Negotiating Boundaries between Scholars and Practitioners

I t has become commonplace to assert that practitioners and academics compose fully distinct communities based on their contrasting worldviews, sense-making devices, goals, and preferences for data (Beyer &Trice, 1982). Under this assumption, commentators call for scholars to increase their reach into practitioner communities by either developing more comprehensible messages (Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001) or to conduct research that addresses pressing practitioner problems (Aldag, 1997). In both cases, the knowledge that is the basis of scholar-practitioner interaction is portrayed as an objective entity that can and should be linearly transferred from one side of the (supposedly) clearly defined boundary to the other to address practitioner problems. Instead of clear divisions between scholar and practitioner communities, however, it ismore likely that there existmultiple and heterogeneous communities on each side of the divide that is created by university affiliation. Activitywithin each community is significantly more complex than is often portrayed from across the boundary. For instance, analyses of social scientific paradigms and basic-versus-applied debates consistently demonstrate a wide range