits.