The Butterfly Effect: How Academics and Practitioners’ Micro-Practices Shape Turning Points in Response to Paradox
研究通过六项合作案例，揭示学者与实践者在日常微观行为中如何影响合作转折点，从而应对学术-实践鸿沟中的悖论，对管理合作实践有启发。
One of the most frequent means of creating relationships between management research and practice is through collaboration. However, odds are that such arrangements will be filled with tensions that characterize the academic–practitioner gap. Against this background, our study investigates how academics and practitioners’ micro-practices shape turning points in response to paradox in six collaborations. We assume a process ontology and employ a comparative case study approach to explore the evolving relationships between academics and practitioners in collaborative settings through 34 semi-structured interviews conducted during the second year of joint work in a social program. Our findings demonstrate how small and seemingly mundane acts at the micro level can affect turning points during the collaborative process by shaping their trajectories. With their day-to-day actions, our informants created significant change in organizational settings characterized by paradox. We found that multiple independent paths to generative responses to paradox exist. However, cultures of impactful collaboration do not evolve quickly and are not attributable to single discrete events. We propose a process model of turning points in academic–practitioner collaborations and offer implications for both theory and practice.