Bridging the Knowledge Gap in Collaborative Research—in Dialogues We Trust

By building upon the prior work exploring the nature of practicing and knowing in collaborative research (CR), this article argues that focusing on how trust evolves in collaborative dialogue could enhance the learning potential in CR projects. Drawing from 42 workshops within a CR project, we analyze how dialogue and learning practices develop trust. We use the dialogical framework developed by Walton and Krabbe (1995) to identify and classify 107 dialogues. From our data, we identify three distinct dialogical patterns (educating, inquiring and practicing). These three dialogical patterns are related to four learning practices that are conceptualized as knowledge sharing, knowledge gapping, knowledge bettering and knowledge speculating. Combined, these dialogical patterns and learning practices develop collaborative trust in CR projects. We propose that these results represent an emerging conceptual language that addresses the development of trust in managing CR projects. This conceptual language can both improve managerial practice in the CR context and inspire future theory building.

A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action: Participatory Insider Action Research in an Executive Team

In this paper, we describe a Participatory Insider Action Research (PIAR) intervention within the Executive Committee (EC) of a large publicly funded service for people with intellectual disabilities. I was a member of this EC and had been for 20 years. The intervention ran over a two-year period and comprised three cycles of PIAR. We addressed two specific organisational issues but our work did not deliver change in these areas in a substantial sense. We identify power dynamics and role duality challenges as the core factors that contributed to this outcome and describe their effects in this under-researched domain. We finish by offering some advice for future researchers undertaking initiatives of this nature.