The Promise of Collaborative Management Research

A s editors of the Handbook ofCollaborative Management Research,we began this project with a firm belief based on our experience that broader and deeper collaboration between managers of organizations and academic researchers could yield significant benefits for both parties. Managers would learn much more about how organizations function and new approaches to managing complex systems, thereby improving their individual and orga-nizational performance. Researchers would have access to organizations to discover and test new theories and hypotheses, thereby advancing knowledge and using it to enhance undergraduate, graduate, and executive education. What we didn’t realize at the time was how much we would learn about col-laborative management research from each other and from our colleagues who have contributed chapters to this volume. As we began work on the editorial statement and guidelines for the book, we quickly realized that we held different ideas of what collabo-rative management research entailed. As we tried to define what we meant by management and collaboration, we dis-agreed on some basic points. Did manage-ment include both profit and nonprofit organizations? Did it include the “manage-ment ” of systems that weren’t even formal organizations, such as regional economies? Did it address issues that “managers ” as dis-crete individual actors could influence, or did C H A P T E