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The purpose of this paper is to use entrepreneurship to bridge the traditional-progressive education rift.

The rift between traditional and progressive education is first deconstructed into five dualisms. Conceptual question-based analysis is then applied to determine if and how three entrepreneurial tools could contribute to bridging this rift; effectuation, customer development and appreciative inquiry. Finally, pattern-based generalizations are drawn from this analysis.

Patterns in the analysis motivate the articulation of an overarching educational philosophy – learning-through-creating-value-for-others – grounded in entrepreneurship and capable of bridging the educational rift.

Only three entrepreneurial tools are included in the conceptual analysis, signifying a need to explore whether other tools could also help teachers bridge the traditional-progressive education rift. Entrepreneurial tools and the new educational philosophy manifesting entrepreneurship could also need to be further contextualized in order to be useful in education.

The tentatively new educational philosophy has been shown to be capable of bridging five dualisms in education which are currently problematic for teachers in their daily practice, and to remedy teacher challenges such as complexity, lack of resources, assessment difficulties and student disengagement.

An educational philosophy grounded in entrepreneurship has arguably not been proposed previously. Contrasting existent educational philosophies, this new philosophy goes beyond learning-through to also emphasize creating-value-for-others. This could facilitate bridging between traditional and progressive education, one of the most important challenges in education. It could also be used to facilitate the infusion of entrepreneurship into general education.

Although management accounting tools and techniques are developed to solve practical problems in organizations, there is a lot of criticism of management accounting research for not having an impact on practice. In interventionist research, the “shaping” of an intervention to solve a practical problem is an important step. The purpose of this paper is to explore how the findings of management accounting research can be reviewed to make them practically applicable in shaping an intervention.

The paper is based on the author’s experiences with an interventionist research project.

Systematic literature reviews, which are common in engineering and medicine, bring together the academic knowledge that can contribute to solutions for a specific practical problem, including a definition of the ways in which this knowledge can be applied. Inspired by the methodology for conducting such reviews, this paper proposes how interventionist management accounting researchers can use existing theoretical knowledge in shaping interventions that aim to solve a practical problem. After an intervention, the analysis of the intervention’s unforeseen effects can provide a basis for the refinement of the theory identified in the literature review.

Such a literature review can be organized according to four approaches to taking theoretical knowledge into practice. Unforeseen effects of the intervention can guide the selection of additional theory that helps to interpret these effects and refine normative and academic theory.

In management accounting it is uncommon to review the literature with the aim of shaping a solution for a practical problem. This paper explores how literature reviews that focus on a specific practical problem can contribute to bridging the gap between theory and practice.

Bridging education programs have been developed to enhance the ability of internationally educated professionals (IEPs) to access professional employment in Canada. IEPs are professionals who received their original training outside of Canada. Bridging education programs consist of specialized courses, offered by higher education institutions, focusing on skill and knowledge upgrading in preparation for meeting professional licensure requirements. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the preferred learning styles of IEPs enrolled in nursing, pharmacy and teacher programs.Design/methodology – This survey research assessed the learning styles/preferences and degree of self‐directed readiness of IEPs enrolled in three different Ontario bridging education programs: pharmacists, nurses and teachers. These professions represent some of the largest regulated professions in Canada. Three professions were selected for this study because they have similar regulatory procedures for candidates seeking licensure. These programs were situated within higher education institutions. Adult immigrant students participated by completing Kolb's Learning Style Inventory and Guglielmino's Self‐Directedness Scale.

The most significant finding of this research is that all three professions were found in the divergent quadrant of the Kolb Learning Style Inventory. The learner with a divergent style of learning prefers observation rather than action and is able to view concrete situations from multiple perspectives. These learners value concrete experience and reflective observation, suggesting that they tend to consider a situation from differing perspectives. This finding suggests that being a recent adult immigrant has a stronger effect upon preferred style of learning in bridging education than profession‐specific factors. IEPs are also illustrated to be highly self‐directed learners.

The generalizability of these results must be treated with caution due to the small sample size. Several factors influenced the results such as difficulties in accruing a larger and more representative sample.

Currently, substantial funding is provided for bridging education in Canada. There is little research being conducted on the effectiveness of this type of higher education from the perspective of learning processes. More research is needed to enhance the ability of IEPs to succeed in these programs. Ultimately, it can improve new immigrant professionals' success in the labor market.

Research on bridging education is still in its infancy and there is little research evidence to guide the development of effective programs. Some research indicates that bridging education programs are useful for providing profession‐specific language training and orientation to the Canadian workplace. If the preferred learning styles of immigrant professionals can be identified, more effective courses for immigrant learners can be developed. Educators can create increased academic success and improved employment outcomes.

Similar to joining comparative education and international education, bridging theory to practice is a hallmark of the field of comparative and international education (CIE). Despite the commonality of citing “theory to practice,” a disconnect exists between comparativists who develop theories and practitioners who supposedly implement them. This article questions the use and meaning of this phrase. Specific questions are posed to explore how “theory to practice” is referenced in CIE publications: What does “theory to practice” mean? Who are theorists? Who are practitioners? Do practitioners know they are practitioners? How do practitioners apply theory? Perspectives from comparativists and practitioners are supplied in response to these guiding questions. These opposing perspectives demonstrate the continued disconnect between and misunderstanding of “theory to practice.” Further research is requested to better understand how these questions are currently represented in the field and how the field should evolve to better reflect theory and practice in the future.

This paper compares and contrasts practice-based perceptions of the research–practice gap in the United States (US) with those in Australia.

The current study extends the work of Tucker and Lowe (2014) by comparing and contrasting their Australian-based findings with evidence from a questionnaire survey and follow-up interviews with senior representatives of 18 US state and national professional accounting associations.

The extent to which academic research informs practice is perceived to be limited, despite the potential for academic research findings to make a significant contribution to management accounting practice. We find similarities as well as differences in the major obstacles to closer engagement in the US and Australia. This comparison, however, leads us to offer a more fundamental explanation of the divide between academic research and practice framed in terms of the relative benefits and costs of academics engaging with practice.

Rather than following conventional approaches to ‘bridging the gap’ by identifying barriers to the adoption of research, we suggest that only after academics have adequate incentives to speak to practice can barriers to a more effective diffusion of their research findings be surmounted.

This study makes three novel contributions to the “relevance literature” in management accounting. First, it adopts a distinct theoretical vantage point to organize, analyze, and interpret empirical evidence. Second, it captures practice-based views about the nature and extent of the divide between research and practice. Third, it provides a foundational assessment of the generalizability of the gap by examining perceptions of it across two different geographic contexts.

With leadership education expanding at an unprecedented rate, there is an acute need for an evidence-based leadership pedagogy that can bridge the gap between leadership theory and student practice both in the classroom and beyond its boundaries. This paper will give an overview of the Intentional Emergence Model as a way to teach leadership to emerging adults that specifically addresses this gap between theory and practice. It will discuss the model, research and evaluation data associated with the model, training requirements for instructors and teaching assistants, and the implications for leadership education as a result of the research on, and application of, the model.

Child development lab schools have long played a significant role in contributing to our understanding of child development and new and innovative educational practice. In this chapter, we argue that lab schools need to be continually reinvented and reconstructed to meet changing societal and institutional demands. As models for the early childhood community, lab schools should be on the leading edge of what theory and research informs us are best practices in early childhood education and child development. Here we tell the story of the Virginia Tech Child Development Lab School’s efforts to reconsider and reconstruct our philosophical approach, practices, and policies and move closer to bridging theory and practice as a family-centered, teacher-inquiry based, community of learners. It demonstrates a paradigmatic shift in thinking about children, families, early childhood teacher education, and the role of lab schools in general.

The pracademia movement is gaining increasing traction in education, particularly in educational leadership. Offered as a means to bridge practice and academia, questions remain as to whether it resolves or perpetuates the theory–practice divide. This paper systematically approaches this problem.

Theoretically informed by the relational approach, this conceptual paper articulates the preliminaries and underlying assumptions of pracademia before exploring the implications for the field of educational leadership.

Having established the underlying assumptions, this paper offers three standards – description, explanation and alternative – for assessing knowledge claims in the field that does not default to distinct knowledge worlds (e.g. academic, practice) or categories of knowledge generators (e.g. academics, practitioners, pracademics).

Through a relational approach, this work breaks down the boundaries of theory and practice to offer a new way of thinking about knowledge claims. The new approach is consistent with the intent of bridging theory and practice without the need to assume them to be separate in the first place.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue that critically examines topics informing long‐standing disputes concering the status of theory and practice in management studies. Contributions explore the character of the imputed relationship between theory and practice.

The editorial introduction sets the discussion of topics in the context of institutional change influencing the production, circulation and consumption of knowledge products in the economy of relevance and reputation. It also presents an overview of the papers included in the special issue.

The main themes addressed in the papers represent a call for change; a call to radicalize the approaches to understanding ways of knowing; a call to re‐evaluate relations with practitioners; and a call to reimagine ways of representing knowledge to various constituencies, including fellow academic practitioners, management practitioners, students, and policy‐makers and other opinion‐formers.

The key message is one of the importance of encouraging broad discussions concerning the direction and impact of flows of knowledge and the various products in which that knowledge is embedded. It calls for a more market‐oriented approach to understanding the knowledge economy and the mediating role of various institutional players, including the academy, in the circulation, creation and destruction of knowledge products.

That a more‐market oriented approach to arrangements for the distribution of research resources in management studies calls for the development of more market‐oriented institutions capable of shaping relationships of collaboration, involvement and accountability.

Contributions expand the understanding of the problems and opportunities of imputing links to theory and practice.

The purpose of this study is to examine the link between research and practice within the context of Islamic marketing (IM), an issue which is controversial in the literature. It offers reasonable answers that bridge the gap between research and practice, as well as the way to mitigate it.

This study uses a critical approach to analytically review the literature on IM, and relates it to research and practice.

The study finds that the advancement of knowledge on IM necessitates research and practice. There is a gap between research and practice which evolved from decades of objectivity between researchers and practitioners in the field of IM. It is necessary to search for some practicable solutions that can narrow the gap between theory and practice.

The basic limitation of this study is that IM has not yet emerged as a distinct discipline. Hence, there is limited study on IM issues in the context of research and practice.

This study makes essential contributions to the chastisement by research and practice, a theoretically new field of IM subject.