Van de Ven and Johnson's “Engaged Scholarship”: Nice Try, But…

Abstract

Practitioners find little value in academic research. Some see it as a knowledge flow problem; others see practitioner and academic knowledge as unrelated. Van de Venand Johnson propose a pluralistic collective of researchers and practitioners using “engaged scholarship” and intellectual arbitrage to create practitioner-meaningful research. It's a nice dream, but not a solution; bias, disciplines, and particularism remain. Neither discipline-centric nor practitioner-driven research offers a solution. Earthquake science offers a better model for business school research.