The Scientist as Rebel (Dyson, 2008) inspired the title for this guest editorial. Dyson argued in one of his essays that science requires collaborating scientists from across cultures to rebel against the narrow views of any one of their cultures. He suggested that this is always the task of science; a science that does not do this stagnates and never grows and develops.
On the surface, this appears to be an oxymoron, for a scientist (or scholar) is supposed to be consistent, orderly, and build in an accepted way on previously established theoretical frameworks. We talk about academic fields as disciplines. We require students and authors to be structured in their approach to reporting their research. We look for a systematic explanation of the methods used in the research and reject the manuscript if the explanation does not fit a preconceived notion of what systematic means.
Bloom (2009), along with Dyson, also challenged us as scholars to think in new and radical ways. He argued that there are mistakes in many economic concepts that we take for granted, and that the only way we can identify new ways to think about those concepts is to take a multidisciplinary approach and perspective. He claimed that it is not capitalism, per se, that failed us in the 2008 economic crisis, but, rather, our inability to see through the misunderstanding and misapplication of capitalism that got the world into trouble.
How does HRD, through our journals and our professional organizations, facilitate dramatic and radical disconnections from our embedded wisdom? If Dyson' s and Bloom' s perspectives have validity as new paradigms for moving HRD forward, then it is critical for us to put into place infrastructures that value and honor disconnections rather than serve as a firewall to keep radical innovative and creative perspectives out of print or hold them up to ridicule.
An academic-turned-practitioner HRD friend and I have had ongoing conversations about the connections between research and practice and the apparent gap that exists. I asked where she gets her information about cuttingedge HRD practices and their validation through research. Her response was