Now that I have your attention…
The program that I manage is intensely applied. I’m currently writing this from LAX, where I am returning from the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) meetings in Long Beach, CA. We took 16 students, all interns or early career management analysts, to gain greater exposure to professional local government management practitioners.
While in Long Beach, I had coffee with a practitioner friend, and we talked about many things local government management. One thing that stuck out to me was a comment about the interaction at the conference between (the few) academics and practitioners. This got me thinking about how those two groups interact outside of a venue where “real” interaction is more or less forced.
Many schools or departments of public affairs encourage collaboration with practitioners. It keeps the field relevant to practice and often grows a relationship that is beneficial to the scholar and to the school. This collaboration comes in, essentially, two flavors.1 The first is a true collaboration–practitioners are involved in all steps of the academic process and the output is typically an academic piece or pieces and a practitioner-focused piece. All parties are served in the relationship. The second is academics using administrative data,2 perhaps with some consultation with practitioners about how the data came to be.
In my experience, a lot of what is called ‘collaboration with practitioners’ is really just using administrative data. An academic has an interesting question that can be answered with data generated from implementing a policy. The practitioner is a (semi-active) bystander to the academic process that is occurring. While that’s perfectly fine, it’s the least engaging and useful type of collaboration for practitioners (or informing practice).3 True collaboration–understanding practitioner’s problems (and, gasp, perhaps letting them drive the research question process), devising novel data collection or analysis schemes, and delivering actionable advice–is what’s necessary.
Practitioners want to access the vast resources of the university. Both professions would benefit greatly it, but we need to engage in this work in a truly collaborative fashion. This will likely require some tenure and promotion standards to change to accommodate the different kinds of research outputs, beyond the traditional academic journal article that administrative data are being used to create, these collaborations generate.
Footnotes
I’m ignoring contract work, which is by definition collaborative, but is a completely different beast.↩︎
Data derived from the administrative process to implement some program. Importantly, the data are not generated for research.↩︎
It’s highly lucrative for scholars, who require novel data to answer questions. And it might be prestige-enhancing for practitioners.↩︎