When the Practice of Theorizing Meets the Theorizing of Practice. Social Knowledge Making in Organization Science Academia and Managerial Communities

The aim of the present work is to contribute to a better understanding of the relation between organization theory and management practice. It is organized as a collection of two papers, a theoretical and conceptual contribution and an ethnographic study. The first paper is concerned with systematizing different literatures inside and outside the field of organization studies that deal with the theory-practice relation. After identifying a series of positions to the theory-practice debate and unfolding some of their implicit assumptions and limitations, a new position called entwinement is developed in order to overcome status quo through reconciliation and integration. Accordingly, the paper proposes to reconceptualize theory and practice as a circular iterative process of action and cognition, science and common-sense enacted in the real world both by organization scholars and practitioners according to purposes at hand. The second paper is the ethnographic study of an encounter between two groups of expert academics and practitioners occasioned by a one-year executive business master in an international business school. The research articulates a process view of the knowledge exchange between management academics and practitioners in particular and between individuals belonging to different communities of practice, in general, and emphasizes its dynamic, relational and transformative mechanisms. Findings show that when they are given the chance to interact, academics and practitioners set up local provisional relations that enable them to act as change intermediaries vis-a-vis each other’s worlds, without tying themselves irremediably to each other and to the scenarios they conjointly projected during the master’s experience. Finally, the study shows that provisional relations were accompanied by a recursive shift in knowledge modes. While interacting, academics passed from theory to practical theorizing, practitioners passed from an involved practical mode to a reflexive and quasi-theoretical one, and then, as exchanges proceeded, the other way around.

Reputation, VC funding, and innovation: Evidence from the UK Micro and Nanotechnology sector

Startups’ contributions on economic growth have been widely realized. However, the funding gap is often a problem limiting startups’ development. To some extent, VC can be a means to solve this problem. VC is one of the optimal financial intermediaries for startups. Two streams of VC studies are focused in this dissertation: the criteria used by venture capitalists to evaluate startups and the effect of VC on innovation. First, although many criteria have been analyzed, the empirical assessment of the effect of startup reputation on VC funding has not been investigated. However, reputation is usually positively related with firm performance, which may affect VC funding. By analyzing reputation from the generalized visibility dimension and the generalized favorability dimension using a sample of 200 startups founded from 1995 operating in the UK MNT sector, we show that both the two dimensions of reputation have positive influence on the likelihood of receiving VC funding. We also find that management team heterogeneity positively influence the likelihood of receiving VC funding. Second, studies investigating the effect of venture capital on innovation have frequently resorted to patent data. However, innovation is a process leading from invention to successful commercialization, and while patents capture the upstream side of innovative performance, they poorly describe its downstream one. By reflecting the introduction of new products or services trademarks can complete the picture, but empirical studies on trademarking in startups are rare. Analyzing a sample of 192 startups founded from 1996 operating in the UK MNT sector, we find that VC funding has positive effect on the propensity to register trademarks, as well as on the number and breadth of trademarks.