The art and science of pracademia

Author: Barry Rogers

The mere sight of ‘1.6’ should strike fear into the heart of every aspiring academic. This apocryphal statistic is believed to be the number of times a doctoral work is read from start to finish after it is completed (…and this includes by the person who wrote it).

Whether the exact statistic is 1.6, 100.6 or 1000.6 it really does not matter; the message is the same. Extraordinary time, effort and resources are devoted to the pursuit of wonderful, insightful knowledge only for that knowledge to sit, quite literally, on the shelf.

This is not just an issue for academia however - far from it! In organisational life only a very small fraction of the billions of dollars spent every year on formal training and learning has bottom line impact. Most of this, despite the best intentions to apply, gets smothered in the action, traction and distraction of everyday organisational life.

The issue of knowledge transmission between different contexts has exercised me for most of my professional life. Let me briefly explain why.

Moving between different realities

In 1997, while working as a banker, I decided to return to university. In my mid 30s, moderately successful and with a young family to support, this, as the English say, was an ‘interesting’ decision. Many of my JPMorgan colleagues were bemused. ‘Where does this Social Psychology fit with Fixed -Income Derivatives? The answer was simple - it didn’t. Thankfully, my boss at the time suggested I work part-time while I studied and come up with a more coherent answer later.

My place of work, a large trading floor, was based on the edge of the City of London at Victoria Embankment. Navigating the laneways of the Inner Temple to the London School of Economics, my graduate school, could not have been easier. It was 17 minutes (exactly) from trading desk to classroom.

While this arrangement was physically close, mentally it was a very different story. It felt that the nature of the realities I moved between, busy organisational life and reflective academia, were alien countries or realities. This feeling confused but also fascinated me.

I loved my new environment. The hunger I had for fresh perspective seemed to feed countless connections to my day-to-day work. On my walk back to work I was usually buzzing with ideas as I processed what I had learned in the classroom.

There was a problem, however. I only needed to see the walls of my office building to be thrown back into the frenzied embodiment of a very different way of operating. Somehow the clarity of understanding, commitment and intent I had experienced only minutes before in the classroom, evaporated. This gnawed away at me. Why was this happening and, most of all, how could I do something about it?

25 years as a Pracademic

The rather awkward term, ‘pracademic’, nicely describes who I am and what I do. While I fit uneasily into the mould of a traditional academic, I am also not a full-time practitioner. I sit, very deliberately, at the intersection of both, in the middle space that seeks to bridge theoretical understanding and practical use.

Just to be clear; I do not consider myself some cut-price, dumbed-down academic. Far from it! I love academic knowledge. I love reading it, unpicking it and pondering over it. Most of all I love the elegance and depth within its construction that opens the potential for meaningful, sustained change.

There is a ‘but’ however.

I struggle with the ‘destination’ of much of what we call academic knowledge. Tapping the essence of ‘1.6’ I feel distinctly uneasy that huge swathes of valuable output are locked within a closed, self-limiting loop of reified academic scholarship. This frustrates, annoys and profoundly disappoints me. In my role as a pracademic I seek to bridge this gap.

A crucial distinction: knowledges not knowledge

The field of ‘knowledge transmission’ – how we put knowledge to work between different contexts - has defined my career for the last 25 years. Operating in the middle space, between theoretical understanding and practical use, I have worked with many of the world’s largest organisations to design and deliver customised executive education - to make academic ideas come alive in an organisational context. Alongside this I have run my LSE MSc course (‘Organisational Life’) - unpacking emerging organisational themes by bridging rigour and relevance in real-time. The process of bridging, I believe, gives the pracademic an edge in shaping, capturing and delivering value. ‘Organisational Life’ has now grown into the world’s first dedicated Pracademic Lab based at the LSE Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science.

As a pracademic, I reject the idea that knowledge transfers in an uncomplicated, linear fashion between the conceptual realm (e.g. theory) and the world of application (e.g. organisational life). Instead, I see ideas coming to life via a cocktail of non-linear processes. These processes unpack the languages we use for knowledge (‘codes’) as well as how we experience that knowledge - both in and over time (‘modes’). This latter factor, the temporal distinction between where knowledge is produced AND consumed, is a vital component in turning learning into action. The dynamics of time and translation are always complicit bedfellows in the armory of the pracademic.

Don’t be alarmed by the strange terms like codes and modes; these are just shorthand for many of the experiences we all feel very viscerally in our daily lives. Unfortunately, we often find it hard to explain, articulate and productively use these. Seeing, understanding and knowing the processes underpinning these experiences sets individuals, groups and organisations apart. It enables them to deliver their promises and most of all, deliver value through action.

Original 15/6/2025 Revised 16/6/2025

Selected References

The past, present and future of the PhD thesis. Nature. 2016, vol. 535, nº 7610, pp. 7-7. DOI: 10.1038/535007a

Freifeld, L. (Ed.). (2024, November 20). 2024 Training Industry Report. Training Magazine. Retrieved from Training Industry website 16/6/2025

Rogers, B. M. (2025). Beyond the illusion of change: bridging the ‘classroom’ and the workplace via processes of temporal re-contextualisation. In Proceedings of the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (Vol. 21). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1472974