Building and Breaching Boundaries at Once. An Exploration of How Management Academics and Practitioners Perform Boundary Work in Executive Classrooms

Based on an ethnographic study of exchanges between management academics and practitioners in an executive program, the research articulates a process perspective on how academics and practitioners engage in boundary work -how direct interaction strategies (boundary building or boundary breaching) shape their knowledge exchanges. Findings suggest that in order to deal resourcefully with relational insecurity, academics and practitioners use a set of strategies according to trial and error logics. In the beginning of an interaction episode, they draw intentionally on boundary building strategies. If these are refused, they draw on emergent strategies of boundary breaching which connect more creatively classroom roles (in situ) with roles outside the classroom (ex situ). We show that each strategy triggers a different type of knowledge exchange, and that intentional boundary building triggers more limited knowledge exchanges (knowledge transfer) than emergent boundary breaching (new understandings). Our findings contribute to the boundary work literature and integrate arguments about a theory-practice gap with arguments emphasizing the relational potential of academic-practitioner exchanges. We also suggest that if business schools de-infrastructure and encourage trial and error interaction, they can increasingly become trading zones for academic-practitioner boundary work.