Co-Creative Action Research Experiments—A Careful Method for Causal Inference and Societal Impact

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I would like to congratulate You on a job well done on the development of the method CARE. The process is very carefully described and explained. In my opinion it could be very useful in practice and really could be helpful in fulfilling the rigor relevance gaps. However I think that some part of this paper could be elaborated more precisely - for example the part concerning the explanation of six models in lines 663-667, maybe it could be presented in a table which allows the readers not to miss the point. Also, however the references list is quite long and correctly chosen, and You have explained that not all information could be included into the paper which is obvious, in a part where You are describing the gaps or shortcomings in another surveys and elaboration these observations and statements should be supported by more examples and sources (especially in lines 105-145). The last comment applies to overuse of a proverb ("the proof of the pudding is in the eating") which is very nice once but not three times in a scientific paper.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting paper that explores the rigor-versus-relevance debate in the management domain, which continues to be debated by many in the academic community.

While I agree there is an increasing trend of management research adopting highly quantitative studies based on increasingly sophisticated forms of inferential statistics (and indeed many prestigious academic journals appear to practically demand such approaches be adopted), I would suggest that the rigor-versus-relevance debate can be repositioned as not being solely a binary artifact. Instead, why cannot research be adequately rigorous and robust, while also being relevant to practitioners, e.g. from industry? Of course, the question then becomes, what is adequately rigorous?

An appropriate level of rigor is needed, and I would suggest essential, because without it how can we be confident that a scientific approach has been adopted and that new knowledge has been generated in an unbiased manner, but yes, management research should absolutely be relevant. Because irrelevant insights into management will unlikely never be adopted in the real world. But in any case, the proposed approach described in this paper would appear to be seeking to achieve both relevance and rigor.

The paper is very well written and itself adopts a rigorous approach to the method that is deployed.

Possible enhancements to the paper include the following:

On page 4, it would be useful to have a few supporting references for each of the different parts of the methodological approach, including references for co-creation, qualitative information, quantitative measurement, action guidance, experimental intervention, and matched-pair follow-up.

Is there any descriptive data available on the case/companies/people involved? How many companies or people were involved in the coaching activity and what were the characteristics of the companies/people involved in the study.

It would be useful to read more about proposed future work/next steps for this research area, or even some form of research agenda for other researchers to potentially address.

Author Response

Please see the attachment for our response to all reviewer comments

Author Response File: Author Response.docx