Building and Breaching Boundaries at Once: An Exploration of How Management Academics and Practitioners Perform Boundary Work in Executive Classrooms
基于高管项目的民族志研究，揭示管理学者与实践者通过计划性边界建立和应急性边界打破策略进行知识交换的过程，对商学院改进项目设计有参考价值。
Based on an ethnographic study of exchanges between management academics and practitioners in an executive program, our research articulates a process perspective on how academics and practitioners engage in boundary work—how direct interaction strategies (boundary building or boundary breaching) shape their knowledge exchanges. Our findings suggest that to deal with relational insecurity, academics and practitioners use a set of planned and emergent strategies according to trial-and-error logics. In the beginning of an interaction episode, they draw intentionally on planned boundary-building strategies. If these are refused, they draw on emergent strategies of boundary breaching, which connect inside classroom roles with outside classroom roles in a more creative way. We show that each strategy triggers a different type of knowledge exchange, and that intentional boundary building triggers more limited knowledge exchanges (knowledge transfer) than emergent boundary breaching (new understandings). Our findings contribute to the boundary work literature and to the debate in management about a theory–practice gap by emphasizing the relational potential of academic–practitioner exchanges. We also suggest that if business schools loosen their programs’ infrastructure and encourage trial-and-error interaction, they can increasingly become trading zones for academic–practitioner boundary work.