Research/Management

Practice is to managers what theory is to researchers. It is the focus of their concern. It is where they seek to establish order, or subvert it. It is what they are trying to change or to maintain. A manager cannot simply implement a new practice and a researcher cannot simply establish a new theory. Both are given an order within which to accomplish what they can, and this order includes a tendency, a propensity to change. And a resistance to change. Theories and practices are orders of experience, programmes of perception and of action. We suffer the distance between them as we cross it.