Jo Mackiewicz English Department, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA.

Transferring Research Findings to Business Practice

In his Outstanding Researcher Lecture at the 1999 ABC conference, Jan Ulijn (2000) stated, “The business community will trust our ... practical guidelines if they are backed up with sound reliable and valid research.” My talk is not another call for good empirical, including experimental, research in business (and technical) communication. I won’t preach to the choir. Rather, I want to outline some reasons to be optimistic about overcoming the challenge of transferring knowledge from our research to practitioners, including these: (1) Our students use the theoretical goggles that they obtain in our programs in their workplaces; (2) We regularly collaborate with businesses and other organizations; and (3) We who work in academia now often have business and industry experience.

I also want to point out some challenges in creating and transferring that knowledge: (1) What counts as evidence and, more specifically, what counts as strong evidence, differs across professional boundaries. In contrast to medical research and its findings, in business communication, “evidence” may come from just one or two studies. This field (and the field of technical communication too) does not have a record of replicating research, and (2) As Dopson (2006) writes about evidence-based health care, people “actively interpret and (re-)construct [the] local validity and usefulness [of research findings]” (p. 85). As researchers, we don’t often enough interpret our findings for a range of potential settings. For ethnographic researchers, the problem is that the application of their findings may appear limited. For experimental researchers, focused, specific findings may appear trivial.

I want to end by discussing ways to overcome the challenge of moving research findings and interpretations into practice. For example, business communication needs a mode of interpreting research findings, such as a newsletter or online trade magazine. We can also reach a wider range of people working in business and industry by setting up workshops for instructors who work in vocational and trade schools. We can also do more to reach business practitioners directly through seminars for local business people.

With these challenges and possible solutions in mind, I am optimistic about research in business communication and about the opportunities for transferring knowledge stemming from that research into business practice.

References

• Dopson, S. (2006, April). Debate: Why does knowledge stick? What we can learn from the case of evidence-based health care. Public Money & Management: 85-86.

• Ulijn, J. (2000). Innovation and international business communication: Can European research help to increase the validity and reliability for our business and teaching practice? Journal of Business Communication 37(2): 173-187.