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A scholarly collaborative partnership is a capability that develops over time. Its quality is an outcome of the collaborative context, the alignment of purpose, development of work and learning processes, development of shared language and success stories. In this chapter, the authors engage in a metalogue where their shared reflection on the formation and development of their collaborative scholarship in the field of organization development and change is itself an instance of a process of shared scholarship. By adopting the format of a metalogue, they provide the voices of their individual thinking and their reflective conversation so as to offer an expression of the process of theorizing to scholars who wish to embark upon or study shared scholarship.

The article brings the quality characteristics of action research to project management and explores how these quality characteristics of well-designed and executed action research can inform and enhance the practice of project management.

A reflective paper.

The article identifies five imperatives in bringing together action research and project management. The authors argue that project management may be conducted in a manner that is rigorous, reflective and relevant.

The integration of project management and action research is not empirically described. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test and further develop the model in relation to the design and management of projects.

Practical questions are posed for implementation.

The integration of action research and project management is a collaborative venture and the engagement imperative emphasizes that collaboration.

By bringing together action research and project management the article integrates five imperatives: design, engagement, improvement, action and research and quality characteristics of action research to enhance project management as rigorous, reflective and relevant.

Doctoral education (DE) is central to the development and application of operations management (OM) thinking. The European Doctoral Educational Network (EDEN) seminar on research methodology in OM is a structured initiative developed in 1999 by European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) and European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). This intensive five-day seminar has run annually since and, to date, has engaged 486 students. The purpose of this paper is to ask: what role has the OM EDEN seminar played in the formation and academic career development of doctoral researchers, and how has it contributed to the development of EurOMA as a community of practice?

The authors developed a retrospective case on the design, launch and growth of the OM EDEN seminar employing two data gathering methods (collecting secondary and archival data, and a survey of four selected seminar participants) and a social network analysis.

The EDEN seminar is an effective educational intervention in developing doctoral researchers and their subsequent academic careers. The seminar has also contributed to EurOMA as a community of practice, bringing faculty together to teach, write and publish leading edge contributions in research methods for OM.

The case is focused on the OM EDEN seminar only, within which the survey is limited to four of the early participants. While another set of participants might respond differently in detail, the authors’ expectation is that participant perception of the role of the seminar would not change. The paper provides an exemplar for European academic associations to guide how they might explore the formation and academic career development of doctoral candidates within a community of practice.

The seminar merits the ongoing support of EurOMA and EIASM, not just in educating doctoral students but also in bringing faculty together to publish leading edge contributions to the OM domain.

The paper draws on the areas of student formation, academic career development and communities of practice to illustrate the role played by the OM EDEN seminar.

This paper is the first description, analysis and reflection on the role played by the OM EDEN seminar.

Reflecting on 25 years of collaborating in action learning research initiatives in interorganizational settings, the authors have framed three key theoretical contributions: (1) a formula for action learning in networks, (2) the notion of action learning research, and (3) the application of action learning research in networks. This chapter reviews how each of these three key theoretical contributions emerged as insights and were developed over time through three large-scale funded interorganizational action learning projects. The chapter provides insights into the process of theorizing as the authors show how these frameworks emerged through inquiry into experience and were consolidated through collaborative action as practice-based research, research as practice, and practice as research toward designed-in impact.

This article presents a nucleus of organizational levels which attempts to articulate an OD framework which acknowledges how large system change is a systemic interlevel process. This framework describes four levels in terms of a task at each level—bonding at the individual level, creating working, functioning team at the team level, coordination at the interdepartmental group level and adaptation at the organizational level—and attempts to articulate the dynamic interrelationship between the individual's bonding to the organization, the team's functioning, the interdepartmental group's coordination and the organization's adaptation, particularly in a change situation. This focus on interlevel dynamics is not common in the OD literature, yet is at the heart of many consulting experiences. The article describes this framework, positions it in relation to other OD levels approaches, and argues for the notion of organizational levels to be understood in dynamic systemic terms and that interlevel dynamics be constructed into OD theory and practice.

Within the developing exploration of the role of the scholar-practitioner, the situation in which scholar-practitioners engage in the scholarship of practice in their own organizational systems has not received much attention. This chapter adopts the position that scholar-practitioners are not merely practitioners who do research but rather that they integrate scholarship in their practice and generate actionable knowledge, that is, knowledge that is robust for scholars and actionable for practitioners. This chapter explores the phenomenon of scholar-practitioners engaging in the scholarship of practice in their own organizational systems as inside change agents. It discusses how scholar-practitioners engage in inquiry-in-action in first-, second-, and third-person modes of inquiry and practice in the present tense and provides a methodology and methods for such engagement that it be rigorous, reflective, and relevant.

For 30 years the series, Research in Organizational Change and Development (ROCD) has provided an extensive range of scholarly research and philosophical reflections on the field of organization development and change (ODC). On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the first volume, this chapter poses the question as to how we might learn about the philosophy of ODC research from the 24 published volumes. Taking the author’s explicit pursuit of the question as a process of interiority, it invites readers to engage with the question themselves and thereby enact interiority within ODC itself.

This chapter informs current research and practice in organization development and change (ODC) with an actionable knowledge of the social science philosophies. It adds value to the scholarship of ODC by charting the progression of philosophies of social science, by showing how researchers in ODC structure their inquiry based on the inherent philosophical dimensions, and by offering useful and actionable knowledge for research and practice. The aim of the chapter is to reflect on the practice of ODC as a social science and to consolidate its social science philosophies so to provide solid philosophical and methodological foundations for the field.