Scholar-stakeholder collaborative HRM research – taking stock and moving forward

Management research is more and more required to develop rigorous and actionable knowledge, relevant to today’s social and environmental global challenges. Engaging in collaborative knowledge creation processes - through which academics embed themselves in contexts of application, develop transdisciplinary collaborations, and involve stakeholders throughout the research process – has been considered for years a possible way to reach that objective, and it becomes even more important today for exploring the so called ‘messes’ or ‘wicked problems’. Even if HR research is potentially well equipped for providing actionable knowledge on global social and environmental challenges, several influential commentaries highlight that currently HR scholars tend to engage in more traditional knowledge creation processes, in which research is mostly performed and ‘consumed’ by academics, and is mostly driven by disciplinary and theoretical concerns rather than practical ones. Consistent with the conference theme, our panel symposium has the objective to collectively reflect on what has been done until now for developing relevant HR research via researchers-stakeholders collaborations (i.e., the ‘taking stock’), and what could be future initiatives (i.e., the ‘moving forward’) for improving collaborative HR (relevant) research. The symposium involves a group of panellists in a formal, moderated, interactive discussion. The panellists are of two types: (i) authors of two empirical collaborative HR papers, included in a recent special issue of Human Resource Management Journal on collaborative research in the HR field; (ii) journal editors interested in collaborative research. The symposium has been intentionally designed in a multi- disciplinary way, so that voices from the HR research community are together with voices from other management research communities facing the same rigor/relevance challenge (i.e., Organizational Change, Operations Management). Overall, we hope our symposium will serve as a catalyst for increasing the relevance of HR research via collaboration with relevant stakeholders.