Organization studies as an applied science:the generation and use of academic knowledge about organizations : introduction to the special issue

The relationship between theory and practice has been discussed in the social sciences for generations. Academics from management and organization studies regularly lament the divide between theory and practice. They regret the insufficient academic knowledge of managerial problems and their solutions, and criticize the scholarly production of theories that are not relevant for organizational practice (Hambrick 1994). Despite the prevalence of this topic in academic discourse, we do not know much about what kind of academic knowledge would be useful to practice, how it would be produced and how the transfer of knowledge between theory and practice actually works. In short, we do not know how we can make academic work more relevant for practice or even whether this would be desirable. In this introduction to the Special Issue, we apply philosophical, theoretical and empirical perspectives to examine the challenges of studying the generation and use of academic knowledge. We then briefly describe the contribution of the seven papers that were selected for this Special Issue. Finally, we discuss issues that still need to be addressed, and make some proposals for future avenues of research.

Follow-ups and interpreter-mediated discourse

The edited volume documents the proceedings of the ESF workshop "Follow-ups across discourse domains: a cross-cultural exploration of their forms and functions". It examines the forms and functions of the dialogue act of a follow-up, viz. accepting or challenging a prior communicative act, in political discourse across spoken and written dialogic genres. Specifically, it considers (1) the discourse domains of political interviews, editorials, op-eds and discussion forums, (2) their sequential organization as regards the status of initial (or 1st order) follow-up, a follow-up of a prior follow-up (2nd order follow-up), or nth-order follow-up, and (3) their discursive realization as regards degrees of indirectness and responsiveness which are conceptualized as a continuum along the lines of degrees of explicitness and degrees of responsiveness. The chapters come from the fields of linguistics, discourse analysis, socio-pragmatics, communication, political science and psychology, examining the heterogeneous field of political discourse and its manifestation in diverse discourse genres with respect to evasiveness, indirectness and redundancy in mediated political discourse, professional discourse, discourse identity and doing politics, to name but the most prominent questions.