Abstract
Interdisciplinary working within and between different professions is now commonplace, with the transferability of knowledge across situated contexts of implementation. Education at doctoral level can be one mechanism of ensuring that mid-career professionals are equipped with the skills needed to build the capacity and capability required to deal with crisis situations. Interdisciplinary professional doctoral pathways and their associated learning trajectories are now a recognised mechanism of operationalising translational research from the context of work-based praxis. The longstanding debates of how best to bridge the theory-practice nexus in the field of business remains a challenge, although the progressive development of professional doctorate programmes has seen a rise in the number of clinical and professional practice doctorates across Western educational providers. This theoretical chapter will provide an insight into the concept of translational research in the context of research-based practice/work-based praxis within organisations across the globe.
TopIntroduction
Business in the context of the 21st Century knowledge economy is driven by the dynamics of policy, practice and the institutions and organisations which drive their capacity to function and develop professionally and in the context of applied research (Bogoviz, 2019). It is within these contexts that the emergence of Professional Doctorate programmes, the Doctorate of Business Administration, in particular, which has forged a landscape of the need to address the professionalisation of knowledge, to acknowledge the agency that applied knowledge equips personnel with and how more traditional mechanisms of doctoral education are less suited to the application of theory to practice and more suited to theoretical emergence and academic contexts such as education (Cardoso et al, 2020). The gap between perceptions of usefulness and purposefulness of the two though, has narrowed in recent years (Aarnikoivu, 2021). The prospect of responding reflexively and adaptively to new events and key epiphanies such as crisis has ensured the visible and tangible impact of professional doctorate programmes in practice, reflecting a shift to greater respect for a different type of knowledge creation and replacing the contexts of validity and reliability in empirical research with those of trustworthiness and authenticity in applied praxis environments such as the workplace (Dirks and de Jong, 2021).The objectives of this chapter are fourfold in a) providing a theoretical basis for the facilitation of knowledge creation in work based settings and its translation into practice via optimal leadership b) Framing the translation of doctoral knowledge in crisis by mid-career professionals; c) The consideration of the complex ambiguity surrounding knowledge creation from a methodological perspective and d) Introducing transformative learning theory as a lens through which the need for cognitive, metacognitive and epistemic perspectives can be acknowledged and used to drive positive action in workplace crisis.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Impact: Something that has a marked effect or influence.
Action Research: Also, often, and interchangeably termed Participatory Action Research (PAR), co-operative enquiry and action learning is a research approach focused on the systematic improvement and positive change of the structure and agency afforded to people within context specific settings.
Knowledge Transfer: Is a diverse range of activities used in the support of mutually beneficial collaborations within and between universities, businesses, and the public sector for the civic benefit of society.
Disruptive Innovation: Refers to the innovation that transforms previously inaccessible products and ensures their availability to wider more generalised populations.
Performativity: A philosophical means of describing the power of language to effect change in the world.
Transformative Learning: A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.