AO: They describe various collaborative experiments that they have undertake as academics working with other academics on knowledge production which they call “strong collaboration” - a form of collaboration in which explicit attention to the process is part of the project. Specifically they detail overlapping and joint fieldwork; analyzing data in tandem; collaborative writing (381). They are not tackling collaboration with interlocutors which is “another can of worms” (398).
AO: They note collaboration between humans - non-humans, between group members, between making knowledge and social practice, and both within and beyond the academy.
AO: Fortun and Cherkasky introduce essays that speak from the “messy middle” between the university and direct engagements with politics to suggest how “critiques of expertise can operate in settings rife with demands for positivist polemics.” This reminds me of the polemics that Green describes.
Hegel is quite restrictive in what she considers to be collaboration. This might be due to the fact that she is trying to advocate a specific type of improvised collaboration but, at least at certain times, she seems to let this strain of collaboration stand for/define collaboration more broadly.
Hegel’s understanding of collaboration can be surmised by taking a look at what she defines it against in the following quote:
“Historically, we do fieldwork alone rather than in teams, and although we are in conversation through publications and peer review, these forms of engagement are, temporally speaking, not improvisational. When we gather at campus talks and annual conferences and listen to one another’s papers, we often participate in Q&A sessions following the presentations. The Q&A is spontaneous and responsive—is this a kind of peer-to-peer, collaborative improvisation? According to the “yes, and” principle, no. We use the Q&A to constitute our own authority (for instance, in the too-common monologic style of questioning). We don’t typically agree (“yes!”) and jump aboard the analytic train of our colleagues (“and”), spontaneously entering into dialogue in a spirit of collaborative analysis.”
The author is explicitly arguing to expand our conception of collaboration in the research process, particularly around the notion of analytical contributions. She argues that data collection and preparation are shot through with analytical choices that will be pivotal to whatever publication results from data analysis. Thus, the act of identifying “authorship” with the person(s) who wrote (or sometimes merely submits for publication) the words of an academic artifact is tantamount to erasure, appropriation, or at worst, theft of others’ analytical contributions.
AO: Fortun and Cherkasky note that collaboration “draws people with different interests, perspectives and skills into synchronized effort to accomplish something that could not be accomplished individually. To work, collaboration must turn diversity into a resource. A politics of collaboration is a politics of difference.” (146)
“The second important concept used to explain how museum workers managed both diversity and cooperation is that of boundary objects. This is an analytic concept of those scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds (see the list of examples in the previous section) and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. 15 Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use. These objects may be abstract or concrete. They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 393).
Topically, the authors are investigating historical collaborations built by and between California scientists, local elites, amateur naturalists, University of California administrators, and local farmers and trappers, with the end goal being a natural history research museum with a repository of accurate and preservable data on the local fauna and their habitats.
More conceptually, the authors refuse to reduce collaboration to concensus: “Consensus is not necessary for cooperation nor for the successful conduct of work” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 388). Instead they argue that before scientific problems can be approached and resolved, the diverse actors that “come from different social worlds” must first “establish a mutual modus operandi” (Star and Griesemer 1989, 388). The distinction between consensus and a mutual modus operandi, is that in the latter case, these standardized methods do not need to be understood or valued in the same way.
Gorman constructs a continuum of “collaborativity” (my word) that corresponds with three basic types of trading zones:
“The first is a network controlled by an ´elite in which there really is no trade: those not in the ´elite either obey, or they are ignored. …The second is a boundary-object trading zone, where experts from different fields interact around the development of a technology or system – like radar or MRI. Here the system of concern serves as an object that links the participants in the network, but experts from different fields see the boundary object in ways dictated by their expertise. … Contributory expertise brings us to the third kind of trading zone, in which the participants share a common understanding of a goal and collaborate closely. In the parlance of cognitive science, they must share a continually evolving representation of a techno-social system that would normally serve as a boundary object” (Gorman 2002, 934).
Star does not define collaboration directly. Instead she developed the concept of boundary objects to argue against the consensus model. Fieldwork inspired her to question the (then) standard model of conceiving collaboration as being dependent upon the preliminary establishment of concensus between participants. By contrast, she witnessed and experienced numerous instances where scientific research and knowledge production continued productively without establishing consensus. The concept of boundary object was innovated to help explain the material-semiotic process underwriting this particular type of cooperation.
AO: The greater convergence between the fields of psychology and economics which has led to distinct field of behavioral economics.
“Analysts note the dual origin (Behavioral Economics (started by economists in the US) and Economic Psychology (started by psychologists in Europe)) but argue that the fields are converging and that the “collaborative potential of psychology and economics is materialized” (388).