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In this paper we (a pracademic, a practitioner, and an academic) aim to explore the academic/practitioner gap in social marketing and offer recommendations to close it, while amplifying existing examples of best practice from within the field. We also propose a research agenda to spur dialog and guide further investigations in this area. Insights from prior research, coupled with the co-authors’ experience and observations, indicate that a disconnect does exist between academia and practice within social marketing, though it is admittedly and unsurprisingly not uniform across contexts and disciplinary areas. Given social marketing’s identity as a practice-oriented field, there are many existing examples of academic/practitioner collaboration and the successful linkage of theory and practice that deserve to be amplified. However, the challenges associated with the very different systems and structures affecting both worlds mean the disconnect is problematic enough to warrant systematic change to ensure the two worlds are more aligned.

This paper (a pracademic, a practitioner and an academic) explores the academic/practitioner gap in social marketing and offer recommendations to close it, while amplifying existing examples of best practice from within the field. The authors also propose a research agenda to spur dialog and guide further investigations in this area.

The authors suggest five key reasons that focus should be placed upon closing the academic/practitioner gap in social marketing: demonstrating societal value by contributing to practice; embedding and developing theories in practice; adding to the social marketing literature; contributing to social marketing teaching; and communicating the value and effectiveness of social marketing. To close the gap, the authors propose specific recommendations within four broad areas: marketing the academia and practitioner collaboration offer; building ongoing relationships; creating collaborative partnerships; and changing the publishing model ensuring communications are accessible to all. They also suggest ways for social marketing associations and peak bodies to play a role.

The concept of a disconnect between academia and practice is by no means new; it has been a pervasive issue across disciplines for decades. However, this issue has not been the subject of much discussion within the social marketing literature. Recommendations outlined in this paper serve as a starting point for discussion. The authors also acknowledge that due to long standing “bright spots” in the field, numerous examples currently exist. They place an emphasis upon highlighting these examples while illuminating a path forward.

The academic–practitioner gap has been a widely discussed and well-established issue. Despite numerous studies conducted in this area, empirical evidence reveals that the gap is widening and also emphasizes the exigency to bridge this gap. Hence, the purpose of this study is to propose an acceptable solution that will fill this lacuna.

The study adopts the qualitative research methodology and was based on the system theory (ST) and the institutional theory (IT). Interviews, based on a semi-structured questionnaire, were conducted, focusing on three categories, namely individuals with solely academic experience, individuals with both academic and industrial exposure and business leaders. The unit of analysis was the individual.

The study, which unearthed some rich and challenging evidence from the respondents, reveals that gaining industrial exposure and working on continuous professional development are vital for academics to narrow or even close this gap. In addition, serving as apex members at board level or in professional bodies, serving global organizations as lead consultants and working on research collaborations are other important dimensions for academics.

This study introduces an emerging model named the “Pentagon Model” and develops a corporate index (C-index) for academics to earn, similar to the h-index. The study also explains the operationalization of the C-index based on the proposed algorithm. Hence, it is the envisaged that this study will change the landscape of the academic sphere in practical terms.

This study was carried out with the sole intention of bridging the gap between academics and practitioners. The proposed model and the index, which were developed by the author purely based on the outcome of this study, pave the way for many future research studies, not only to further improve the C-index but also to minimize disparities in transdisciplinary work between academics and practitioners.

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.

This study aims to explore relationships among supervisors’ socialization behaviors, newcomers’ socialization outcomes, organizational commitment, and work outcomes in three large companies in Korea.

The research was conducted via an online survey in three large firms in Korea. The sample comprised newcomers who had worked for more than six months but less than one year in these firms. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling (SEM).

Derived from SEM, the study’s results confirmed a causal relationship between supervisor’s socialization behaviors and newcomer’s work outcomes, which was fully mediated by newcomer’s socialization outcomes. However, organizational commitment was observed as a mediating variable, not a moderating variable. All types of supervisors’ socialization behaviors were related to newcomers’ socialization outcomes. Providing appropriate feedback, supporting newcomers’ development and improving social relationships were most strongly related to newcomers’ socialization outcomes.

This study proposed a rationale for the potential effectiveness of supervisor socialization behavior training. Related variables such as supervisor training aspects and the effectiveness of supervisor training for newcomers’ organizational socialization could be examined further.

The study offers critical areas to consider when designing training programs focused on supervisors’ socialization behaviors. Human resource development practitioners should be aware of the importance of supervisors’ socialization behaviors for newcomers’ organizational socialization and develop a program to improve all types of supervisors’ socialization behaviors.

New areas of training and development for supervisors can be proposed to improve newcomer organizational socialization and, eventually, to enhance the work outcomes of newcomers.

This paper aims to investigate the competencies that researchers need to develop and employ for successful collaborative research.

The authors use a reflexive approach built on participant observation of six cases of collaborative research in public procurement and logistics.

The authors identify and explain two major competencies that are required for successful collaborative research. The first is boundary-spanning competence that represents the researchers' ability to move fluidly from the academic milieu to the practitioner's environment. The second is reflexivity competence that allows the researchers to learn from each collaborative research project they participate in and further improve their boundary-spanning competence.

This study goes beyond the list of skills for collaborative research reported in the literature to describe two major competencies that researchers should develop to perform successful collaborative research. This reflection may serve as a starting point for the development of a sociological understanding of the collaborative research field.

This paper presents participants' experiences of the collaborative process. The paper introduces the World Heritage Site and presents the central learning outcomes of a process through which researchers and practitioners sought to develop an empirically-grounded, site-specific and practice-led research agenda relevant to World Heritage management. The purpose of this paper is to discuss an approach to improving collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the World Heritage field.

From September 2021 to April 2022, a research-practice team comprised of social scientists and managers of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site in Norway participated in a capacity-building pilot initiative under the ICCROM-IUCN World Heritage Leadership programme. Bringing researchers and practitioners together in a joint collaborative process, the Heritage Place Lab (HPL) pilot programme aimed to function as an incubator for developing research agendas for World Heritage Sites.

The paper demonstrates that close collaboration between heritage researchers and practitioners can benefit World Heritage Sites, offering managers valuable inputs for informed and inclusive decision-making. In the case of the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, an improved understanding of the diversities in local values would benefit management, as existing management issues underpin the site's complexity. Furthermore, fruitful collaborations between heritage researchers and World Heritage managers depend on an overlapping and reflexive understanding of central concepts. This can be achieved through collaborative research-practice processes but is likely to require careful time management.

Focussing on the collaborative process between World Heritage researchers and practitioners, and using additional information for comparable World Heritage examples obtained online, this paper shows how research interests and management challenges can be developed and aligned more successfully through cooperation and improved communication over time. Beyond the specific results for the Rjukan-Notodden Industrial Heritage Site, the broader discussion presented on the challenges and importance of addressing the complexities of managing heritage sites will be valuable for other World Heritage Sites and managers.

The purpose of the empirical study was to examine whether strategies shown to work well in one model of network development for library and information science (LIS) practitioners and researchers could be applied successfully in the development of a new network and contribute to the narrowing of the research–practice gap in LIS.

Overall, 32 members of a new professional network were surveyed by a questionnaire following the completion of a programme of four network events held between 2019 and 2021.

The analysis demonstrates the transferability of the existing model of network development to a new network and that it can be successfully adapted for online delivery of network events and activities.

The criteria deployed for the evaluation of the new network could be used in other similar settings. Funding bodies can also use these findings as demonstration of the value of their investment in network grants.

This contribution on means of growing collaborative networks to narrow the LIS research–practice gap stands out in contrast with prior research that tends to focus the support of research productivity of academic librarians in North American universities for the purposes of career development. Here wider aspects of research engagement are considered of value for LIS practitioners from a range of sectors and institutions, beyond North America, for purposes that are broader than personal advancement.

As digital spaces for team collaboration, virtual worlds bring considerable verisimilitude to technology-mediated social interaction and change the process of traditional team learning. The purpose of this study is to understand how to promote collaborative learning in virtual worlds by leveraging the power of we-intention to participate in virtual worlds. The authors further use the valence–instrumentality–self-efficacy–trust model (VIST) model as a means of understanding the formation of we-intention to participate in virtual worlds, during which behavioral desire serves a bridging role.

The authors tested the research model using the data gathered from 298 users of a prominent form of virtual world, i.e. massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The authors used the structural equation modeling approach and the partial least squares technique for data analysis.

Results show that the four factors of the VIST model (i.e. valence on team goals, instrumentality of contribution, self-efficacy in team tasks and trust in team members) all positively influence we-intention to participate in virtual worlds through behavioral desire for team actions. We-intention to participate in virtual worlds further exerts a stronger positive effect on collaborative learning in virtual worlds, compared with I-intention to participate in virtual worlds.

This work advances the information systems literature by introducing a relevant and important concept, i.e. we-intention, to explain collaborative learning in virtual worlds. This study especially compared the effect of we-intention and I-intention on collaborative learning in virtual worlds. The results of this work also provide practitioners with insights into the role of we-intention in promoting collective actions in virtual worlds.

Inspired by the “responsibility turn” in the broader organization/management literature, the overarching aim of this article is to help scholars working at the gender × entrepreneurship intersection produce research with a higher likelihood of being accessed, appreciated and acted upon by policy- practitioners. Consistent with this aim, we hope that our paper contributes to an increased use of academic-practitioner collaborations as a means of producing such research.

We selected Cunliffe and Pavlovich’s (2022) recently formulated “public organization/management studies” (public OMS) approach as our guiding methodology. We implemented this approach by forming a co-authorship team comprised of a policy professional and an entrepreneurship scholar and then engaging in a democratic, collaborative and mutually respectful process of knowledge cogeneration.

Our paper is comprised of four distinct sets of ideas. We start by describing who policy-practitioners are and what they want from academic research in general. We follow this with a comprehensive set of priorities for policy-oriented research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus, accompanied by references to academic studies that offer initial insight into the identified priorities. We then offer suggestions for the separate and joint actions that scholars and policy-practitioners can take to increase policy-relevant research on gender and entrepreneurship. We end with a description and critical reflection on our application of the public OMS approach.

The ideas presented in our article offer an original response to recent work that has critiqued the policy implications (or lack thereof) within prior research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus (Foss et al., 2019). Our ideas also complement and extend existing recommendations for strengthening the practical contributions of academic scholarship at this intersection (Nelson, 2020). An especially unique aspect is our description of – and critical reflection upon – how we applied the public OMS approach to bridge the academic-policy divide.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the challenges encountered by international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) operating in armed conflicts within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR). Through a 20-month fieldwork analysis, this research maps logistical risks and highlights key obstacles on the ground for successful humanitarian deployments in dynamically changing and complex environments. The study brings together academics and practitioners, providing practical and concrete recommendations for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to focus on in the conflict zones studied.

Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, this research provides valuable insights into the challenges faced by INGOs in conflict zones. After collecting data from the field, including interviews with key stakeholders and on-the-ground observations, the data analysis uses software tools such as Text Analysis Markup System analyzer and Macbeth. By adhering to ethical principles and incorporating a reflexive analysis, the study sheds light on the multidimensional nature of successful humanitarian deployments.

The primary risk in all armed conflict zones, including the DRC and CAR, is insecurity. However, to achieve a successful humanitarian deployment in such contexts, a multidimensional approach is required. This involves first securing the acceptance of local communities and conflict parties, which can be achieved through a deep understanding of both political and customary structures, with a focus on respecting key engagement leaders. Sustainability also plays a crucial role, and NGOs must maintain a secure stock of energy and provide greater initiative for on-the-ground managers to meet the expressed needs of beneficiary populations and involve them from the planning stage onwards. Finally, effective communication, cooperation and collaboration with United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are essential to overcome procurement, technical and security risks, particularly during the initial deployment phases.

This study provides an illustration of the uncommon practice of conducting collaborative research in humanitarian settings amidst two neighboring areas of armed conflict. The authors identified 268 common risk factors across eight categories during five deployment phases. To analyze these risks based on criticality and NGO responsiveness, the authors used a multicriteria method. This approach allowed the authors to validate unanimous judgments, resulting in valuable insights and concrete recommendations.