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Drawing on the experience of the Observatories, a set of interconnected research centers in Italy, this chapter explains why academics are in one of the best positions to orchestrate interorganizational initiatives of change and development, and highlights two prerequisites that appear necessary to render salient this orchestrator role of academics: (i) the extensive use of multiple approaches of collaborative research and (ii) the creation and maintenance of a platform allowing the management and diffusion of the network-based learning mechanisms underlying each change and development effort. The contributions extend existing knowledge on organization development and collaborative research.

This chapter argues that one of the fundamental challenges of the global character of strategy research is the growing need to foster collaborations between academic and business practitioners that can help build a better understanding of the practice of strategy and through these means deliver greater impact. This challenge strengthens existing calls for strategy research to refocus on understanding the practice of strategy with an attentiveness to micro-dynamics of strategizing, and requires us to expand the ways in which research practice is performed. Whilst this can apparently be achieved through better dialogue, building trusting relationships and valuing the contribution each party can make due to their differences, it in fact requires a questioning of our research assumptions and practice.

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.

This chapter explores specializations within academic librarian practices, focusing on librarian research and collaboration. Academic librarian roles are transitioning from service providers to specialists, researchers, and collaborators. Roles have shifted to incorporate interdisciplinary research and collaboration; embedded librarianship; research data management expertise; information literacy instruction; and core curriculum development. In order to understand this shift in roles, a mixed methods research project undertaken with a Purdue University researcher and Purdue Libraries faculty that prompted the development of a research diagrammatic metaphor modeling the components of librarian-faculty collaboration. The model demonstrates the dynamics and roles in academic collaboration and interdisciplinary research. A generalization of the model applied to two librarian-faculty collaboration scenarios exemplifies how these components facilitate engagement and project management. Potentially the model could be operationalized to understand disciplinary differences and provide a framework of accountability for both faculty and librarians engaged in research projects.

This chapter defines and provides examples of activist criminology methods (ACM). Although many examples of ACM studies are provided, to date, no publications use this identification. The authors begin by questioning not only the feasibility but also the desirability of the ‘neutral scientist’. The authors then summarise the predecessors and contributors to ACM: ‘activist research’, participatory action research, and public criminology. The components of ACM are (1) including the public; (2) using reflexivity; and (3) ensuring the findings are relayed to the public and ideally, used to create change. Including the public has two subsections, the victims/survivors and the activists resisting the injustice studied. The authors discuss some of the challenges in conducting ACM, including academic marginalisation of this scholarship (and thus the difficulty of pursuing it, particularly if untenured), securing collaboration with activists and/or survivors, reflexivity on the power differences when collaborating with marginalised communities, and the near impossibility of achieving all the goals of ACM in one study. Although unnamed until now, ACM, as we describe them, has been conducted for hundreds of years around the world. The growing number of scholars historically kept out of academia due to race, gender, sexuality, class, and criminal history is no doubt related to the vastly increasing frequency of studies employing ACMs, as well as discussions and advancement of these methods.

While qualitative work has a long tradition in the strategy field and has recently regained popularity, we have not paused to take stock of how such work offers contributions. We address this oversight with a review of qualitative studies of strategy published in five top-tier journals over an extended period of 15 years (2003–2017). In an attempt to organize the field, we develop an empirically grounded organizing framework. We identify 12 designs that are evident in the literature, or “designs-in-use” as we call them. Acknowledging important similarities and differences between the various approaches to qualitative strategy research (QSR), we group these designs into three “families” based on their philosophical orientation. We use these designs and families to identify trends in QSR. We then engage those trends to orient the future development of qualitative methods in the strategy field.

Rashidah N. Andrews is an academic advisor in the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned an Ed.M. in higher education at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and is currently a doctoral student in educational administration at temple. Before arrival at Temple, Rashidah spent three years as project manager for the Ethnic Minorities Student Achievement Grant (EMSAG) at Halesowen College in England, one year as director of College Retention at a non-profit in Philadelphia and two years as admission counselor at her alma mater. Her research interests include access, retention and persistence of low-income, first-generation students.