Collaborative Research In Organizations

The partnership ideal and emergent inquiry process make collaborative research complex and difficult to organize, lead and manage. This book addresses these needs by revisiting traditional research ideals. It provides basics in the historical context, the emergent need, and the challenges of working in the borderland between academy and industry.

'Collaborative Research in Organizations' leverages and sustains the role of management research while increasing the theoretical development of complex organizational and management issues.

This practical book explores collaborative inquiry as an approach to research and change in organizations where internal members and external researchers work together as partners to address organizational issues and create knowledge about changing organizations.

This handbook provides the latest thinking, methodologies and cases in the rapidly growing area of collaborative management research. What makes collaborative management research different is its emphasis on creating a close partnership between scholars and practitioners in the search for knowledge concerning organizations and complex systems. In the ideal situation, scholars and their managerial partners would work together to define the research focus, develop the methods to be used for data collection, participate equally in the analysis of data, and work together in the application and dissemination of knowledge. The handbook contains insightful reflections on the state of the art as well as detailed descriptions of the collaborative efforts of an international group of leading edge academics and their practitioner counterparts. The applications of collaborative research methods included in this volume include those aimed at individual development, organizational development, regional development efforts and economic policy. The insights from the cases suggest that collaborative management research has been a highly effective means of getting at issues that other research methods and intervention techniques have failed to address. The rationale for conducting this highly engaging type of research is explored in the first section of the handbook, followed by sections that offer new methodologies, descriptive cases, views from those directly involved, and issues and enablers about the use of this approach in advancing knowledge and practice. The handbook does appeal to scholarly practitioners as well as practical scholars.

This volume will help individuals and organizations, from both academia and industry, to effectively work together on R&D projects. This inspiring and highly readable book covers winning grant support, the legal arrangements, working with academics and practitioners, managing project progress, and exploiting the project results. Step-by-step coverage guides a project team though a challenging venture, helping them avoid potential pitfalls.

Although organizational decision-making can be very complex, the understanding of technology applications is significant in not only determining the usefulness of virtual groups in organizations, but also in the designing of electronic collaborative activities. Collaborative Communication Processes and Decision Making in Organizations focuses on the role of technology in organizational decision-making processes and activities, providing academics and management teams with current research in the field of virtual teams in organizations. This publication is an essential resource for instructors and students of organization and group communication, and institutions that have networks of offices and employees in multiple geographical locations.

Solve business problems, uncover new opportunities, and ignite innovation using the newest collaborative technologies The Collaborative Organization gives you a strategic approach to building, implementing, and using social and collaborative technologies—such as those created by Jive and Yammer—to create innovative products, solve business problems, and create new processes that will foster lasting success and growth. Jacob Morgan is the principal and cofounder of Chess Media Group, which helps organizations understand how to use social and collaborative tools to solve business problems.

In a global and rapidly changing commercial environment, businesses increasingly use collaborative ethnographic research to understand what motivates their employees and what their customers value. In this volume, anthropologists, marketing professionals, computer scientists and others examine issues, challenges, and successes of ethnographic cooperation in the corporate world. The book argues that constant shifts in the global marketplace require increasing multidisciplinary and multicultural teamwork in consumer research and organizational culture; addresses the need of corporate ethnographers to be adept at reading and translating the social constructions of knowledge and power, in order to contribute to the team process of engaging research participants, clients and stakeholders; reveals the essentially dynamic process of collaborative ethnography; shows how multifunctional teams design and carry out research, communicate findings and implications for organizational objectives, and craft strategies to achieve those objectives to increase the vibrancy of economies, markets and employment rates worldwide.