{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.016260162601626018, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007113821138211382, 'mean_word_length': 5.377969762419006, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 2, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Engaged scholarship: a guide for organizational and social research

The ongoing challenges of advancing our understanding of social phenomena and making a difference by addressing ‘real world’ problems beg for different views of social research. Van de Ven (2007) provides such a view in his recent book entitled Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Although written primarily for academics, the research method presented depends on the genuine engagement of multiple stakeholders – most importantly, those practitioners grappling with problems on a daily basis in organizations and communities. Andrew H. Van de Ven is a Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change at the Carlson School of the University of Minnesota. His primary research interests focus on the management of innovation and change, organizational behaviour and research methods. A past president and active member of the Academy of Management, Van de Ven has published numerous journal articles and books on organization assessment, inter-organizational relationships, and methods for building theories and designing research studies. In earlier work, Van de Ven and Johnson (2006) argued that the gap between practice and the academy had been ill conceived. They contended that this gap is not a matter of convincing practitioners of the value of academic research, but rather it is a matter of academics and practitioners collaborating in the production and cocreation of new knowledge. The knowledge thus created should be more relevant for and effective at solving problems in organizations, as well as informing scholarly work. Each party to the effort brings unique expertise and different perspectives on the social world, and it is the interaction of these differing perspectives that provides opportunities for deeper insights and understandings of the social world. This view of engaged scholarship is somewhat different from the view of engagement as service learning. The view in this book focuses on the co-production of knowledge, between scholars and practitioners that can help solve real world problems in social settings. Van de Ven argued that to achieve meaningful understanding of complex social problems requires the engagement of stakeholders throughout the research process. His process of engagement offers researchers a method of engaging others in a fourstep research process (presented as a diamond model whereby researchers move around the four points of the diamond as baseball players move around the bases of the game). As the initial definition of the problem and articulation of the research questions are critical, Van de Ven advocates beginning by grounding the problem in the real world. This involves genuine collaboration between researchers and stakeholders. This intense collaborative process continues as stakeholders move to Human Resource Development International Vol. 12, No. 2, April 2009, 233–239