Utilizing Academic-Practitioner Partnering for Societal Impact
In this article, co-authors Natalie Slawinski, Bruna Brito, Jennifer Brenton, and Wendy Smith reflect on the inspiration behind their research article, “Reflections on deep academic–practitioner partnering for generative societal impact,” published in Strategic Organization.
The rising sustainability issues of our times, such as climate change, inequality, and poverty, demand innovative and collaborative solutions. These grand challenges require not only the attention of policymakers and practitioners but also the rigorous engagement of management scholars who can contribute to sustainable and impactful change. Through engaged scholarship, scholars can conduct research on the ground, connecting with, and learning from, those who experience these issues.
In this essay, we reflect on what we call “deep partnering” – an extreme form of engaged scholarship that involves highly interdependent and evolving interactions between partners over an extended time period to address shared goals. We share insights from our long-term collaboration with Shorefast, a nonprofit organization dedicated to revitalizing the community of Fogo Island, Newfoundland, which faced a downward spiral of devitalization after the collapse of the cod industry in the North Atlantic Ocean. In 2013, Shorefast launched the Fogo Island Inn, the first of several social enterprises whose profits were reinvested into Shorefast’s mission “to unleash the power of place so local communities can thrive in the global economy.” Shorefast leveraged and honored the assets of Fogo Island, including its culture and traditions, in their work to build cultural and economic resilience for Fogo Island, and our research partnership helped them to codify and share these lessons with other communities around the world.
Engaging in deep partnering is not an easy task. In our essay, we identify three paradoxes that emerged in the process and that required our careful navigation: First, our research team grappled with the need to maintain professional distance to achieve more objectivity while at the same time being personally involved with Shorefast to better understand the issues they faced and help them develop solutions. Second, we confronted a paradoxical tension between the need for a longer time horizon to conduct rigorous research and looking for ways to help Shorefast with the immediate problems they faced. Finally, we faced a paradox between our goal to publish our generalizable insights in academic journals and helping Shorefast with their need to find specific solutions to the challenges they faced.
Navigating these paradoxes demanded deliberate strategies. To navigate the first paradox, we found comfort with the discomfort. We embraced the uncomfortable emotions surfaced by our personal involvement while pursuing objectivity recognizing that trust and support from our partners could only be built through genuine engagement. To address the second, we took a patient approach, embracing the uncertainty of spending time in the partner’s world to gain a deep understanding, which, paradoxically, allowed us to develop insights and solutions more rapidly. Finally, to navigate the third paradox we allowed vulnerability, acknowledging the limits of academic knowledge and seeking to learn from Shorefast’s practical experience.
Deep partnering can enable a more impactful, though often challenging, approach to engaged scholarship. It requires continuous negotiation of challenges, but the outcomes can be profoundly generative, extending far beyond the initial partnership to a greater number of stakeholders. We hope that our experiences and reflections inspire other scholars to pursue deep partnerships with practitioners, recognizing that these relationships can offer important insights into, and solutions to, our world’s grand challenges.
