Categorical entanglements of scholarly practice – re-connecting ‘L’, ‘P’ and ‘Q’ in new ways

The starting assumption of this paper is that the management scholar-practitioner does not exist as a stable distinct category. Rather, scholarly practice may be better understood as the on-going entanglements between scholarly insight and practitioner knowledge. The learning that occurs when practitioners transition to scholarly-practititioners is explained with an alternative reading of the classic action learning equation (L = P + Q). In this new reading, scholarly-ness is identified as the source of questioning insight (Q) and practitioner expert knowledge is equated with P. The mechanisms by which scholarly-ness provides questioning insight (Q), and the subsequent entanglement with expert practitioner knowledge (P), are then related to different process theories of change [Van de Ven, A. H., and M. S. Poole. 1995. “Explaining Development and Change in Organizations.” Academy of Management Review 20: 510–540]. In this, I posit that the mechanisms and entanglements will be most effective if they are congruent with these underlying process theories of change. This framework allows different threads of literature on scholarly practice to be reconciled into one model.