Preventing Cooperative Knowledge Production From Falling Apart

The purpose of this article is to analyze why work liferepresentatives are engaging themselves in joint knowledge production with academia. Weintend to deepen our understanding of how the practitioners’ trust in academia isconstituted, that is what trust-building practices conditions their trust. The articleis based on interviews with practitioners who are cooperating with a Swedish researchcenter. The result indicates that practitioners’ trust in cooperation is based on acombination of different trust-building practices, among which the academy as adependable supplier of objective and authoritative knowledge production is stillimportant. At the same time, practitioners’ trust is also dependent on the existence ofshared and integrated knowledge production relevant to their professions. The mainconclusion of the study is that academia has to manage a set of different conditionsdemanding that different trust-building practices be combined and managed for trust tobe maintained