Beyond Boundaries. Reconceptualizing Exchanges between Management Scholars and Practitioners

This paper challenges orthodox understandings about the existence of a theory-practice gap in organization science and points out the limitations of, and uncertainties behind, seeing management academics and practitioners as two separate communities with different systems of expertise (i.e., theoretical and practical expertise). Based on an ethnographic study of two groups of academics and practitioners in an executive master’s program, the research articulates a process view of how academics and practitioners, in particular, and individuals belonging to different occupational communities, in general, exchange expertise across boundaries. Findings suggest that academics and practitioners can resourcefully deal with exchanges that are pervaded by information shortage, differences and misunderstandings, thanks to their exceptional ability to develop provisional relations: temporary, open-ended and malleable relations that draw on the broader systems of relations in which they are entangled elsewhere. Accordingly, theories and practices are not exclusive systems of expertise but common resources for instrumental exchanges; when called to interact, academics are easily able to pass from theory to practical theorizing, as practitioners can switch from an involved practical mode to a quasi-theoretical one. These findings contribute to boundary spanning literature by discussing the issues of exchange multiplicity, hybrid systems of expertise, and continuous transformation through relationality