The Translation of Management Knowledge: Challenges, Contributions and New Directions

• Author: Dimitrios Spyridonidis,Stefan Heusinkveld,Karoline Strauss,Graeme Currie,Andrew Sturdy
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12110
• Date: 01 July 2016
• Published date: 01 July 2016

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 18, 231–235 (2016)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12110

The Translation of Management

Knowledge: Challenges, Contributions

and New Directions

Dimitrios Spyridonidis, Graeme Currie, Stefan Heusinkveld,1Karoline Strauss2

and Andrew Sturdy3

University of Warwick,1VU University Amsterdam, 2ESSEC Business School, and 3University of Bristol

Corresponding author email: dimitrios.spyridonidis@wbs.ac.uk

Across manysectors, new developments and discourses that emphasize change, collabo-

ration, shifting professional boundaries and increased sharing of knowledge are taking

place. One is thus challenged to question and/or develop further understanding of how

and to what extent new ideas, scientific developments and technologies are translated

within such contexts and thereby extend managementand organization studies. To ad-

vance understanding about this significant field in the scholarlycommunity, this special

issue has assembled a diverse set of papers, which review developments in translation

theory and seek to encourage new thinking and frameworksand open up new directions

in management and organization studies more generally. By reflecting on these papers,

the authors summarize key challenges in translational researchand new framings, and

point to exciting new research opportunities that can be foundin fruitfully comparing,

elaborating, expanding, contrasting and blending extant perspectives.

Introduction

Knowledge both changes and retains its character-

istics when translated. Even relatively fixed forms

of knowledge, such as those associated with matters

of faith, are changed according to context and over

time. Yet we can also still recognize continuities. In

the context of management, where knowledge is rel-

atively ambiguous, research frequently used to treat

ideas or innovations as quite fixed, even if their im-

plementation was often contested. In parallel, over

the course of the last twenty years, scholarly attention

has become increasingly focused on the waysin which

management knowledge has been created,developed,

disseminated and applied (Czarniawska-Joerges and

Sev´

on 1996, 2005). In particular, both in management

and other disciplines, it has become widely accepted

that knowledge in the form of ‘new’ ideas, practices,

scientific developments and technologies does not

typically remain stable. Rather, when it ‘diffuses’,

‘flows’ or ‘moves’, knowledge is translated to ‘fit’

the specific context (Ansari et al. 2010; Røvik 2011).

While, obviously, there remain many challenges in-

volved with studying primarily ideational phenomena

(Benders and van Veen 2001), we are beginning to un-

derstand better how various forms of knowledge are

blended, modified, adapted or reinvented, and how

these processes may ultimately shape a large variety

of different outcomes such as those related to learn-

ing and innovation. In this sense, translation theory

has reoriented the emphasis of learning and innova-

tion on both the actors who engage with the transla-

tion process and the diverse contexts in which they

do so.

Challenges

There are a number of challenges facing the study

of translation, of which two have formed the main

motivation for this special issue. While perhaps

not exhaustive, these are central issues that have

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