Knowledge Integration in Professional Practices: Towards a New Transacting Approach

Abstract

This paper advances understanding of knowledge integration across professional boundaries by examining how professionals coordinate action in two life‐ and time‐critical settings: aircraft maintenance and emergency healthcare. Building on established knowledge integration perspectives, the study investigates situations in which actors must establish a basis for action while knowledge claims remain uncertain, contested, or incomplete. Adopting a qualitative case study design that combines observations, interviews, and document analysis, the cases are analysed through the lens of knowledge integration theory, with particular attention to the processes of transfer, translation, transformation, and transcendence. The analysis shows how professionals coordinate action when available knowledge cannot immediately be fully integrated and identifies transacting as an approach through which actors compare, evaluate, and temporarily stabilise competing knowledge claims to establish provisional grounds for action. The study further introduces organic boundaries to describe temporary epistemic boundaries that emerge around specific artefacts, decisions, or uncertainties rather than predefined professional divisions. By conceptualising transacting as a complementary interactional process and extending boundary perspectives, the study explains how coordinated action becomes possible before shared understanding or transformed knowledge has fully developed in complex, high‐stakes environments.