What is it about?
One may think that getting a PhD or a DBA after an experience in industry, or working part-time as a consultant throughout academic tenure automatically awards the status of boundary spanner, and all the benefits it implies, such as, for instance, the knowledge advantages of a financial broker or the reputation of a cultural mediator. However, our study shows that scholar-practitioners have a very hard time defining who they are, professionally and personally speaking, because they are caught in between institutional pressures for role separation, on the one side, and their personal desideratum for role integration, on the other side. Specifically, we show that scholar-practitioners move differently on the separation-integration continuum, according to how experienced they are. The less experienced scholar-practitioners seem to be more subject to pressures for role separation and follow a strategy that constantly reorders the priority of their roles, avoiding this way an overloading integration. The more the scholar-practitioners progress in their career, the more they are willing to integrate their roles, through strategies that we called “role interspacing” and “temporary role bundling” which, however, do not reach a full level of integration.
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Why is it important?
An important feature of the study is the concern not only with how boundary spanning occurs but also with what kind of knowledge gets transferred from one role to another. We found that role management strategies that are closer to the separation pole allow scholar-practitioners to make operations with contents, while strategies that are closer to the integration pole enable them to transfer across roles procedural knowledge, and, in the condition of highest role integration, metaknowledge -i.e., knowledge about who knows whom and who knows what in their social networks.
Perspectives
Currently, we know almost nothing about how people or organizations successfully bridge the research/practice divide. Our paper gives a first impulse to investigate and recognize the key role of scholar-practitioners. We also go beyond scholar practitioners and provocatively suggest that a solution to bridge the academia-practice gap is to encourage also traditional scholars and practitioners to perceive themselves as fragile and at the same time resourceful boundary spanners. Our study also brings significant contributions to role theory. The finding that professionals move differently on the separation-integration continuum according to experience can have important consequences for setting up motivational strategies for professionals at different stages of their career, as well as assisting them in their struggles to maintain a delicate equilibrium between pressures for separation and integration.
Guillaume Carton
emlyon business school
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Bridging the Research–Practice Divide: A Study of Scholar-Practitioners’ Multiple Role Management Strategies and Knowledge Spillovers Across Roles, Journal of Management Inquiry, March 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1056492617696890.
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