Real-world outcomes: Or how to make discourse-based research findings useful to practitioners through reflection and dialogue

When working with discourse-based research in professional settings, one question invariably arises: How do we, as researchers, ensure that our findings are taken up by the professionals with whom analyses are carried out, leading to reflections on or even change in their social practices? The answer is that quite often, we do not. Studies (e.g. Erickson and Schultz 1982; Roberts and Sarangi 2003) suggest that when doing applied-linguistics or discourse studies, many academic researchers stop short of addressing the practical relevance of their results and instead “believe in a talking-down model of feeding back research findings to subjects” (Roberts and Sarangi 2003, 340) although, arguably, making results applicable to a real-world context ought to be an essential goal of researcher-practitioner studies.
This issue forms the background of the presentation, in which it will be discussed how the dissemination of research findings may take place to ensure the creation of real-world outcomes for practitioners (cf. e.g. Nørreklit et al. 1987; Puchta & Potter 2004). The presentation will be centered around the interview study of the discursive constructions of culture in a Danish cross-border software company and the possible implications of these constructions for organizational collaboration. Special attention will be paid to the reflexive processes which took place as we, the researchers, discussed the findings of our analyses with a group of managers, the practitioners, during one specific meeting.

References
Erickson, Frederick and Jeffrey Schultz. 1982. The Counsellor as Gatekeeper: Social Interaction in Interviews. New York: Academic Press.
Nørreklit, Lennart, Stig L. Pedersen, Bo Prangsgaard and Kristian Tuft. 1987. Aktørsmetoden: En Indføring i Erhvervsøkonomisk Projektarbejde. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag.
Puchta, Claudia and Jonathan Potter. 2004. Focus Group Practice. Los Angeles/London: Sage.
Roberts, Celia and Srikant Sarangi. 2003. “Uptake of Discourse Research in Interprofessional Settings: Reporting from Medical Consultancy”. Applied Linguistics 24(3): 338-359.