Abstract
As IACCM goes from strength to strength, the organization is working hard to build relationships, collaborations and promote the exchange of knowledge, expertise and cutting-edge insights between researchers and practitioners. While not new, the growth in relationships between universities and organizations such as IACCM, is occurring at a much greater rate, especially as universities seek to produce work ready graduates for an increasingly competitive and uncertain market. Many of these university/industry connections can prove to be the impetus for innovation and change for both parties. It is no surprise that universities around the world are actively innovating ties with industry through roles such as professor of practice, honorary and visiting fellowships for key people working in industry, and other forms of fractional or full-time appointments, as well as collaboration in maker spaces, innovation hubs, apprenticeships and internship programs just to name a few. Such initiatives bring people from practice into academia to collaborate on design and delivery of educational offerings such as the design of individual subjects, entire programs such as an MBA or MSc, or for broadening and building entrepreneurial ecosystems in a city or region, or in its absolute simplest form, to deliver a guest lecture.
Government is also nudging universities and organizations from across industries and sectors to work together through a number of initiatives such as through the promotion of collaborative funding mechanisms, or by including measures of impact and knowledge transfer between university researchers and industry to determine university performance. Fostering collaboration and engagement between academia and practice will continue to be a growing agenda, and it can be fruitful, rewarding and most importantly innovative. Of course, it is also very challenging.
The challenges are not insurmountable, but they can be difficult. For example, there are legal and contractual issues that are yet to be fully fleshed out around intellectual property (who owns the knowledge created), what changing will occur in labour laws as the nature of university employees changes, and also deeper questions about what it actually means to be an academic. There are certainly some who see the involvement of ‘industry’ within academia as an encroachment on academic freedoms and part of the neo-liberalisation and commodification of universities. As such ‘collaborative’ research can be seen as somewhat dirty and problematic, and for some scholars it can be seen as biased towards the interests of the business sponsoring the research and hence not to be trusted. For such voices, universities should be free to pursue any question or problem they want, free from favour or influence. For others, however, universities are ivory towers devoid of any ‘practical’ importance and should be rationalized and made to focus on only the most practical of research that has a direct impact on society, the economy, the nation and its institutions.
For a long time a major challenge has been how to reconcile some of the differences between our worlds. Concepts such as time and performance mean different things whether you are a researcher in a university or a manager in a business or an administrator in government or a manager in a not-for-profit. While we may speak the same language, and use the same words, some of the deeply held heuristics that we use to make sense, interpret the world and make decisions are different. It is easy to say let’s bring academic and practitioners together to share, create and disseminate new knowledge. No doubt sometimes it is easy (usually when its fun and everyone is driven by a curious nature), but in reality, this is the exception rather than the rule. Such well-intentioned and positive statements belie the fact that sometimes that co-production and co-creation can be a very difficult process. It can be a long and evolving process; but it is well worth it.
When IACCM and SAGE launched JSCAN one of our aims was to attract more scholars working to IACCM by having a peer reviewed scholarly journal for their work in areas of contracting, negotiation and commercial strategy and management. Another of our core motivation was to provide a platform where practitioners can also publish their works. Herein lies a great challenge, because to be regarding a quality journal in academic circles there are at least three critical components to a scholarly journal article: theory, current literature, methods. These three components in our experience are central to any good manuscript. For journals such as JSCAN, that encourage and seek to grow the number of articles submitted by practitioners, this produces some real challenges.
We have had to reject several practitioner-oriented submissions because they fail to pass the test on these three components. Indeed, we have also had to reject many articles submitted by academics for the same reason. So, in the next two editorials we would like to provide a little more guidance on the component of an article that will most likely make it through to review and hopefully will be published. These three components above, when ignored or done badly will mean a reject. They are subtly different for practitioner as opposed to a scholarly article, and in this issue, we shall focus on what makes a good practitioner article.
The justification of your theory is critical whether you do theory testing or theory building. Most scholars will be trained or at least fairly well exposed to theory testing and building. If you look at most articles that use theory they will tend to use theories associated with the Resource Based View, Game Theory, Transaction-Cost-Economics, Behavioural Theory, Identity Theory, Institutional Theory, Social Movement Theory, and several others. These theories are used as the foundations of the hypotheses to be tested or as the dominant framework to make sense of the phenomena under investigation.
In JSCAN, for practitioner-oriented papers we are not expecting full blown theory papers, nor are we expecting you to test theory. Yes, theory is important, but it is not the main criteria for publication for a practitioner-oriented paper, and so we do not expect pages and pages of writing on theory. Also, for some practitioner papers, we are more interested in the phenomenon under investigation and so you can be light on theory or you may have no theory stated at all, or you may conclude by offering some insights into how your work has implications for a particular theory. For example, how is Artificial Intelligence transforming the process of contracting? Here a field is evolving, and we do not understand it that well, and so your practical insights might produce important areas for investigation. These might be wholly practical – and hence you provide practice insights. However, might want to engage with theory that tends to appear in the topic area, and provide some theoretical insights in your paper. This is fine, but overall in a practitioner-oriented paper theory is either best used as a lens to frame your research, or as part of the discussion where you might discuss your findings in relation to it theoretical implications. If you so so, you should demonstrate your understanding of the theory and how it fits your work, and to do so this takes us to the second component – the literature.
The literature you use should not only be recent, but also relevant. That means, are you using work that relates to the topic or issue you are writing about? Are you using sufficient previous research to build your argument and substantiate your claims? Are you engaging deeply with these articles, and do you understand them? You would be surprised by the number of people who cite two articles to make a claim, not realising that these two articles actually totally contradict each other or come from a fundamentally different theoretical perspective. So read widely and deeply.
What sorts of literature should you use? As with scholarly pieces, it is advisable to mainly use peer reviewed articles in quality journals. However, you might best engage with more practitioner or phenomenon driven journals. While there are many of these, examples include: California Management Review, Journal of Business Research, Harvard Business Review, Long Range Planning etc. These tend to be generalist, but they do provide good examples of the sort of articles we look for from a practitioner perspective. However, also feel free to augment your literature with quality books, book chapters. You may use industry reports etc, to frame your study as well, but these tend to work best when used to set context or background.
Do not forget that it is not only in the literature review section where you review literature. In the methods section you can draw upon articles that provide insights into the approach you are using – for example if you are doing action research, we would expect you are cognizant of the state of the art in doing such research. Indeed, the literature you use is the mortar in your bricks. The bricks are your ideas, the literature is the mortar that binds them together to form a solid, stable shape. So the literature gives shape to your story, substantiates your claims, frames your topic, and provides a platform for you to tell us about why this research is important for both other practitioners and for those of us researching the topics and subjects you are talking about.
For those interested a very good book that helps you develop your literature reviewing and writing skills is Wallace, M., & Wray, A. (2016). Critical Reading and Writing for Postgraduates 3rd Edition. London: Sage Publications. While designed for PhD students, it is also ideal for anyone wishing to develop these skills. Alternatively, there are many good books that develop literature review and writing skills.
We do not privilege any methodology (i.e. case study, quasi-experiment etc) or methodological tool (survey, interview, etc.). However, whether your paper is quantitative (involves numbers) or qualitative (involves conversations or quality of words as the primary data), your methods must make sense, be justified, well designed and executed, transparent, and clearly articulated. Moreover, it must make sense in relation to the topic under investigation, and the research question(s). Critically important to note is that when you analyse and discuss your findings, your data analysis should be appropriate for the type of data you collect, and your conclusions must be consistent with your questions and your data.
To close, while getting these three components of a paper right are critical for getting your paper into the review process, they are not the sole reasons for success. Other really important questions to note for a practitioner-oriented paper include: Does the paper cover an important and relevant topic to practice? Is it relevant to the scope of JSCAN? Is it novel? Does it have clearly articulated implications for practice? Is it likely to encourage people to research the topic? Does it make sense? This includes being well written, with no spelling and grammatical errors. Is it likely to create debate and garner attention? Does it provide usable and actionable recommendations for practice? This point is particularly important for a practitioner article.
If you are a practitioner, we hope this editorial at least tickles your interest in thinking about writing a paper for JSCAN. Of course, the editorial team is also always happy to chat to you if you have an idea.