Beyond boundaries. A relational study of knowledge exchanges between management scholars and business practitioners in executive classrooms

Based on an ethnographic study of the interaction of two groups of management academics and practitioners in an executive master’s program, the research articulates a process perspective on how academics and practitioners exchange expert knowledge across boundaries. Findings suggest that academics and practitioners can resourcefully deal with knowledge exchanges that are pervaded by relational insecurity, thanks to a set of relational strategies that are used sequentially, according to trial and error logics. The four strategies that we identified connect, albeit to different extents, what goes on inside the classroom (in situ) with what goes on outside the classroom, in academics’ and practitioners’ day-to-day relations (ex-situ). We show that each strategy led to a different type of knowledge exchange and that the first two strategies –that were intentional- had less impact on new knowledge creation than the two strategies that emerged spontaneously from interaction. Our findings challenge orthodox understandings about the existence of a management theory - managerial practice gap and points out the importance of seeing theoretical and managerial expertise in practice as socially entangled rather than community-specific. We also show that business schools play an important role in facilitating academic-practitioner boundary work. By triggering insecurities, conflicts and reparatory negotiation processes, business schools settings allow for repeated contaminations between knowledge deriving from theorizing and practising.