Reinventing Translation: Toward a Common Language for Scholar-Practitioners

Translation starts in one language, and converts to a second. But it doesn’t change the languages or the people who “speak” them. We propose – instead of translation – the joint development of theory and practice that becomes a common language, a common language of a community of scholar-practitioners. This paper describes the work of two scholar-practitioners committed to addressing a pressing problem of practice: the educational attainment and skills required for positive outcomes in the 21st century workplace. This paper examines the original design and implementation of an innovative, theory-based workplace learning initiative called Books@Work, and, arising from this work, proposes a research methodology that integrates theory and practice in a complex, emergent form of engaged scholarship. The authors propose the use of a single lens to join theory and practice in a seamless partnership between scholars and practitioners – and program participants themselves – engaged in a joint effort to solve practice problems and to shape a more integrated, reformulated, view of scholar-practice. Reinventing Translation: Toward a Common Language for Scholar-Practitioners Ann Kowal Smith Karen R. Nestor Books@Work Books@Work EDITORIAL NOTE Ann Kowal Smith’s and Karen Nestor’s article “Reinventing Translation: Toward a Common Language for Scholar-Practitioners” is the first translation paper in EMR. The purpose of translation articles is to examine how research results, designs or methods are being applied and ‘translated’ into practical outcomes by practitioner-scholars in the ‘swing of things’. The articles are empirical in the sense that they show by using empirical evidence how research results are ‘fed’ back into action settings and how they shape or fail to do so management action. This article carries all the signs of a good translation article, which I had in mind when we established this genre in EMR. Smith’s and Nestor’s study setting— how employees read and discuss books in a guided setting in their work place—is itself an example of the first level translation. But they show how this simple translation has rich and far reaching effects on individuals’ confidence, cognition and identity and consequently on organizational cognition, absorptive capacity, social bonding and performance. They follow this cascade of effects through a third type of translation in which they use qualitative, grounded theory based dialogue research techniques which they learned as part of their research training. They show how these scholarly competencies help them analyze and make sense of such processes and use it to influence the effectiveness of future translation interventions and of practice itself—an example of true engaged scholarship and action research carried out by practitioners! As a result, the article is rich in detail and provides original insight, inviting the reader to follow these multilevel translations triggered by the initially innocent desire to get people around the table and to discuss well written and touching prose. Lastly, the article is emblematic of the subject matter of Books@Work’s mission—it is beautifully written and crafted. I hope that it invites all to read this simple story of people who read books at the work to discuss them and what this actually comes to mean to them and for the rest of us. 39 SEPTEMBER 2017, VOL 1, NO. 2 Engaged Management ReView