Critical Perspectives on Replicability in Work/Organizational Psychology Research

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Background

Thinking about Critical Perspectives on Replicability in Work/Organizational Psychology Research entails multiple and intertwined theoretical and operational stances, and conveys challenges and suggestions for enhancing meaningful, interesting, and good empirical research in the field of Work Organizational Psychology (WOP).
On the one hand the label refers to a prescriptive an routinized approach to conduct research; on the other it has to be revised dealing with the last decades’ debates about changes in linguistic, narrative, practice, and material.
These implications have been suggested in order to consider managerial and organization studies as ‘applied science’, to enhance academic-practitioner collaboration, to go beyond narrowly circumscribed areas of study achieving a ground-breaking research.
Research in this field is context-specific driven, and therefore requires a shift of knowledge production inside organizations. The shift would be from Mode 1 (traditional, linear formulation of knowledge production) to Mode 2 (social processes, emphasizing material, historical, socio-linguistic, and relational conditions). How can we improve an understanding from within the work activities, considering the social nature of organizations and the situated contextual conditions in which the work takes place?
Under question is a unitary vision of science and modern knowledge, based on the assumption of an epistemic awareness of a science immersed in the world. A science that, if oriented to the study of human action in its various manifestations, individual and collective, cannot evade the theme of responsibility for its use from its considerations, by bringing together truth and values, epistemic and ethical demands. Research capable of going beyond formulaic models and playing a role in configuring more heterogeneous, influential and future-oriented approaches in the study of organizational and managerial phenomena.
Thereby we theorize the growing importance of theoretically and methodologically ambitious intervention research, which moves the focus from replicability and statistical generalizibility to generativity, acknowledging the importance of engaged scholarship, more specifically political and ethical commitment to the critical challenges of our time, namely climate change, poverty and polarization of societies.

Issues and scopes
This Research Topic welcomes both theoretical and empirical papers examining:
• emblematic example of intervention and transformative research, taking responsibility on the major challenges we are facing in tackling the current crisis
• how researchers in WOP can detect and valorise repertoires of shared knowledge and common identifications, giving space to multivocal subjects' experience, acknowledging the power of situated and tacit knowledge through unconventional inquiry methods
• innovative inquiry methods to approach and highlight tacit situated knowledge, developing ways for accompanying subjects to revisit and reflect on their in use assumptions
• epistemological implications related to going beyond the linearity theory-application, moving from the content of knowledge to the locally acknowledged use(s) of knowledge
• methodological implication, in order to develop a looking forward (not only backward) sensemaking, enabling a participated approach that conceives subjects as research co-authors, negotiating with them aims, methods and mutual expectations:(more than a taken for granted contract)
• How context-focused research aims to elicit collective reflection and open unedited, original understandings and is characterized by multi-method, flexible, work-in-progress approach.

Keywords: Critical approach, generativity, intervention and transformative research, engaged scholarship, epistemological/methodological implications

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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