Engaged Scholarship (Professor Andrew Van de Ven & Professor Majken Schultz) (4 - 6 October 2010)

Faculty
Andrew Van de Ven, Professor, Strategic Management and Organization, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota , USA, Professor Majken Schultz, Department of Organization, CBS. Guest speaker: President for CBS, Professor Johan Roos

Course Coordinator
Professor Majken Schultz, Department of Organization, CBS

The PhD scholar must be working on an organizational research project and be willing to explore the relevance and implications of engaged scholarship on the project. The idea is not to push students into becoming engaged scholars, but to make them reflect upon their role and project from this perspective. The course addresses theoretical and methodological issues particularly relevant for empirical studies or studies that have the ambition to develop theory relevant to practice.

The PhD scholar is required to write a short paper (2- max. 3 pages in English) as a preparation for the course in which s/he relates the curriculum literature of the course to his or her project. It must include specific references to the literature applied. Deadline for submission of presentations is Friday 17th of September, 2010.

The presentations will be used as background in the preparation of the course and as a reading for all participants as a preparation for the course. They will serve as a platform for discussions during the course, but the course is too short to include specific feed-back toall individual student. The student must be willing to participate in discussions based on all presentations and are expected to attend the full course.

The aim is to raise awareness that scholars of organization and management have special opportunities to be engaged in the fields that they study and benefit from such engagement in their empirical and theoretical work.

The course departs from a classic research design and shows how ‘engaged scholarship’ opens a range of new research activities and ways of doing research. The course presents different ways in which students can engage others in conducting their research projects. It particularly shows how dialogue with practitioners and other stakeholders helps scholars define their research problem, build theory, design research, and disseminate research findings in multiple ways. Through conceptual discussions and case-stories the course seeks to motivate and inspire the participants to make their PhD projects even more relevant to practice.

The course follows the various stages in a research project and demonstrates how ’engaged scholarship’ is relevant in relation to problem formulation; theory building; research design; research application and dissemination of findings.

Lectures with workshop, dialogues and student discussions

Andrew Van de Ven: Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Schultz, M. & Hatch, M. J. (2005) Building Theory from Practice, Strategic Organization. August: 337 – 348