What Has Happened to Mode 2?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00773.x |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Jean M. Bartunek |
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What Has Happened to Mode 2?
Jean M. Bartunek
Department of Management and Organization, Fulton 430C, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue,
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3808, USA
Email: Bartunek@bc.edu
In 2001 the British Journal of Management (BJM)
published a special issue addressing ways of
bridging the relevance gap between management
practice and management research. That year,
and that special issue, marked what seems from
today’s perspective to have been an optimistic
time for academics concerned about academic–
practitioner relationships. In this short commen-
tary I would like to reflect on the 2001 special
issue from the standpoint of 2011. I would also
like to comment on some recent initiatives that,
while not framed explicitly in terms of Mode 2,
are pertinent to it.
By the time the special issue was published
there had been sentiment over several years that
reforms in business schools that had been
initiated by the Carnegie and Ford Foundations
in 1959 had succeeded all too well in increasing
the rigour of business school training. These
reforms had resulted in professors being hired
and rewarded more for their research (and
discipline-based) capabilities than for their
knowledge of practices of management. While
the research output of management school
professors had indeed improved considerably,
there had not been comparable improvements in
the perceived relevance to management and
organizational practice of the research con-
ducted. Rather, it seemed to some that perceived
relevance had decreased in almost direct propor-
tion to improvements in rigour.
But means had begun to be developed that
promised to increase relevance. For example, a
number of DBA or, more broadly, executive-
based doctoral programmes had recently sprung
up in the UK and other countries, and many
expected that practitioners who earned docto-
rates would be bridge-builders between practice
and academia (Starkey and Madan, 2001). In
2001 Rynes, Bartunek and Daft edited a special
research forum in the Academy of Management
Journal that focused on forms of knowledge
transfer between academics and practitioners.
Particularly pertinent for the special issue,
Tranfield and Starkey (1998) had published a
paper in BJM that had articulated policy pro-
positions for how management research should
be conducted (Hodgkinson, 2001). Their paper
drew on Gibbons et al.’s (1994) discussion of
science and technology policy, and on the basis of
this discussion distinguished between Mode 1
knowledge production, where ‘knowledge pro-
duction occurs largely as a result of an academic
agenda’ (p. 347), and Mode 2 knowledge
production, which ‘requires trans-disciplinarity
in which teamworking among academics and
practitioners and across different academic dis-
ciplines rather than heroic individual endeavor
becomes the established norm’, and where
scholarly knowledge is developed in the context
of application. They argued for the importance of
Mode 2 approaches to research.
The 2001 special issue in BJM centred around a
paper by Starkey and Madan (2001) that devel-
oped the implications of the Mode 2 approach
for management research. It also included several
commentaries on their arguments. Starkey and
Madan argued (p. S20) that ‘if we are seeking
new forms of knowledge perhaps it is better to set
out from the starting point of problem definition,
the problem in practice (the Mode 2 route), and
construct and develop individuals and teams of
researchers up to the limits required by particular
problem definition’. Their paper advocated for
British Journal of Management, Vol. 22, 555–558 (2011)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2011.00773.x
r2011 The Author
British Journal of Management r2011 British Academy of Management. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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