Preventing Cooperative Knowledge Production From Falling Apart

• Main Authors: Christer Theandersson, Bertil Rolandsson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2013-11-01
• Series: SAGE Open
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013511259

The purpose of this article is to analyze why work life representatives are engaging themselves in joint knowledge production with academia. We intend to deepen our understanding of how the practitioners’ trust in academia is constituted, that is what trust-building practices conditions their trust. The article is based on interviews with practitioners who are cooperating with a Swedish research center. The result indicates that practitioners’ trust in cooperation is based on a combination of different trust-building practices, among which the academy as a dependable supplier of objective and authoritative knowledge production is still important. At the same time, practitioners’ trust is also dependent on the existence of shared and integrated knowledge production relevant to their professions. The main conclusion of the study is that academia has to manage a set of different conditions demanding that different trust-building practices be combined and managed for trust to be maintained.