Are academics and practitioners that different after all? An entanglement perspective for the theory-practice debate in management

The article contributes to a better understanding of the relation between organization theory and managerial practice, by providing a systematic review of the theory-practice debate and proposing a new integrative position called entanglement. A careful analysis of the debate highlights a dichotomist pattern (science versus commonsense, rigor versus relevance and cognition versus action) that propels a circling debate. To reconcile dichotomies, we propose an entanglement position that re-conceptualizes relations between academics and practitioners as loops of trans-epistemic boundary work. We identify three loops that explain how and why academics and practitioners alternate between science and commonsense (legitimation), translate standards of rigor into multiple systems of relevance (mobilization), and form common action-cognition meshes (enactment). We show that not all loops require the same relational effort, which explains some of the contrasting findings in the theory-practice debate. We try to advance the debate by proposing new research directions for each loop.