Narrowing the Dissemination Gap: Genres for Practitioner Scholarship

Abstract

Practitioners with a minimum of ten years of management experience increasingly enroll in doctoral-level management education programs. When entering these programs, their view of the world shifts as they augment practitioner perspectives with scholarly perspectives. They acquire distinct competencies in framing, inquiring, and addressing managerial problems as practitioner-scholars who act as boundary spanners between academia and management practice. Unfortunately, current management outlets for knowledge dissemination do not explicitly support boundary-spanning strategies and writing genres. At one end of the spectrum are academically focused journals, where concerns of theory and method dominate. The target audience of these outlets is academic scholars—the same group of scholars who produce the knowledge. At the other end of the spectrum are practitioner-focused journals with genres that focus on communicating practical insights for practice. Here, concerns of practitioner problems dominate, and the genres emphasize practical experience and good stories. The articles are authored either by scholars or practitioners, and they convey knowledge that the editors and authors believe to be salient for the targeted audience. In this paper, we formulate an alternative dissemination strategy for a new practitioner scholarship journal titled Engaged Management ReView (EMR). The journal gives high priority to boundary spanning in content, audience, and forms of knowledge and seeks to narrow the dissemination gap between the two worlds by integrating the traditionally separate genres into new genres. In this inaugural editorial essay, we reveal the logic that guided us in creating the journal and in innovating and imagining its genres. In particular, we discuss select practitioner scholarship genres promoted by EMR that balance academic rigor with practical relevance. By promoting these forms of writing, we aim to create for practitioner-scholars a space in which they can better reinforce, interweave, and experiment with the bifurcated intellectual foundations that inform their scholarship, and in doing so, to build a repository of such works to allow for awareness, ongoing debate, and expansion of this new perspective on knowledge production.

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