From Gaps to Tangles: A Relational Framework for the Theory-Practice Debate

The article contributes to a better understanding of the relation between organization theory and managerial practice. It examines different literatures to identify positions in how organization theories relate to management practice in the theory-practice debate. It finds positions are founded on a similar set of dichotomies -academics versus practitioners, rigor versus relevance, cognition versus action and science versus commonsense- that propel a debate that moves in circles instead of forwards towards new areas of inquiry. However it is shown that dichotomies are often exaggerated because of the excessive focus on theory-practice gaps and the lack of attention to theory-practice interrelationships. To demonstrate how dichotomies may be reconciled, the paper proposes a new position - entanglement- according to which relations between scholarly and managerial theories and scholarly and managerial practices constitute iterative processes in which organization scholars and management practitioners resourcefully combine action and cognition and science and commonsense to create hybrid and dialogic knowledge according to multiple systems of relevance -institutional constraints, personal interests and contexts of cross-boundary interaction. Therefore the paper proposes a research agenda to study such process-based manifestations and discusses implications for the theory-practice debate