The Challenge of Delivering Impact: Making Waves ... - SAGE Journals

opoulou et al.The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science © 2011 NTL Institute

47110.1177/0021886310390868Antonac

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The Challenge of Delivering Impact: Making Waves Through the ODC Debate

The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 47(1) 33–52 © 2011 NTL Institute Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0021886310390868 http://jabs.sagepub.com

Elena P. Antonacopoulou1, Erlend Dehlin2, and Mike Zundel1

Abstract This article articulates the nature of the challenge of the academic–practitioner “divide” as one of delivering impact. While measurable impact of research on organizational practice is a key indicator of the value of academic work, the authors explore possibilities of sustainable impact by exploiting and maintaining similarities and differences that characterize academic and organizational practice. Drawing on a metaphor of making waves, they suggest that possibilities of academic impact emerge from day-to-day engagements between scholars and organizational practitioners whose efficacy depends on the creation of shared understandings and personal relationships. This also emphasizes the maintenance of differences in perspective, which alert managers and researchers alike to different aspects that lay hitherto concealed in everyday practice. The authors draw insights from organizational development and change research to distil lessons about ways in which collaborative research practice could make waves that energize responses that extend both theory and practice. Keywords impact, making waves, process research

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University of Liverpool Management School, Liverpool, UK Trondheim Business School, Trondheim, Norway

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Corresponding Author: Elena P. Antonacopoulou, GNOSIS, University of Liverpool Management School, Chatham Building, Chatham Street, Liverpool L69 7ZH, UK Email: [email protected]

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The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 47(1)

Introduction The changing character of knowledge development has been described as a “co-evolutionary process” between science and society (Jasanoff, 2004). Consistent with the drive toward new modes of knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994), this orientation is shaping research practices in a number of scientific fields (e.g., Denis & Lomas, 2003; Landry et al., 2001). Partly because of this movement but also mindful of the specific challenges in the management field, this orientation toward knowledge development has fuelled what has come to be referred to as the “Rigor and Relevance”1 (hereafter R&R) debate (Gulati, 2007; Rynes, 2007; Starkey & Madan, 2001). This debate has drawn attention to the need for management research to be more applicable to management practice and to be more reflective of the effects of research on life in organizations (Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). The R&R debate has also highlighted the need to reassess management research practice, prompting new images of management scholarship akin to Van de Ven’s (2007) call for engaged scholarship, Bartunek’s (2007) relational scholarship of integration, and Antonacopoulou’s (2010a) practice-relevant scholarship. These images of management scholarship promote the need for management scholars and organizational practitioners to jointly create knowledge that can advance both management research and management practice, while being consistent with the underlying drive of the co-evolutionary orientation toward knowledge creation, which has been also referred to in management research as the “coproduction of knowledge” (Pettigrew, 2003). The attention toward coproduction, engagement, and integration emphasizes the significance of building lasting relationships with the research users so that they can both contribute as coresearchers in shaping the research itself and can more actively engage in using the “outcomes.” These images of management scholarship form critical foundations for further imagination in advancing future management scholarship, especially if the focus moves beyond R&R and toward impact. This article contributes to this end by extending the current R&R debate toward an appreciation of what impact may mean and how it may be delivered through collaborative management research. The focus on delivering impact is particularly challenging, and the article also contributes by articulating a processual view of impact, where the focus lies on the affordance of new possibilities rather than outputs or outcomes that are quantitatively measurable in accordance with ex ante defined targets. To this end, we invoke the image of impact akin to making waves—reflecting the rippling effects of sound or water. This conceptualization of impact is distinctly different from the ways in which impact is conceptualized by research funding and accreditation bodies, policy councils and committees, and increasingly academic journals, where the tendency is to focus on the outputs (frequently in terms of publications and citations) or outcomes (accounting for social, economic, or political implications) as evidence of impacts from research (Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB], 2008; Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform [BERR], 2007; Economic and

Antonacopoulou et al.

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Social Research Council, 2008; The European Evaluation Consortium [TEEC], 2005; Lähteenmäki-Smith, Hyytinen, Kutinlahti, & Konttinene, 2006). Notably, there are only limited accounts of impact generated through collaborative management research, which, we will argue, can be a key context in which impact is cocreated. This article responds directly to this issue and draws on the insights gained from the Organizational Development and Change (ODC) debate. The discussion captures some of the valuable lessons that can be drawn from the way ODC research has engaged with process, movement, and becoming to capture analytical distinctions between continuity and discontinuity, stability and change (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002; Van de Ven & Scott-Poole, 2005), which are of particular relevance to address the challenge presented by the reconceptualization of impact put forward in this article. It is argued that the metaphor of making waves potentially also provides ways of expressing and extending the current process orientated debate in the ODC field by outlining implications for future ODC research practice. Exploring impact as a (dynamic) process, we argue demands as a starting point a revision of the perhaps paralyzing separation of scholars and organizational practitioners as if these represented separate (social) groups with clearly delineable boundaries, properties, and modus operandi. Instead, an orientation toward impact provides scope for the level of engagement, relationality, and integration consistent with the new images of management scholarship. This implies that academic theorizing is not prior to or above management practice. We take the view that we are all practitioners who carry different labels—“academic,” “researcher,” “manager,” “policy maker”—but who have re-search as a common practice and coexist through overlapping processes rather than differences in “being.” This reconceptualization helps explain why we abandon reference to the academic–practitioner divide and instead encourage greater critique and analysis of scholarly and organizational practices and their relationship. This practice orientation with a focus on the relationship between scholars and organizational practitioners allows us to begin to outline how a processual view of impact addresses also the way the ODC field and its ensuing debate needs to respond practically to the challenge of delivering impact. We organize the analysis of these ideas in two main sections. Following the introduction, we first discuss the notion of impact for management scholarship and practice. We summarize the main points from the growing debate on this theme and lay a foundation for theorizing impact as a process of making waves. The next section distils key lessons from established approaches of scholar–organizational practitioner collaborations that have been successfully applied also in the ODC field. We draw attention to the insights from collaborative research practice and follow on the footsteps of ODC scholars to capture the importance of learning and engagement in making powerful connections through collaborative research. We conclude by exploring the implications for future ODC research practice committed to making waves. We propose a view of impactful ODC research practice as one that creates scope for difference through improvisation and experimentation with the latent possibilities of collaboration rather than fixed delimitations of relevance.

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Why Impact and Why Now? The relationship between “theory” and “practice” is one of the central issues in organization and management research (Beyer & Trice, 1982, Rynes, 2007). Much academic debate has proposed a need for organizational research to be relevant (Mintzberg, 2004; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002), that is, to be actionable and applicable to the problems of individuals within organizations (Argyris, 2004; Mohrman, 2001). Yet differences between both spheres have been highlighted in terms of the rigorous and incremental focus of academic work versus the engaged and immediate concerns of agents in organizations and the mental schemes and forms of knowledge involved in dealing with the different demands of academic and organizational affairs (Rynes, 2007; Shrivastava & Mitroff, 1984). At the center of this debate lies the premise that abstract, academic knowledge has the possibility of generating action. This conception of “theory” as a precursor to “action” is rooted in rationalist traditions in which formal logical principles that involve cause– effect relationships can be identified, isolated, and “put into practice” at distinct spatial and temporal points (Simon, 1976, Tranfield & Starkey, 1998). However, such a “narrow” conception of the relationship between academic work and management practice harbors a variety of conceptual and methodological problems relating to differences in knowledge, language, and focus of the respective groups involved (Ghoshal, 2005; McKelvey, 2006; Shapiro, Kirkman, & Courtney, 2007). It also limits the increasing attempts at measuring academic relevance (e.g., in the United Kingdom via the Research Excellence Framework) to identifying mostly direct “visible” outputs that are implied by academic work. This drive toward measurable indicators reinforces the attaché that what gets measured gets done (Kerr, 1975) and helps explain why attention has now been shifting toward impact.

The Content of and Context for Impact Stakeholders such as international funding councils (Research Councils UK, 2007) and accreditation bodies (AACSB, 2008), European initiatives (TEEC, 2005), and the policy agenda by the governments of different countries (see BERR, 2007; Lähteenmäki-Smith et al., 2006; Munn-Venn, 2006) increasingly recognize that a narrow focus on relevance alone will not guarantee that research will engage users in academic research processes. More important perhaps is the question of whether it is sustainable or even acceptable to continue to invest in research especially that is driven primarily by scholarly interests unless economic, social, cultural, and political returns from investment in research are demonstrated. Yet narrow perspectives of such returns (e.g., by focusing solely on economic improvements of individual firms) hold the danger of neglecting wider impacts of academic interventions that may only become visible in the long run. For instance, Lähteenmäki-Smith et al. (2006) point out dimensions and related indicators of impact from research. These range from macro issues (e.g., economy, competitiveness, commercialization, and the environment) to micro issues (e.g., social networking, social capital, knowledge, decision making, and techniques). Their dimensions of


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impact promote attention to public, environmental, and economic issues while the related indicators of impact focus predominantly on “evidence” of improvement in existing practices, efficiency in the use of resources, and expansion of resources. Taken together, current conceptualizations of impact imply or directly refer to a process of “improvement,” “change,” and “making a difference” (TEEC, 2005, p. 16). These examples, illustrative of the current “impact” debate, indicate a narrow understanding of the possibilities of the scholar/practitioner interrelationships: First, we note that impact is understood as an effect or outcome that emanates from (intentional) actions and interventions that implicate particular changes. Such change unsurprisingly is colored in positive terms, suggesting the “elevation” of the identified aggregate (an organization, an industry, a society) from one state to another advanced one. Having an impact on something or someone mostly implies delivering “beneficial change” (Soule, 2010). Second, there is some recognition that the nature of impact may vary in terms of intensity (in terms of level of analysis), scope (in terms of geographical criteria), actuality (in terms of actual and potential impact), degree (in terms of immediate, intermediate, and higher impact), and duration (short, medium, or longer term) (Soule 2010; TEEC, 2005). Yet we suggest that we need to pay greater heed to the conceptual and methodological difficulties of delimiting clear-cut “causes” as well as “effects” without reducing and caricaturing the complexities and manifold interrelationships of life. A related issue here is the reification of the categories of provider (theory developer) and user (practitioner) where the former creates knowledge that is unidirectionally “transferred” to the latter whose role is limited to that of an applicator. Third, a potential trap of too narrow a formulation of impact is that these formulations may lose the necessary flexibility and elasticity to deal with new problems and unforeseen demands. Narrow definitions of what counts as desirable impact furthermore have the tendency to systematically create the research outputs of which they speak. This form of “path dependency” restricts researchers to satisfy a priori set standards rather than being mindful and reactive to the particular insights they may gain. Creativity and novelty may be thus equally stifled as the reporting of unintended or adversary effects of research that is not directly in service of the modernist quest of (economic) improvement.

Conceptualizing Impact as a Process of Making Waves Our concern is to rethink possibilities of impact while being sensitive to a processual rather than objectified understanding of (organizational) life (e.g., Cooper, 2005; Rescher, 2000). Going beyond mere semantics, we propose that impact can capture a wider sense of the influence of academic work that is not restricted to cause–effect relationships between theory preceding action. We start from the premise that impact is also an indeterminate movement, a flow of unpredictable, incomplete connections as part of the fluctuating working net of events of dense intermeshing relationships (Antonacopoulou, 2009). This processual view of impact acknowledges that impact entails both “emergence” and “emergency.” Hence, impact challenges us to both “embrace” it for the possibilities it holds as well as “brace for” it in terms of the unintended consequence

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that it may entail. Impact seen in these terms creates tensions and can lead to a crisis (emergency) as well as create a multitude of connections that only in experiencing impact first hand it is possible to account for (emergence). Impact transcends processes of intentional change and can, perhaps, be more authentically explored as a set of generative moments that can be experienced in the midst of action, interaction, and transaction of competing priorities and possible connections (Antonacopoulou, 2010a). In attempting a tentative conceptualization of impact as a process, we draw reference from the work of Gregory Bateson and invoke a metaphor of “waves.” For Bateson (1972/2000), the impact of systems is not akin to the transfer of energy but to a stimulus that energizes. Rather than implicating a result in the fashion of cause and effect (McTaggart, 1915), impact as energizing implies that individuals, groups, and organizations are not passive objects whose behavior is limited to and dependent on receiving and enacting prescriptions (theory). Instead they (we) are alive, responsive, and endowed with creative, innovative, and improvisatory energy (Dehlin, 2008). The role of impact is thus not to prescribe action but to awaken others and animate them to release their own energy. We suggest that the metaphor of “waves” is helpful in outlining the characteristics of “impact” and its generativity in energizing connections. Waves have the conspicuous quality of combining what is seemingly fluid and in motion with forces of impact we are more used to ascribing to rigid “objects.” Unlike static objects waves resist clear taxonomizing and inquiries into their internal workings. They unfold their impact often after long periods of concealed building up and changes in refraction and speed. Amplitudes, directions, and breaking points of waves are difficult, if not impossible, to preempt and evade our usual approaches of measurement (size, weight, surface conditions, etc.), which underlie mechanical attempts at fixing and controlling our environment. Waves, thus, combine qualities of matter with those of movement and flux, urging us to question our ontologically objective categories. The wave is certainly there, it has substance and it is continually moving. The substance of the wave, however, is temporary, fluent, and fragile, something that makes each wave a novelty of its own. It is fundamentally infused with difference and change, and the (dissipative) similarity with itself over time (making a movement in water seem like “a” wave), as well as with other waves, is metaphorical more than it is analytical. For the spectator the (always fresh) image of “a wave” is sufficiently precise so as to give meaning but not mathematically precise so as to display transcendent perfection. We suggest that waves, rather than objects and quantities, serve as good metaphors to understand possibilities for “impact.” Understanding the implications of academic work can therefore not be restricted to mechanical relationships between isolated groups of active researchers and passive recipients of academic insights, empowered merely to apply and execute what has been invented and “thought out” elsewhere. This implies as well that just as amplitude, speed, and directions of waves remain difficult if not impossible to predict as well as to reconstruct, “impact” is not a reified concept that can be measured in the ways in which we survey the crater that is left by the collision of two objects. Academic impact, just like waves, unfold largely concealed from obvious


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detection over time. They may softly ripple out or, meeting obstacles, come to the surface in unexpected moments. Importantly, waves and impact share their blending quality of matter and movement. Waves only exist in and through motion and impact is not the measurable result of academic work leaving an imprint on organizational practitioners but the transformation of connected individuals (researchers and managers). Waves resemble the conjoining of animated substances, the meeting of things always already in flux, and movement whose coming together can amount to more or less than the exchange of kinetic energy; tiny ripples may neutralize each other or, given sufficient conditions, add up to a swelling crescendo of movement and force. Viewing the participants of research not in terms of a provider–user dichotomy but creative and responsive cocreators of “impact” can furthermore be likened to a wave in a football stadium. When football fans jump up and cheer, they do not move their hands because they received an energy transfer from the person in the next row. They do not require the transfer of energy as such, but a stimulation to use their own resources to participate in the orchestration of the wave. When stimulated, waves can be amplified (when several layers overlap in frequency) far beyond their initial energy content, which is dramatically demonstrated by tsunamis and the behavior of bridges and other constructions in earthquakes. Akin to waves and their rippling effects impact creates vibrations and interferences, which can lead to tensions as well as create new possibilities. This means that as a process impact recognizes the dynamic nature of all social and natural phenomena and attempts to reflect the generative qualities of overlapping practices just as it would be the case of scholarly and management practice. Viewing waves as generative sources of energy offers an alternative frame through which the dynamics embedded in action and interaction may be captured. In particular, it represents an effort to grasp movement and becoming, rather than the changes of fixed and demarcated entities, so as to highlight disambiguation and oscillations in human interaction. This emphasis on disambiguation, on the one hand, explores the elasticity of relational processes that expand the space of possibility, stretching latent pasts and futures of engaged actors. On the other hand, it attends to the vibrations in the way back and forth motion negotiates tensions and enables perceived courses of action to be formed. What is fundamental in this process of connectivity is that all actors are in flow. Hence, the energizing is cocreated akin to what Sawyer (2000, p. 183) calls “collaborative emergence.” Perhaps most interesting is the prospect that Merleau-Ponty (1962) alluded to when he pointed out that such communicative interactions reveal the potential (thoughts) of individual actors that by themselves they may not have been able to identify they possessed. This implies that being on the same wavelength is not all that matters in making communicative interaction between actors productive. What is more important to appreciate is how their interaction in dialogical terms provides a basis for each of them to draw energy and insights that mobilize their subsequent individual and collective action. Understanding the impact of academic work for management practice through energizing possibilities, through making waves, invites us to rethink scholar–organizational practitioner relationships. On a practical level, this perspective invites us to extend the

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current R&R debate by raising questions about the primary role of research practice: What might research practice be primarily concerned with—removing ambiguities, identifying (amplifying) them? Might it be concerned with eliminating tensions, using and expanding on them? Why is it important to align differences between scholars and organizational practitioners rather than thrive on their respective uniqueness? The fundamental challenge these questions present is not to choose between one or the other possibility. Instead, we feel that exploring these possibilities simultaneously may be a way of capturing the unique contribution of scholarly practice in relation to management practice. In other words, the challenge is to understand how rigor and relevance may lie in stimulating alternative sights and new interpretations of what has hitherto been concealed in the respective practices of scholars and organizational practitioners. In this respect impact prompts a sensitivity to see things afresh and to experiment with possibilities previously not thought possible. From this orientation three key issues need to be further explicated: First, understanding the relationship between management scholarship and practice in terms of waves implies a processual view of the constitution of social and natural phenomena. Such a perspective shifts our focus from “enduring things” toward patterns of stability in a sea of process; pending configurations in a realm of change (Rescher, 2000). Like a wave pattern in water, social and natural phenomena are not fixed and static entities but constitute a continuously unfolding and becoming tapestry of processes (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Second, the metaphor of waves highlights the limiting aspects of a concept that is based on cause–effect relationships. Within a “sea of waves,” individuals need to distinguish a signal from background noise. For practitioners to “pick up” academic work necessitates that they notice it. Getting things “on the map,” however, requires openness to disturbing information against which we often have the tendency of “shutting off” (Bateson, 1972/2000). This also bears implications for attempts at “measuring” impact. Rather than focusing on changes that follow academic intervention (which assumes that prior to such intervention the object of study was a static and inanimate “thing”), understanding impact means getting a grasp of the ways in which academic work creates resonances (Stacey, 2001) whose visible attributes may not surface straight away and may not be directly attributable to the intervention, just as a wave is difficult to isolate from the sea of changes within which it unfolds. Third, for energizing to happen, it requires difference as well as similarity. This seemingly paradoxical position entails both scholars and organizational practitioners sharing a joint background through which they can make sense of each others’ worlds. Being on the same “wavelength” implies mutual understanding of each others’ spheres so that overlaps can occur. Being different means to be able to disturb engrained patterns of stability, to create turbulences and ripples that liberate imagination and action. In Bateson’s (1972/2000, p. 381) words, it is “the difference that makes a difference.” Viewing impact not as the force transferred from a perpetuated substance onto another that merely passively awaits this transfer, this perspective highlights the possibility of academic work to create ripples whose “resonance” has the potential of creating larger waves. For resonance to happen, we argue, academic work does not need exact prescriptions of


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what to do, but it needs to overlap in some way with the processes that make up organizational life. Next, we explore how making a difference–making waves—is possible in collaborative research, by looking more closely at the insights that we can distil from existing research practices, in particular, from ODC collaborative research.

Learning To and From ODC Collaborative Research to Understand Impact A processual orientation toward impact and its characteristics and attributes find practical application in several examples of collaborative research that transcend boundaries of context (international), discipline (interdisciplinary), and fields of practice (interactive). A common thread that these examples of impactful collaborative research share is the emphasis on collaboration practice itself. It is this that we turn our attention to next. This section seeks to address the issues in relation to existing conceptualizations of impact by distilling key lessons from established approaches of scholar–organizational practitioner research collaborations that have been successfully applied also in the ODC field. We base our analysis on the emphasis drawn by ODC scholars on the importance of building powerful connections. Attention is predominantly drawn on how relationships between collaborators are formed as opposed to the role of language, conversation, or dialogue (Ford & Ford, 2008; Grant, Michelson, Oswick, & Wailes, 2005; Heracleous & Barrett, 2001; Tsoukas, 2009). We see this as a critical issue in understanding the microfoundations of collaborative research practice, which we explicate in the paragraphs that follow.

Lessons From Research Practice: The Power of Collaboration In the previous section, we have suggested that the relationship between management scholarship and practice may be more fruitfully understood through a processual lens that humanizes both organizational practitioners and scholars. This orientation implies viewing scholars and organizational agents as practitioners who coexists rather than populate isolated fields and posses either practical or theoretical knowledge. This idea is reflected in approaches that emphasize the practical character of all engaged activity, for instance, when they suggest that scholars and organizational practitioners perform their practices in different communities of practice and as such the situated and contextual nature of their knowing predisposes them to a different orientation, approach, and set of expectations from research (Brown & Duguid, 2001; Lave & Wenger, 1991). We suggest that the emphasis on scholars to create knowledge, which can be applied by organizational practitioners, suppresses the practical character of both spheres and the similarities that exist between them (Zundel & Kokkalis, 2010). Academic work entails uncertainties, pressures, routines, skills, and improvisatory elements, which are similar to those of people working in other organizations. Impact, therefore, works both ways, as academic work and the kind of knowledge created is not different from that which is created in organizational practice. This suggests the importance of collaboration

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and coproduction rather than a one-dimensional transfer of knowledge. This point finds support in studies of collaboration (see Gray, 1989; Huxham & Vangen, 2005) as well as more recent accounts of critical aspects of successful collaborative research practice that promote a “collective investment” orientation (Antonacopoulou, 2010b; Knight & Pettigrew, 2007). Conceptualizing collaborative research as a collective investment centers on the complex dynamics of learning with and through others. Learning with and through collaborators to develop knowledge for action is not the same as a collaboration that addresses a narrow and specific business issue. Perhaps more than any other form of scholar– organizational practitioner relationship, research collaborations call both for a more active engagement in learning to collaborate and learning from the collaboration on an ongoing basis. Research collaborations that deliver impact engage collaborators in a journey of personal and collective development where learning becomes a central feature of collaboration practice as well as research practice. If we entertain collaboration as a learning space then our attention needs to shift beyond collaborators’ attitudes toward learning in collaboration (Adler, Shani, & Styhre, 2004; Huxham & Hibbert, 2008). Paying heed to the impact of learning on collaborators and their collaboration rather than the immediate, economically accountable outputs of such work could provide a better basis for understanding the transformations set in place through such work. A learning perspective also shifts the focus from commonalities, in the form of jointly achieved (economic) improvements, the greater alignment of academic and organizational worlds (such as universities becoming economic players and organizational practitioners using academic tools) toward understanding the importance and efficacy of learning that is rooted in differences among collaborators, and their subsequent ability to change extant views and offer new conceptions.

Learning From ODC Collaborative Research Practices The learning perspective outlined above also highlights that impact consists not merely of the provision of “technical” solutions to (largely economic) problems but that there is a human and practical side to academic work that remains largely underplayed. In particular, collaborative work stresses that this point suggests that the research practitioners involved, and the practical judgments they make in the course of a collaborative research project, have the potential to make the difference. In essence, research practice even (and especially) when done collaboratively is to a large extent a personal affair. The dynamics of collaborative research practice reveal very unique and individual issues that different research practitioners (scholars and organizational practitioners) bring to, and experience in, collaborating with others. These individual issues explicate the inner workings of how collaborators may think and act on their expectations from collaborative research and why they may choose to engage in collaborative research (Amabile et al., 2001; Shani, Adler, Mohrman, Pasmore, & Stymne, 2008). Engaging in collaborative research requires not only a positive attitude but also an instrumental orientation to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs. Engagement


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is about making powerful connections that can only be formed and maintained if the necessary level of investment is made in the collaboration itself. By drawing attention to investment two important dimensions of collaborative research are highlighted. First, investment implies commitment of resources. The kind of resources necessary in collaborative research are not only funding, time, and capabilities, elements that could provide the raw materials from which the benefits of the collaboration will be accrued. Consistent with Golden-Biddle et al.’s (2003) and Bartunek’s (2007) emphasis on relational stance in collaborative research, we would also add the importance of the investment in energy and level of personal commitment required to develop the relationship between collaborators. Only with such personal investment is it possible to engage in collaborative research that is based on trust and respect. It takes personal investment and a deep sense of care toward others’ needs to make the collaboration work. Some of the lessons from collaborative research practice are derived from the longstanding research practices adopted especially by ODC scholars. Whether it is Bartunek and Louis’s (1996) insider/outsider team research, Hartley and Benington’s (2000) co-researcher methodology, and other similar approaches within the Action Research (Coghlan & Brannick, 2010) and Design Science (van Aken, 2005) tradition, the common thread is one of engagement in learning and changing as a critical foundation in the research collaboration. We would argue that the intimate understanding of issues that are typical of interventionist ODC research are found to rise up to the challenges of managing interpersonal differences (including conflict, power inequalities, and intergroup dynamics) that may arise because of the heterogeneity in orientation among research collaborators. Moreover, they are found to be more robust in attending to ethical dilemmas in collaborative research practices. This is not to suggest that these approaches to collaborative research are immune to the tensions inherent in research and collaboration practices. If nothing else, it could be argued that these interventionist approaches exacerbate the tensions. However, we feel that interventionist ODC research has been leading the way in identifying ways of attending to tensions in collaborative research practice by recognizing the importance of building powerful connections by being more attentive to issues of language, conversation, and dialogue. Collaborative research practice, like other social practices, necessitates the consideration of discursive processes, not least because it relies on the meanings that collaborators create through their interactions both about the collaboration and the research practices, which affect their actions in the ways they collaborate and engage in research. ODC scholarship has been particularly geared toward discursive approaches in analyzing change, not least because interpretation and construction of meaning are seen as integral to the process of change. Tsoukas (2005) reminds us of the role of discursive processes such as (re)definition, (re)labeling, or (re)interpretation as integral to the way social actors (re)negotiate the sense they make and give to particular events affecting their engagement with organizational change initiatives. This discursive orientation in ODC research is in line with our emphasis on repetition in the way meaning emerges especially in collaboration. Collaboration offers a space for reviewing and revising meaning in ongoing negotiation. As different perspectives are exposed and considered in a learning

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mode, there is scope for a difference in understanding to emerge. This is not simply a matter of acknowledging the importance of shifting conversations (Ford & Ford, 1995, 2008; Shaw, 2002). We argue that beyond people’s surface-level communicative actions, there are deep structures that affect how social actors become attuned to events and situations. This attunement, akin to connecting on the same wavelength, includes cognitive understandings as well as emotions and their expressions in moods, feelings, affections, and general positioning with the situation at hand. Through a contextual attunement to the emergent fabric of authentic dialogue the space is created for a greater appreciation of what is interrelational, unsaid, and merely hinted at. To be sensitive to the unsaid, latent, and concealed in everyday practice may require us to acknowledge that there is more than can be said and that when we fix one aspect (when we interpret something as something), we leave unsaid and unfixed a whole world of wider relationships that constantly evade and remain in flux—superficially suspended by theoretical formulations of background assumptions and model conditions that remain a far stretch from the unfolding of lived experiences in organizations and academic institutions. Our emphasis is less on explicit instruments of conversation, less on language itself, and more on the complex and emergent process of interaction in which language is put to use. This finds support in Tsoukas’s (2009) analysis of the relational nature of dialogue that is integral to the creation of new knowledge in organizations. His relational analysis highlights the importance of accepting responsibility toward creating the conditions that affect action, building high-quality connections that can provide the possibility for mutual influence. These insights from ODC research and beyond provide us important clues about the way collaborative research practice intended to deliver impact could usefully be pursued. As we have argued, to collaborate is not about entering in an instrumental knowledge exchange. Instead, what we learn from ODC research is that forming the kinds of relationships necessary for impact to be delivered is more critical. This is reminiscent of Latour’s (1986) emphasis on the power of association in the connections that are fostered between partners in the cocreation of knowledge, something that implies greater attention to the way in which collaborators negotiate dynamically the emergent knowledge they cocreate by drawing on their learning with and from each other to attend to the tensions that they are experiencing. This point brings to the fore that the quality of connections collaborators form may well influence the scope to make a difference.

Making Waves Through Maintaining Differences As we have argued in the previous sections, understanding connectivity and relationality as central to collaborative research practice demands that we think of impact in terms of processes not static implications of one object on another. This means that we need to be mindful of dualistic framings of research relationships and embrace the challenge of capturing the way tensions form the basis for new possibilities to be generated. The success and thus the sustainable impact of collaborative practices depend not only on the extent to which immediate problems can be “solved” but also on creating compatible


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wavelengths while retaining and exploiting differences. We argue that this would be akin to making waves, exploring how the rippling effects of movement generate possibilities for action through improvisation and experimentation. By “tension” we indicate the intrusive and uninvited presence of sentiment that triggers, accompanies, and underpins the flow of conscious experience. Some have described such sentiment as a vague urge, eros, or passion (Alexander, 1990; Feyerabend, 2002), others like a struggle that triggers and permits the formation of meaning (Joas, 1993, 1996). We argue that differences create tensions, which energize our creativity and capacity to act. It is perhaps in understanding the complex and emergent nature of tensions that we also experience the meaninglessness of pursuits toward linear causality and intentional “change.” For even if tension sets a direction, it does not strictly define a path, and as much ODC research also shows, it is not uncommon for change efforts to be perceived to produce little or no change (see Ashmos et al., 2007; Balogun, 2006; Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990). Moreover, organizations tend to produce webs of self-reinforcing narratives of success while the greater possibility for transformation, and thus for sustainable impact, lies in the diverse voices and deviating narratives that are too often confined to organizational blind spots (Geiger & Antonacopoulou, 2009). The unintended consequences of ODC efforts are only too common and impossible to predict, however simplified they may be explained in terms of resistance, power and politics, leadership, communication, culture, or other-related explanations (see Bovey & Hede, 2001; Buchanan & Badham, 1999; Schein, 1997). This point presents one of the most important challenges of future ODC research, namely, to capture the complexity of the process of movement and flow without resigning to mechanical models or accounts of “change” and “impact” that neglect the peripheral transformations of those involved in the processes and that may, like waves, evade measurement by instruments designed for static objects.

Discussion Taking together the various issues that emanate from our analysis of collaborative research practice especially in the ODC field, as well as our processual orientation toward impact, the analysis contributes to “changing the conversation” in relation to R&R in three important ways that fundamentally inform future management scholarship and practice. First, our analysis is founded on the challenges of delivering impact, which shifts the focus beyond simply debating issues, but instead looking to consider appropriate modes of action to address the issues that the debate has raised. For this reason we encourage, at the most basic level, a change in the terms we use. We no longer refer to “scholars,” “practitioners,” and their “divide.” We encourage, instead, recognition that we are all practitioners irrespective of the different labels used to distinguish our practices. Hence, we refer in our analysis to scholar and organizational practitioners. From this perspective emanates also our position that to speak of a divide is to deny the interdependencies that constitute our respective practices and the opportunities there are for scholarly practices to energize organizational practices and vice versa.

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Second, our focus on impact is concerned with the dynamics that underpin our collaborative research practices, which shed light on the nature and modes of learning with and from each other. This focus on learning in collaborative practice we see as critical to the potential difference (not just benefits) that emanate from our interaction and explore how such a difference can be captured beyond the currently limiting conceptualizations of impact. We, therefore, promote a view of impact akin to making waves to open up the scope for the emergent possibilities that can be cocreated through collaborative research that can energize a whole host of changes on the respective practices of the collaborators. Third, these ideas reflect the makings of a processual view of impact that brings to the fore greater attention to the emerging, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of impact. This, we argue, contributes on a number of important levels in extending the current R&R debate, by providing a way of appreciating impact as a set of generative moments that energize and stimulate action akin to the rippling effects of water that create vibrations and oscillations with the potential to make a difference rather than in terms of “fixed outputs” from research. As we reflect critically on the approach we have adopted in our analysis, namely, to apply insights from the ODC debate to understand the challenges to which ODC research practice needs to respond to, we claim two main contributions that we see as important foundations for making waves through future ODC scholarship and practice. First, by developing a processual account of impact in relation to the advancement of new directions for future ODC research practice, we suggest a reconsideration of scholars and organizational practitioners as research practitioners. We propose that both communities engage in practices whose members depend on socialization and dialogue to cope. This implies for the possibility of impact in OCD research the recognition that sustainable transformation depends on more than the provision of tools to fix immediate problems. It requires a greater focus on the ways in which individuals interact and the role of personal relationships between research partners and the various explicit and implicit developments these take. Impact, thus, derives from the blending of scholar and organizational practitioner work in collaborative research rather than the reification of differences and continued attempts at overcoming “gaps.” Such connections, as we have argued, are relational and social as much as they are cognitive and emotional. Appreciating, therefore, connectivity in research practice is not only appreciating the inseparability of R&R. It is also about making a conscious effort to understand tensions, divisions, and distinctions as a basis of extending the range of possibilities. Moreover, such a conceptualization of impact as a blending of processes and their aggregates that belong to the same ecology, we gear toward what Bateson (1972/2000) calls systemic wisdom—which is an appreciation of the wider hanging together of our actions. Our contribution is intended to add to such a renewed focus on wisdom by changing the conversation of the ODC debate beyond “change” and toward the connections that affect the pace and rhythm of emergence. We feel that ODC can and does make waves especially if it attends to the everyday tensions that practicing managers need to address when improvising and experimenting to discover their courses


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of action. After all, waves happen mostly under the surface, and what is visible (expressed, articulated) represents only the cusp of what is going on. And maybe we ought to be reminded too that a wave never stands still!

Conclusions In this article, we address the nature of the challenge of the “scholar–practitioner divide” by shifting the focus on impact. Instead of attempting to isolate fixed objects and measure the effect one has on the other, we encourage a rethinking of the ways in which we expect our work to matter, if we abandon our expectation that each effort causes a direct effect. We suggest that impact harbors wider reaching understandings of the possibilities of collaborative research. We fundamentally question dichotomies between practitioner and practice, researcher and research object. We point toward the patterning of interrelationships rather than the current focus on “content.” We outline a processual view of impact that focuses on the indeterminate nature of impact. Through the metaphor of making waves we draw attention to the emerging and dynamic ways of making a difference, which we see as a set of generative moments than fixed outputs and outcomes from collaborative research. We have suggested that impact is a process of creating shared wavelengths while being different to make a difference. In relation to collaborative research between research practitioners (academics and business executives), we have drawn attention to the importance of learning with and from each other because of the differences in perspectives. Our emphasis on learning as integral to collaborative research practice intended to deliver impact has allowed us to capture the importance of making connections (social, emotional, and cognitive), which we argued provide the basis of attending to collaborative research practice as a collective investment. We have highlighted key lessons from collaborative research practices we have found to be successfully applied in the ODC field and have indicated the leading role of ODC research practice in pointing to issues of language, conversation, and dialogue in relation to organizational change issues. The metaphor of waves urges us to focus on the style in which scholars and organizational practitioners blend together, engaging in mutual dialoge within a wider patterning of social relations that make up the fabric of (social) life expressed in everyday practice. Acknowledgments We are grateful to Prof. Jean Bartunek for her valuable feedback to earlier drafts of this article. We also thank participants of the Academy of Management—Practice Theme Committee—GNOSIS Project workshop for the inspiration we drew from our discussions, which influenced the development of the ideas on impact presented in this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests The authors declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

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Funding The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article: The authors acknowledge the financial support from the ESRC/EPSRC Advance Institute of Management Research under the “Impact scheme,” awarded to Prof. E. Antonacopoulou, which made the authors’ collaboration possible.

Note 1. The “R&R” debate is another way of capturing the concerns of the Scholar–Practitioner divide. It reflects the culmination of a series of calls by management scholars to attend to both the scientific rigor of the research as well as its applicability in the world of business practice. Presented frequently as a tension between competing and potential uncompromising demands, this debate has evolved from polarized positions of “either/or” toward perspectives of “both/and” that are also more consistent with the co-evolutionary orientation to knowledge development.

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Bios Elena P. Antonacopoulou, PhD, is professor of organizational behavior at the University of Liverpool Management School where she leads GNOSIS, a research initiative advancing impactful collaborative research in management and organization studies. Erlend Dehlin, PhD, is associate professor of organization theory at Trondheim Business School. He is dedicated to the advancement of practice theory within his field, and is currently engaged in multiple research projects related to project management, organizational identity and new public leadership. Mike Zundel, PhD, is a lecturer in strategy and international business at the University of Liverpool Management School. His research interests include strategy processes, learning, and the possibilities of practice and process perspectives for studying organizations.