La communication des savoirs actionnables à diverses communautés de praticiens : chaînon souvent manquant dans la recherche

The interest for actionable knowledge production has grown tremendously during the last few years in the management sciences field. This contribution aims at revisiting the question of actionable knowledge validation in management sciences viewed as "sciences of the artificial" (Simon, 1969). It focuses on the role, in the validation process, of communicating actionable knowledge to communities of practitioners.In the first part, it discusses the importance of communicating to various communities of practitioners the knowledge that researchers produce intentionally as actionable knowledge. It is argued that the extra-work that is necessary to communicate properly that knowledge to practitioners contributes greatly to the knowledge production-and-validation process. Two criteria relative to the evaluation of knowledge actionability are set forth: the "in context relevance" and the "in context consistency" criteria.In the second part, it focuses on communication modes that may facilitate actionable knowledge appropriation by practitioners. Two principles are set forth: the translation and the "staging" principles. Finally, various settings that researchers may use for communicating knowledge to communities of practitioners are discussed. They are shown on a diagram crossing two dimensions: 1) whether these communications concern one or several firms, and 2) whether they take place occasionally or recurrently.