Corresponding Chair:
Garth Britton, garth.britton@qut.edu.au
Description:
We invite researcher and practitioners who are working across the boundaries of academic research and public management practice to submit abstracts which further the dialogue this panel has pursued for over a decade.this years. This year’s conference theme Smart Public Service? promotes the need to explore how to be smarter in thinking and practice in difficult contexts.
This SIG promotes engagement and mutual learning to bridge the divide between public management researchers and practitioners who are all attempting to understand and explain how to develop better methods for tacking difficult challenges in a rapidly changing context of fiscal constraint and political instability. It aims to continue and expand the dialogue, bringing together practitioners and academics around papers that describe successful collaboration across the research/practice boundaries or explore the factors that impede or facilitate fruitful knowledge-sharing and suggest ways these factors might be addressed.
We encourage PhD students to present their findings at this panel as a way to test their thinking and approaches in the practice context, as well as their ability to field questions from practitioners and academics.
The manner in which we chair the panel facilitates engaged dialogue between presenters and the broader panel audience. This is the application of adult learning principles and enables greater exploration to occur as there is less performance anxiety than with the formal discussant approach. The papers are linked through each session to create a storyboard and reflect the connections in thinking and practice.