It is important for the research produced by industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists to be rigorous, relevant, and useful to organizations. However, I-O psychology research is often not used in practice. In this paper, we (both practitioners and academics) argue that engaged scholarship—a particular method of inclusive, collaborative research that incorporates multiple stakeholder perspectives throughout the research process—can help reduce this academic–practice gap and advance the impact of I-O psychology. To examine the current state of the field, we reviewed empirical evidence of the current prevalence of collaborative research by examining the number of articles that contain nonacademic authors across 14 key I-O psychology journals from 2018 to 2023. We then build on these findings by describing how engaged scholarship can be integrated throughout the research process and conclude with a call to action for I-O psychologists to conduct more collaborative research. Overall, our goal is to facilitate a fruitful conversation about the value of collaborative research that incorporates multiple stakeholder perspectives throughout the research process in hopes of reducing the academic–practice gap. We also aim to inspire action in the field to maintain and enhance the impact of I-O psychology on the future world of work.

This essay reconsiders the possibility and prospects for the relationship between business ethics scholarship and the world of business practice. More specifically, to a field that often considers the question, “What should be the role of business in society?” it poses the question, “What should be the role of the Society for Business Ethics in business?” My intent is not to solve the related epistemological question of whether we have to “be one to know one.” It is, however, to encourage scholars to leave our laboratories more often to engage with the work and world of those we study. To that end, the essay poses a series of questions for us – individual scholars, members of the Society, and the Society itself – to consider about our relationship with business. It concludes with a postscript response to one of those questions: When, if ever, should the Society make public statements?

Drawing upon findings from an Imagining America research project funded by the Mellon Foundation (2019–2023), this research paper and manifesto proposes five critical ways in which institutions of higher education can better support public humanities. Through over one hundred individual interviews, twenty multimedia case studies, a national graduate scholar survey, an online study group, and public conversations, we learned how public scholars have consistently conducted research that matters – responding to urgent challenges in the world, including on the pressing ecological, social, racial, and economic justice issues of our time. However, the diverse inter-generational Imagining America (IA) research team also found that most academic institutions are still not designed to support this important work. By favoring narrow disciplinary boundaries and norms and individualized methods over collective commitments and reciprocal partnerships, most institutions marginalize and disincentivize public humanities. Our research respondents overwhelmingly agreed that instead of change initiatives led from the top of the university, publicly engaged scholars themselves lead the way by virtue of their groundbreaking collaborative, relational, reflective, critical yet hopeful grounded research. The manifesto shared at the end of the paper proposes how to support this important work today.

How do we do public scholarship? It might seem like a simple question, but as anyone who has attempted to experiment with academic norms—let alone work collaboratively in and through institutional regulations, cultural expectations, and diverse personalities—is well aware, things get complicated quickly. As scholars, practitioners, and educators in the public humanities, the authors offer a set of sticky and thorny questions that are both theoretically minded and practice oriented, as possibilities to consider throughout the process of working on public projects or with community partners. Questions are grouped thematically—Framing, Planning, Partnerships, Institutions, Tools, Outputs and Forms, Documentation, Evaluation and Reflection—though are not meant to be exhaustive or prescriptive. In so doing, the essay insists that public scholarship not be codified into a clearly-defined discipline, but rather acknowledged as both an always already present practice for many scholars and in a constant state of emergence as a field. To that end, the authors also invite direct engagement with these questions, both inside and outside of the space of the text, encouraging readers to generate and share their own questions as well.

Public humanities happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life. Providing a 10-point typology of public humanities, this article explains why we need the humanities – as individuals and as societies – and narrates some moments when the humanities have changed the world. We discuss the rise of “public humanities,” some critiques of the field, and a vision for its future.

This commentary discusses the four articles in this special MOR issue on indigenous management research in China. It begins by recognizing the importance of indigenous research not only for understanding the specific knowledge of local phenomena, but also for advancing general theoretical knowledge across cultural boundaries. Challenging to undertake, we propose a method of engaged scholarship for conducting indigenous research. The four articles in this special issue provide good examples of applying principles of engaged scholarship in their indigenous Chinese management studies.