Management Learning

This article develops a dialogic perspective on practising and knowing management. It builds on prior work which has considered the nature of management research as well as the relationship between those who research organizations and those that manage them. The article argues that practising and knowing are co-constitutive, dialogic processes and that viewing the process in this way helps move beyond views of knowledge production and consumption which centre on translation between communities. The article sheds new light on the nature of research relationships by presenting two ways of mapping the dynamics of these relationships in terms of dialogue.

This article develops a new perspective on reflexive practice in the making of elite business careers. It builds upon Bourdieu’s practice framework to examine how business leaders from elite and non-elite backgrounds develop and practice reflexivity in their everyday lives. The article draws upon in-depth life-history interviews with members of the British business elite. Elites exhibited five types of reflexive behaviour, from which two modes of reflexive practice were derived: an accumulative mode, through which business leaders reflexively accumulate capital, positions and perspectives; and a re-constructive mode, through which they re-constitute the self in response to contingences, contexts and insights gathered. Our analysis suggests a link between reflexivity and career advancement, particularly in the case of non-privileged elites. Their greater experience of navigating the social landscape may facilitate perspective-taking, enhancing multipositionality, enabling such individuals to seize opportunities previously unthinkable.

This paper explores the practice of market sensing through situated dialogic action research. The paper discusses collaborative encounters with a manager who kept a video diary of his work. Through the analysis of five ‘generative moments’ that emerged from the market sensing dialogue between researching-practitioner and practising-researcher, four distinct bundles of market sensing practices are identified; sensing, sense making, framing and reflecting. Dialogue is found to be central to the entanglement and disentanglement of market sensing practices and emergent market frames. Dialogue allows the identification and exploration of tensions and conflict in existing and competing market frames. This in turn generates new and innovative ways of framing markets for future action. Thus, situated dialogic market sensing emerges as an effective way of unearthing and exploring competing market frames and as a mentoring, reflective and reflexive part of market sensing practice.

As part of a searching for scholarly relevance, there is growing interest in how academics and practitioners might work together to produce knowledge. We offer reflections on our experiences as an academic and a practitioner co-creating a research project about leadership in UK public sector organizations. Using an autoethnographic approach we explore how we have engaged in becoming co-researchers, interactive processes which entail a multiplicity of identities and struggles with organizational and professional pressures. We suggest a way of thinking about academic-practitioner research interactions which emphasizes that, rather than forming a communion accomplished in a space beyond politics, they remain as situated and unsettling interactions. Our contribution is to offer a counterpoint to accounts of co-production which present collaborative research as a process of fusion; instead we portray it as involving relations between protagonists which are mutually constituting and uplifting but also at times disturbing and debilitating.

This article addresses how knowing and practising unfolds in collaborative research amongst practitioners from a large consulting and business services group and academics from a UK School of Management. Dialogue enabled actors to cross between theory and practice by providing a ‘space’ for support, challenge, exchange and experimentation. However, this ‘space’ was fragile and the insensitive actions of one individual, driven by institutional pressure to exploit the project for competitive advantage, resulted in withdrawal and the re-establishment of traditional divisions. Our view is that collaborative research is not necessarily an exercise in producing, transferring and implementing research findings but is better thought of as knowledge integration through a dialogue of theory and practice. The article contributes to the ongoing debate about the relevance of management research and the theoretical development of knowledge co-production.