Burnout. COVID-19. Projects and priorities shifted, suspended, restarted, abandoned, or finished. Renewed joy at seeing our friends and colleagues in person at our professional conferences. All these large and small changes are (un)expected, easy and hard, restorative, and overwhelming. However, there are things that do not change. In his poem "The Way It Is," William Stafford (2014, p. 7) writes about holding "the thread" as the world changes, and that we won't get lost if we keep holding the thread. What hasn't changed for Health Care Management Review (HCMR) and our community? The commitment of HCMR, its contributors, and its readers to building better health care systems and outcomes through management scholarship that provides meaningful, actionable knowledge for health care administrators, researchers, and faculty. This is one of our community's threads.
Since his passing in the spring of 2022, we have been reflecting on Dr. Andrew Van de Ven's tremendous contributions to the management field. He thought a lot about how to produce management research that is more impactful for managers (i.e., the "theory-practice gap"), becoming an avid advocate for engaged scholarship and grounding research in practice. His Engaged Scholarship "Diamond Model" adds "reality" to the other nodes of "theory," "model," and "solution." Reality means incorporating practitioners and other key stakeholders into the research. For example, "engaging those who experience and know the problem" (Van de Ven, 2013, p. 10) is imperative for truly understanding the problem and its roots. According to Van de Ven, the degree and form of stakeholder engagement in research is shaped by the purpose of the research (e.g., description of a problem vs. action intervention). Regardless, Van de Ven argues that, "engaged scholarship produces knowledge that is more penetrating and insightful than when scholars or practitioners work on the problem alone" (Van de Ven, 2013, p. IX).
Given that a hallmark of HCMR is its commitment to conversations between theory and practice, we invite you to consider Van de Ven's call to engaged scholarship as you continue to tackle important, complex, and sometimes vexing health care management issues. It may sharpen our questions; it could sharpen our answers; it could help us be a more central actor in stakeholder conversations and actions to solve health care management problems. As academics, we are aware that academic work environments may contain perverse incentives that do not fully support time-intensive engaged scholarship endeavors. However, we believe that one of the threads that HCMR community members follow is creating impactful research for scholars and practitioners. Know that HCMR sees this thread and holds it for our community; we look forward to seeing even more of your insightful, creative, and impactful research.
Jessica N. Mittler
Guest Co-Author
Cheryl Rathert
Larry Hearld
Co-Editors-in-Chief
References