Engaged Scholar(ship): Creative tension or squeezed in the middle?

Purchasing and supply management influences practice through advancement of knowledge and theoretical principles and positions itself as an academic discipline. For the individual researcher, this calls for skills and experiences that can be associated with engaged scholarship. This paper explores tensions inherent in engaged scholarship, namely the quest to interact closely with professionals to ensure relevance and impact whilst at the same time live up to research quality criteria. The paper concludes that the individual researcher in a field such as PSM is easily left with guidelines that point in multiple directions as regards personal achievement and institutional merits.