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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a multi-layered theoretical framework to enable engaged scholarship to develop as a practice in entrepreneurship and small business research. To do so, it illuminates the salient features of engaged scholarship, collaborative learning and actor-network theory (ANT).

The paper follows a narrative or traditional literature review design. Specifically, it adopts a thematic approach for summarising and synthesising a body of literature on engaged scholarship, collaborative learning and ANT with the view to develop a new multi-layered theoretical framework.

Applying the theory of engaged scholarship to pivot entrepreneurship/SME research provides scholars with an opportunity to unlock the theory vs practice paradox. Moreover, engaged scholarship offers valuable instructions for encouraging interactionism between entrepreneurship researchers and practitioners as well as reconcile their polarised views. Co-production and co-creation of knowledge addresses the concerns often raised by the practitioner community regarding the relevance and applicability of academic research to practice.

The proposed multi-layered framework provides entrepreneurship researchers, and the practitioner community with a taxonomy to use to encourage a joint approach to research. Developing deep partnerships between academics and practitioners can produce outcomes that satisfy the twin imperatives of scholarship that can be of high quality as well as a value to society.

The paper advances the theory and practice of engaged scholarship in new ways that are not common in entrepreneurship/SME research. This enables engaged scholarship to develop as a practice in entrepreneurship and small firms’ research. Through applying the proposed multi-layered framework in research, academics can deliver fully developed solutions for practical problems. The framework is useful in the theory vs practice and entrepreneurship researchers vs practitioner debates.

As a core element of the marketing mix, place is of central concern within marketing. Yet existing literature typically presents accounts of research about rather than with places. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to argue that engaged scholarship can help academics, practitioners, policymakers and communities to work collaboratively to solve place-based “wicked problems”. Specifically, this paper focuses on high street revitalisation, a challenge frustrating policymakers and communities since the 1980s.

This paper draws on a mixed-method research project conducted with place-based stakeholders in Manchester, the UK, to discuss the benefits and challenges arising through an engaged scholarship approach.

The authors outline several benefits to engaged scholarship, including forming tailored solutions to place-based problems, engendering trust and ongoing research partnerships and generating real-world impact beyond the academy. However, the authors also draw attention to the challenges including political sensitivities within places, additional layers of scrutiny and challenges to dissemination arising through partnership working with organisations external to the university.

Whereas a range of techniques have been used to research places within marketing, engaged scholarship is lacking. This paper, therefore, provides first-hand insights into the benefits and challenges that the authors experienced using the approach. This is of significance because of the rising importance of generating real-world impact within the academy, which the authors feel requires more institutional support. This paper also suggests Van de Ven’s diamond model of engaged scholarship extends to encompass issues of research governance.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on how the author’s status as an international academic wanting to maintain “local” research relationships in the author’s country of origin both improved and derailed the process of conducting an organizational ethnography.

Using visual representations of the research design process inspired by Maxwell’s (2013) model, the paper traces the evolution of a glocal engaged scholarship project and the personal, professional, and commitments that pulled the researcher and the research project in competing directions.

The first iteration of the project showed that, despite geographical nomadism, the author was firmly anchored to professional norms and methodological choices, with these attachments to values, principles, and practices constituting a global academic “home.” As the project unfolded, local organizational needs and desires that called into question the researcher’s local organizational knowledge and methodological choices destabilized the author’s sense of home, creating a situation of “away-ness” that acted as a catalyst for reflexivity about the project and relationships with organizational partners.

By overturning a view of home as being rooted in a particular locale and homelessness as being nomadic, this confessional tale problematizes the idea that some organizational ethnographers and projects are local while others are foreign.

This paper aims to discuss the question of how the possible gaps between academic and practical accounting research can be reduced and how academics could make a contribution to solving the practical problems of organizations.

A reflection on Van de Ven and Johnson's ideas about “engaged scholarship” as a way for overcoming the gap between academic and practical knowledge creation, illustrated with examples coming from public sector accounting research.

Although academic consultant/researchers, who conduct research of direct relevance to practice, ideally must have research objectives in mind that go beyond the practical problems of the organization in order to address academically relevant goals, this is often not feasible. This is due to the fact that academically relevant research questions can often only be identified when a practice-oriented research project has already taken shape. The authors argue and illustrate that a pragmatic form of engaged scholarship in public sector accounting research implies that such research results in a variety of outputs. Some of the outputs will have direct relevance to the practitioners and others to the academics involved, whilst the outputs that are relevant to each of these two groups will only partly show connections and overlaps.

The preoccupation of academic researchers with publications in high-ranking journals, due to pressures from their universities and peer groups, threatens research projects with a potential relevance for practice, because their publication opportunities are uncertain in advance. The authors welcome researchers who want to take this type of risk, and the authors challenge university officials and journal editors to broaden their view on excellence in research beyond the scope of their traditional academic domains.

The paper offers a realistic way out of serving two seemingly different research goals, practice-relevance and academic rigour.

This paper aims to reflect on relevance of business-to-business research based on Van de Ven’s (2007) engaged scholarship model.

The paper is a reflection of the current state and potential future research avenues.

The paper highlights that relevance is important in all four engaged scholarship activities. Pitfalls also occur at all four parts.

The paper highlights challenges and opportunities in business-to-business marketing research.

The paper reflects on relevance of research projects.

The purpose of this study is to explore trust initiation and development in collaborations between universities and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the implications for enabling engaged scholarship (ES).

Adopting a qualitative inductive approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive maximum variation sample comprising 14 SMEs and 12 university stakeholders.

The authors highlight the role of calculus-based trust in the initiation of collaborations emphasising the key roles of networking and referrals. As collaborations develop, reciprocal insights regarding stakeholders’ competencies and integrity and the development of knowledge-based trust can support engagement, in particular, knowledge application. Although relationships have a common sense of purpose, a fully engaged campus remains absent.

This study is based on a collaborative research between eight SMEs and one university business school and does not reflect ES fully as conceptualised. It provides few insights into the role of trust (or distrust) in such collaborations where things go wrong.

Universities looking to enable ES collaborations with SMEs need to develop and enact strategies which support ongoing engagement and enable identification-based trust (IBT). Recommendations for universities and human resource development regarding interventions to support trust initiation and development to enable knowledge application ES are outlined and suggestions are offered for future research.

University strategies to support the development of trust and, in particular, IBT are likely to benefit longer-term relationships and the development of ES between SMEs and universities.

Little research has been undertaken on trust initiation and development between academic and SME stakeholders or the associated implications for ES.

This paper offers a retrospective on the launch and first volumes of this journal. It describes the history of a unique period in our discipline when founding fathers in the US and UK collaborated with industry and each other to create a new field.

The authors interviewed founding editor Professor Martin Christopher and coeditor in Chief Professor Doug Lambert, conducted a bibliometric review of the first volumes of the journal and informed the analysis by approaches taken in other retrospectives published in the journal. The authors also feature historical artifacts from the journal.

The editorial focus during the early days of the journal demonstrate how the roots of the field are in cost modeling and technical work but quickly moved toward customer orientation and managerial focus. The editorial approach during the early days of the journal was on innovative research and publishing, scholarship engaged with industry, a focus on relevance and industry impact as well as leveraging research in education.

There have been retrospectives on the journals most recent volumes but what the authors aim to do is to reflect upon the launch and the first volumes of the journal. The authors expand and further detail the timeline of the development of the logistics field. In the process, the authors identify several historical roots for topics of greater focus in logistics and supply chain management in later years. The authors also find that many of the essential approaches and lessons learned in the period leading up to the launch and shortly after the launch of the journal do not only capture the early development of the discipline it also offers an approach and model for scholarship worthy of consideration still today. On top of that, several of the lessons learned in that period hold high relevance still today and they imply part of the path forward for the discipline and the journal, the authors develop questions for future research and research and editorial strategies.

This paper aims to demonstrate how sustainable development education can be implemented at business schools, despite institutional barriers, through innovative and collaborative relationships with internal and external stakeholders. Businesses are beginning to accept their social responsibility through proactive approaches to maximizing their net social contribution, embracing opportunities and managing risks resulting from their economic, environmental and social impacts. Yet, many business schools are lagging in integration of sustainability into their curriculum, and as a result are not adequately educating future business leaders.

This case study presents the challenges in developing and implementing sustainability education, as well as analyzes the various underlying drivers of these barriers. The paper provides a detailed description of some of the ways one business school has overcome these barriers, and provides generalizable insights that can help other business schools and universities understand how they can engage in the implementation of similar sustainable development programs.

As business educators, we should reevaluate our role and our focus. Through education, interdisciplinary collaboration, research and community and industry engagement, sustainability can become firmly established within the existing value structure of business schools.

While many business schools worldwide are discussing the importance of integrating sustainability into their curricula, and while employers and students are demanding the same, few business schools have genuinely made progress in meeting these demands. This paper presents both the challenges to integrating sustainability and an in-depth study of one business school’s approach to creating unique and innovative solutions to overcome these barriers.

The purpose of this paper is to document the results and the impact of the ESRC-funded High Street UK 2020 (HSUK2020), a project designed to take the existing academic knowledge relating to retail and high street change directly to UK High Streets, to improve local decision-making and, ultimately, their vitality and viability.

Through a systematic literature review, and by following the tenets of engaged scholarship, the authors identified 201 factors that influence the vitality and viability of town centres. Through the consensus-building Delphi technique, a panel of 20 retail experts identified the top 25 priorities for action.

Taking a place management approach led to the development of a more strategic framework for regeneration, which consisted of repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring strategies (4R’s of regeneration). Collaboration with the project towns resulted in identification of the strategy area that would add the most value, and the impact of the 4R’s and the top 25 priorities is demonstrated via numerous town examples.

Knowledge exchange projects, such as High Street UK2020, have an important contribution to make, not by developing even more theory that is unlikely to get utilised, instead their contribution is to bring existing theory into practical use.

The aim of this paper is to define pracademia and conceptualise it in relation to educational contexts. This paper contributes to and stimulates a continuing and evolving conversation around pracademia and its relevance, role and possibilities.

This paper is a conceptual exploration. It draws upon existing and emerging pieces of literature, the use of metaphor as a meaning-making tool, and the positionalities of the authors, to develop the concept of pracademia.

The authors posit that pracademics who simultaneously straddle the worlds of practice, policy, and academia embody new possibilities as boundary spanners in the field of education for knowledge mobilization, networks, community membership, and responding to systemic challenges. However, being a pracademic requires the constant reconciling of the demands of multi-membership and ultimately, pracademics must establish sufficient legitimacy to be respected in two or more currently distinct worlds.

This paper has implications for knowledge mobilization, networks, boundary spanners, leadership, professional learning, and connecting practice, policy, and research. While the authors are in the field of education, this exploration of pracademia is relevant not only to the field of education but also to other fields in which there is a clear need to connect practice/policy with scholarship.

This paper provides a new definition of pracademia and argues that pracademia identifies an important yet relatively unknown space with many possibilities in the field of education.