Can Different Professionals Talk and not Talk to Each Other at Once? Provisional Relations as Boundary Spanning Strategies between Management Academics and Practitioners

This study contributes to a better understanding of how individuals belonging to different occupational communities negotiate pressures for stability and change during cross-boundary exchanges. We describe micro-dynamics of boundary work enacted by two communities of organizational scholars and management practitioners that come together and interact during a one-year executive master’s program. By looking at how scholars and practitioners negotiated multiple pressures for stability and change (i.e., conformity with or deviance from the knowledge frames of their occupational communities of reference) we identify a set of resourceful strategies called provisional relations and discuss a series of implications for the literature on boundary spanning. Specifically, we propose a social interactionist perspective on change that addresses issues such as occupational interdependencies, mechanisms for coping with multiple simultaneous occupational exchanges, hybrid systems of expertise, and continuous transformation.