Bridging the Rigor/Relevance Gap: a Study of Scholar-Practitioners’ Multiple Role Management

Drawing on growing voices calling academics to move closer to practical settings, this article strives to bridge the so-called “rigor/relevance gap”. As the literature focuses on the benefits of improving the academic-practitioner engagement and emphasizes the difficulties scholars may face while balancing their different roles, it neglects the understanding of underlying mechanisms aimed at bridging the academic and practice worlds. This article is an attempt to solve this gap by studying how scholar-practitioners - professionals that work across the boundaries of academic and practice worlds - manage their multiple professional roles. For that purpose, we study role conflicts and role management strategies as experienced by 16 scholar-practitioners. We contribute to role theory by identifying a strategy that is employed as passage rite in between strategies to clarify role boundaries and strategies to integrate roles. We contribute to the literature on scholar-practitioners and to the rigor/relevance debate by describing spillover mechanisms between four types of roles: teaching, research, combination and application and discuss implications for the theory-practice gap.