What Has Happened to Mode 2

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 commentary 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 conducted. Rather, it seemed to some that perceived relevance had decreased in almost direct proportion 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, executivebased doctoral programmes had recently sprung up in the UK and other countries, and many expected that practitioners who earned doctorates 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 propositions 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 production 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 disciplines 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 developed 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