Understanding practice generalisation – opening the research/practice gap

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the relationship between research and practice. It addresses the question: How can practitioners’ use of generalisations be understood, with a view towards producing research-based generalisations that facilitate use in practice?

Design/methodology/approach

Language games are used to explore generalisation in practice, and the framework of pragmatic constructivism is adopted to characterise the generation of practice generalisation.

Findings

Practice is conceptualised as a complex set of clusters of organised actions run by a set of applied generalisations and driven by human intentions. Practice also encompasses reflective activities that aim to create the generalisations and reflect them into the specific circumstances to create functioning practice. Generalisations depend on underlying concepts. The formation and structure of concepts is explored and used to create the construction and use of different types of generalisation. Generalisations function as cognitive building blocks in constructing strings of interconnected functioning activities. Managers make their own functioning generalisations that, however, do not satisfy the research criteria for acceptable generalisations. The research/practice gap is shaped by the very different language games played.

Research limitations/implications

If research is to be useful to practice, the generalisations produced must methodologically articulate the types of generalisation that pervade the methods with which practitioners construct functioning activities. Further research has to give more insight into such processes.

Originality/value

The paper contributes insight into both the generalisation debate and the research/practice gap debate.

Citation

Nørreklit, H., Nørreklit, L. and Mitchell, F. (2016), "Understanding practice generalisation – opening the research/practice gap", Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. 13 No. 3, pp. 278-302. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRAM-09-2015-0088