Academic-practitioner divide Archive
Neil Anderson and his colleagues has given a lot of thought to the divide between research and practice in Industrial, Work and Organizational (IWO) Psychology. While I don’t know much about this discipline a lot of the problems seem quite …
Bruce Clark reviewed the history of performance measures in 1999. He saw three main themes: “the movement from financial to non-financial output measures, the expansion from measuring only marketing outputs to measuring marketing inputs as well, and the evolution from …
I value academic work that speaks to the issues of managers and others outside of academia. The Net Promoter Score/System (NPS) is widely used by managers and so it can be valuable when academics look into this metric. We (I …
A fascinating event in academic history was the Sokal Hoax. In this a physicist, who had become annoyed with ideas that reality is completely socially constructed, got published in a cultural studies journal. Before we celebrate his inter-disciplinarity he was …
The data being used by managers is becoming increasing messy. Unstructured data is named as such because it lacks the nice organization of traditional data. Of course, the profusion of such unstructured data (text, videos, music) makes analysis complex but …
One the silliest things that academics do is compare the number of A publications people have. The idea that a career can be summarized by a single number is clearly absurd. Even if research publications are all that count (and …
Much academic research is not connected to any immediate practical outcomes. This isn’t necessarily bad — some research can have value to society more broadly or over a longer period. Saying that will happen can be a bit of a …
I find the divide between academics and practitioners fascinating. It is clearly very large and I find it amazing how easily many people on both sides accept it almost without question. Academics are often woefully unaware of the topics managers …
