Jean-Jacques Pluchart
In January 2026, the FNEGE (National Foundation for Business Management Education) published a study on Practitioners Becoming Researchers (PDC), aimed at “understanding their backgrounds and motivations, supporting future candidates in this transition, and highlighting the specific strengths of these profiles for teaching and research in management sciences “.The study uses a methodology based on a survey carried out between January and March 2025, which collected 207 responses, including 124 teacher-researchers who stated that they had been working for between five and twenty years. The survey reveals that a quarter of respondents work in public institutions, half in private schools and the last quarter abroad.
The study distinguishes three profiles of PDCs: “meaning-oriented” (of existence), “intellectual challenge” (faced with the theoretical corpus), and “balanced” (between professional and private lives). The PDCs underline the scale of the challenges to be met by the PDCs: research training, assimilation of scientific literature, drop in financial income, limitation of career prospects, acculturation to the academic environment (often distant), confrontation with a certain psychological distress (due to uprooting), etc. However, they recognize that they have assets favorable to their transition: field experience, mobilization of professional networks for research, better understanding of managerial issues and challenges, less rigid hierarchy, legitimacy with students, etc. They particularly appreciate being able to carry out parallel associative, elective, sports or consulting activities. They acknowledge having underestimated the effort of retraining and the difficulty of accessing the status of university professor. Overall, they do not regret their choice of radical retraining.
The authors of the study recommend that PDCs “adopt a learning posture, accept the status of novice, develop a critical distance from their previous practice, set up companionship systems promoting the transmission of codes, methods and postures of research, create places of collective reflexivity (seminars, peer groups) mobilizing the diversity of courses, organize webinars informing practitioners about the reality of the profession of EDC, and promote projects enhancing the professional expertise of PDCs”.
The study shows that the multiplication of PDCs contributes to a better synergy between theorists and practitioners, between the university and the company, between fundamental research and applied research.
Reference: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/wn_57sf8hq_rdol5jh987mkxq