Co-creating Knowledge and Shaping Practice: The collaborative work of nascent occupations
研究新兴职业（责任投资分析师）如何通过与资产管理专业人士的两种协作路径（结构化协作和生成性协作）来融入现有实践并推动变革，揭示知识共创的过程与条件。
Organizations increasingly create specialized roles to address complex challenges that transcend established boundaries of expertise and practice. This study examines how members of a nascent occupation—responsible investment analysts—collaborated with asset management professionals to incorporate environmental, social, and governance criteria into conventional financial analyses. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and multiple data sources, we identify two distinct collaborative pathways: structured collaboration, which aligns nascent occupational contributions with existing frameworks, and generative collaboration, which involves sustained, iterative engagement to fundamentally transform established practices. We show that progression along each pathway is shaped by the interplay between nascent occupation members’ adaptive strategies and the epistemic assumptions embedded in professional domains—particularly shared beliefs about what constitutes valid expertise and how it should be evaluated. Our findings illuminate how knowledge co-creation unfolds when one party lacks institutionally validated expertise, how professional-level epistemic orientations shape opportunities for practice transformation, and how early collaborative arrangements condition nascent occupations’ ability to gain recognition and influence within organizations. These insights contribute to theories of knowledge co-creation across occupational boundaries and offer practical guidance for organizations seeking to address challenges that span established domains of expertise.