ABSTRACT
School and business-we can pretend these terms exist in opposition to one another: the pure knowledge of research versus the applications of that knowledge in development and production processes; a collaborative learning community versus the competitive office; or, to take a different perspective, “Those who cannot do, teach.” Each of these clichés is built around a kernel of truth and a larger amount of facile exaggeration. Engineers and journalists study their trades in college, but they do not simply apply their knowledge when they emerge into the workforce. Rather, they have to learn about the organizations into which they have entered. What they have studied in the university prepares them to work and opens the door for them, but they have to reshape their knowledge, they have to adjust it to the dynamics of a particular workplace. Later, they may return for a master’s degree. Here, they will take workplace knowledge and reflect on it in relationship with other ideas, other contexts, and other ways of knowing presented in their graduate studies. This back and forth between business and school has often been hidden in polemics about the university and the real world.
