ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES: HOW CAN SCHOLARS GET THEIR THEORY INTO PRACTICE?
Process, Practice and Institutions (PPI) Research Programme / Organisation and Human Resource Management (OHRM) Seminar
There is a good deal of literature of academic "impact" on practice and on "engagement" with practitioners (MacIntosh et al., BJM, 2017, as one recent example). This is very important, but not the only way academics may be involved with practice.
In this presentation Professor Bartunek will focus on one particular means of such involvement, ways that academics attempt to perform their own theorizing. Professor Bartunek will focus on two examples. One is Elizabeth Warren, currently the senior US Senator from Massachusetts, who essentially created the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau based on her research and theorizing. Another is Myron Scholes, who, with his colleagues, created the Black Scholes options pricing model, won a Nobel prize in Economics and which is currently the typical method traders use to value options.
While these are particularly clear examples, there are other, more modest, ways that scholars, including management scholars, perform their own theories as well. One means is by development of measures based on theories of job design, such as the Hackman-Oldham model. Another is by means of tools such as those developed by the Center for Positive Organizational Studies at the University of Michigan (e.g. reflected best self exercise, job crafting exercise).
These reflect a variety of ways that academics may enact their own scholarship. Professor Bartunek will consider some costs and benefits of such approaches.
Speaker Biography:
Jean M. Bartunek is the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and Professor of Management and Organization at Boston College, where she has taught since 1977.
Her Bachelor’s degree in psychology and sociology is from Maryville University (St. Louis), and her PhD is in social and organizational psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a past president and Fellow of the Academy of Management, and currently serves as Dean of the Fellows. In 2009 she won the Academy of Management’s Career Distinguished Service Award, and she was chair of its Ethics Adjudication Committee from 2009 – 2012. Jean is currently an outgoing associate editor of the Academy of Management Review
Jean has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters, as well as six books, most recently, Bartunek, J. M, & McKenzie, J. 2018. Academic-practitioner relationships: Developments, complexities and opportunities. New York: Routledge. Her primary research interests center around organizational change and academic-practitioner relationships.