The academic-practitioner gap: Past time to bring in the practitioner perspective

This article introduces the symposium topic and five papers and their authors. The paradox is pointed out that management academics have for the last twenty years written hundreds of articles analyzing the causes of and remedies for the ‘separate worlds’ chasm that separates the academic and practitioner communities but almost never reach out to the practitioner side to learn their perspective and ideas on the problem. This behavioral asymmetry is attributed to the penchant of academics to view themselves as higher-positioned scientist-scholars who talk at and talk down to practitioners rather than talk with them.