No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Communication Practice for Team Science
Abstract
Communication—the conversations, connections, and combinations that bring new insights to complex problems—is at the heart of successful crossdisciplinary collaboration (National Academy of Sciences, Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research and Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy (NAS), (2004). Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research. National Academies Press, Washington, DC). In the spirit of “practice makes permanent”, teams will benefit from practicing structured dialogue in which deep engagement with one’s collaborators is the norm rather than the exception. This type of practice can help teams create a dialogical communication culture that establishes deep listening and close engagement as community norms. In this chapter, the authors describe the Toolbox dialogue method, a specific approach to structured dialogue designed to encourage a dialogical communication culture. Instructions are provided for using the Toolbox dialogue method, which can support teams in working through challenges and successfully pursuing project objectives in practice sessions as brief as 10 minutes.KeywordsCollaborationDialogueReflexivityPerspective takingInterdisciplinaryToolbox
... These differences yield distinct perspectives regarding assumptions, strategies, and beliefs related to such things as the use of quantitative and qualitative data, the methods for collecting data, importance of stakeholder engagement, and motivations for research (e.g., community benefit or intellectual curiosity). Although bringing different perspectives together is the point of collaboration, failure to understand them can strongly influence the development of effective communication and the trust necessary for building the relationships necessary for successful collaboration [20][21][22][23]. ...
... Communication is key. O'Rourke provides an excellent overview of the practice of communication [23]. Assuming how others think and feel, why they act the way they do reduces the listening a person does and, therefore, effectively reduces communication and increases opportunities for misunderstanding. ...
... Regardless of the selection process, it is important to communicate individual perspectives regarding assumptions, strategies, and beliefs related to such things as the use of quantitative and qualitative data, the methods for collecting data, importance of stakeholder engagement, among others. O'Rourke et al. [23] provides an important discussion about the practice of communication related to the facets of a person's cognitive and disciplinary frame of reference. This should be explored because they influence many aspects of relationship development. ...
The development of relationships between individual team members is critical to effective collaboration. Whether you are a person who considers themselves a team member or a team facilitator, the development of quality relationships influences the extent to which the shared goals of the project are achieved by the team. It is important to intentionally facilitate the emergence and growth of relationships using a variety of processes whereby team members can learn more about each other’s characteristics—behavioral styles, approaches to research, motivational drivers, world views, values, talents, and interests. The extent to which these characteristics are explored will be dependent on the context/complexity of the project and the extent to which team members have worked with each other in the past (i.e., team history). This chapter focuses on the importance of accounting for the compositional characteristics of team members—e.g., behavior patterns, motivational drivers, personality, dispositions, demographics, cultural heritage, etc.—as an inherent part of the collaborative process. Learning to respect, manage, and navigate the differences in these characteristics in your specific context is important to team development and its long-term effectiveness.KeywordsCollaborationDispositionsSurface-level characteristicsDeep-level characteristicsCognitive and disciplinary characteristicsPersonal characteristics
The article Communication processes in intercultural transdisciplinary research: framework from a group perspective, written by Jue Wang, Thomas Aenis and Tuck Fatt Siew, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on 11 February 2019 without open access.
Transdisciplinary research (TDR) that aims at the co-production of knowledge in the process of addressing sustainability problems requires effective communication among scientists and practitioners. In international TDR cooperation, it is recognized that particular attention must be paid to intercultural communication, to enhance knowledge integration and mutual learning. However, there is little knowledge about the role of communication in TDR and how TDR group members with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds can communicate effectively. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis on transdisciplinary communication, with a particular focus on group dynamics and intercultural communication. On this basis, we develop a framework for TDR communication that encompasses topics and indicators for successful communication. This framework was applied in a Chinese–German project conducted in Xishuangbanna, Southwest China, to guide the transdisciplinary communication processes. We focused on the development of trusted relationships among scientists and practitioners in the TDR team, while simultaneously accomplishing various tasks, such as problem framing and scenario development. In this study, we provide insights into intercultural communication in TDR, particularly in the context of Europe–Asia transdisciplinary cooperation. Our findings show that power relations, translator roles and researchers’ mindsets influence effective communication and successful knowledge integration. In the future, additional attention should be paid to improving the supporting system and institutional arrangement for transdisciplinary communication.
We review the new and growing body of work on power in teams and use this review to develop an emergent theory of how power impacts team outcomes. Our paper offers three primary contributions. First, our review highlights potentially incorrect assumptions that have arisen around the topic of power in teams and documents the areas and findings that appear most robust in explaining the effects of power on teams. Second, we contrast the findings of this review with what is known about the effects of power on individuals and highlight the directionally oppositional effects of power that emerge across different levels of analysis. Third, we integrate findings across levels of analysis into an emergent theory which explains why and when the benefits of power for individuals may paradoxically explain the potentially negative effects of power on team outcomes. We elaborate on how individual social comparisons within teams where at least one member has power increase intra-team power sensitivity, which we define as a state in which team members are excessively perceptive of, affected by, and responsive to resources. We theorize that when power-sensitized teams experience resource threats (either stemming from external threats or personal threats within the team), these threats will ignite internal power sensitivities and set into play performance-detracting intra-team power struggles. This conflict account of power in teams integrates and organizes past findings in this area to explain why and when power negatively affects team-level outcomes, and opens the door for future research to better understand why and when power may benefit team outcomes when power’s dark side for teams is removed.
Deliberation is typically theorized as a normative ideal that can only be accomplished momentarily. Drawing from practical theory, this essay develops the concept of deliberative moments that identifies key elements of how deliberation is coconstructed and accomplished in interaction. Similar to their analog dialogic moments, deliberative moments are intense moments of awareness of the self, the other, and the issue. Deliberative moments involve occurrence of three elements: a reason-giving exchange marked by disagreement, stance indicators of listening and respect, and inclusive discourse. We define each of these categories and provide empirical examples.
This chapter reviews the literature on team reflexivity and innovation, to spur research on this important topic. It first reviews the literature on reflexivity and innovation. It then proposes that several team characteristics promote team reflection: A clear team goal, psychological safety, team leader coaching, and expertise diversity. Also, structure variables that predict team reflection in the model are (moderate) time pressure, task complexity, and task interdependence. The chapter argues that the model of team reflection applies to many types of teams, but especially intact and co-located teams. After presenting the model, the chapter reviews evidence from the literature for the effect on team innovation. A review of team-level predictors of innovation concludes that inconsistent findings characterize the field and points to the need for contingency models. This meta-analysis concluded that team reflexivity was related to team innovation, but that it was measured as being part of the broader concept of task orientation.
The theoretical framework presented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.
This article proposes that team reflexivity—a deliberate process of discussing team goals, processes, or outcomes—can function as an antidote to team-level biases and errors in decision making. We build on prior work conceptualizing teams as information-processing systems and highlight reflexivity as a critical information-processing activity. Prior research has identified consequential information-processing failures that occur in small groups, such as the failure to discuss privately held relevant information, biased processing of information, and failure to update conclusions when situations change. We propose that team reflexivity reduces the occurrence of information-processing failures by ensuring that teams discuss and assess the implications of team information for team goals, processes, and outcomes. In this article, we present a model of team information-processing failures and remedies involving team reflexivity, and we discuss the conditions under which team reflexivity is and is not likely to facilitate performance.
Collaborative intellectual engagement is held in high regard in contemporary educational thought as a pedagogical practice of broad value to K-12 students. To what extent is this enthusiasm warranted? Is the practice uniformly productive, or does variability exist in the contexts in which collaboration is effective, the mechanisms involved, and the objectives achieved? In addition to examining these questions, this article suggests further questions that might be addressed with the objective of establishing a more comprehensive base of evidence to substantiate the practice of collaborative learning. Finally, the article reconsiders why collaborative cognition should be a critical concern.
Classroom dialogue can be democratic and evidence critical and creative thinking, yet lose momentum and direction without a plan for systematic inquiry. This article presents a six-stage framework for facilitating philosophical dialogue in pre-college and college classrooms, drawn from John Dewey and Matthew Lipman. Each stage involves particular kinds of thinking and aims at a specific product or task. The role of the facilitator-illustrated with suggestive scripts-is to help the participants move their dialogue through the stages of the framework and to model and prompt good social and cognitive dialogue moves within each stage, until the participants learn to become self-managed.
Integrated research across disciplines is required to address many of the pressing environmental problems facing human societies. Often the integration involves disparate disciplines, including those in the biological sciences, and demands collaboration from problem formulation through hypothesis development, data analysis, interpretation, and application. Such projects raise conceptual and methodological challenges that are new to many researchers in the biological sciences and to their collaborators in other disciplines. In this article, we develop the theme that many of these challenges are fundamentally philosophical, a dimension that has been largely overlooked in the extensive literature on cross-disciplinary research and education. We present a "toolbox for philosophical dialogue," consisting of a set of questions for self-examination that cross-disciplinary collaborators can use to identify and address their philosophical disparities and commonalities. We provide a brief user's manual for this toolbox and evidence for its effectiveness in promoting successful integration across disciplines.
Scientific synthesis has transformed ecological research and presents opportunities for advancements across the sciences;
to date, however, little is known about the antecedents of success in synthesis. Building on findings from 10 years of detailed
research on social interactions in synthesis groups at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, we demonstrated
with large-scale quantitative analyses that face-to-face interaction has been vital to success in synthesis groups, boosting
the production of peer-reviewed publications. But it has been about more than just meeting; the importance of resident scientists
at synthesis centers was also evident, in that including synthesis-center residents in geographically distributed working
groups further increased productivity. Moreover, multi-institutional collaboration, normally detrimental to productivity,
was positively associated with productivity in this stimulating environment. Finally, participation in synthesis groups significantly
increased scientists' collaborative propensity and visibility, positively affecting scientific careers and potentially increasing
the capacity of the scientific community to leverage synthesis for enhanced scientific understanding.
Environmental challenges are complex and require expertise from multiple disciplines. Consequently, there is growing interest
in interdisciplinary environmental research that integrates natural and social science, an often arduous undertaking. We surveyed
researchers interested and experienced in research at the human—environment interface to assess perspectives on interdisciplinary
research. Integrative interdisciplinary research has eluded many of our respondents, whose efforts are better described as
additive multidisciplinary research. The respondents identified many advantages and rewards of interdisciplinary research,
including the creation of more-relevant knowledge. However, they also reported significant challenges and obstacles, including
tension with departments (49%) or institutions (61%), communication difficulties, and differing disciplinary approaches, as
well as institutional barriers (e.g., a lack of credit in promotion and tenure). Most (52%) believed that developing interdisciplinary
breadth should begin as early as the undergraduate level. We apply our results to recommendations for successful interdisciplinary
endeavors.
There is emerging agreement that sustainability challenges require new ways of knowledge production and decision-making. One key aspect of sustainability science, therefore, is the involvement of actors from outside academia into the research process in order to integrate the best available knowledge, reconcile values and preferences, as well as create ownership for problems and solution options. Transdisciplinary, community-based, interactive, or participatory research approaches are often suggested as appropriate means to meet both the requirements posed by real-world problems as well as the goals of sustainability science as a transformational scientific field. Dispersed literature on these approaches and a variety of empirical projects applying them make it difficult for interested researchers and practitioners to review and become familiar with key components and design principles of how to do transdisciplinary sustainability research. Starting from a conceptual model of an ideal–typical transdisciplinary research process, this article synthesizes and structures such a set of principles from various strands of the literature and empirical experiences. We then elaborate on them, looking at challenges and some coping strategies as experienced in transdisciplinary sustainability projects in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Asia. The article concludes with future research needed in order to further enhance the practice of transdisciplinary sustainability research.
In this article we argue that philosophy can facilitate improvement in cross-disciplinary science. In particular, we discuss in detail the Toolbox Project, an effort in applied epistemology that deploys philosophical analysis for the purpose of enhancing collaborative, cross-disciplinary scientific research through improvements in cross-disciplinary communication. We begin by sketching the scientific context within which the Toolbox Project operates, a context that features a growing interest in and commitment to cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We then develop an argument for the leading idea behind this effort, namely, that philosophical dialogue can improve cross-disciplinary science by effecting epistemic changes that lead to better group communication. On the heels of this argument, we describe our approach and its output; in particular, we emphasize the Toolbox instrument that generates philosophical dialogue and the Toolbox workshop in which that dialogue takes place. Together, these constitute a philosophical intervention into the life of CDR teams. We conclude by considering the philosophical implications of this intervention.
Translational behavioral medicine involves experts from different disciplines and professions interacting to solve complex problems. Coordinating this expertise can be frustrated by the partially tacit nature of expertise and by the various ways in which it manifests in different communities. We describe a method-the Toolbox dialogue method-for addressing these challenges by means of a structured dialogue among team members concerning their respective approaches to complex problems. The Toolbox dialogue method consists of a philosophically grounded questionnaire-the "Toolbox"-deployed in workshops by collaborators from different disciplines and professions. The Health Science Toolbox was modified from an extensively utilized questionnaire designed for Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) research and has been piloted with translational medicine teams. Eighty-five percent of participants in STEM workshops indicated a positive impact on awareness of the knowledge, opinions, or scientific approach of teammates. In the Health Science Toolbox, 35 % of questionnaire responses changed substantially from pre- to post-workshop, demonstrating impact of the workshops. The Toolbox dialogue method is a relatively brief workshop encounter that can have a positive impact on mutual understanding within translational medicine teams.
Past research has generated mixed support among social scientists for the utility of social norms in accounting for human behavior. We argue that norms do have a substantial impact on human action; however, the impact can only be properly recognized when researchers (a) separate 2 types of norms that at times act antagonistically in a situation—injunctive norms (what most others approve or disapprove) and descriptive norms (what most others do)—and (b) focus Ss' attention principally on the type of norm being studied. In 5 natural settings, focusing Ss on either the descriptive norms or the injunctive norms regarding littering caused the Ss' littering decisions to change only in accord with the dictates of the then more salient type of norm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Despite the clear importance of team creativity for organizations, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood. Even though diversity, especially diversity of perspectives and knowledge, is frequently argued to stimulate higher creativity in teams, empirical findings on this relationship remain inconsistent. We have developed a theoretical model in which the effect of a team's diversity on its creativity is moderated by the degree to which team members engage in perspective taking. We propose that perspective taking helps realize the creative benefits of diversity of perspectives by fostering information elaboration. Results of a laboratory experiment support the hypothesized interaction between diversity and perspective taking on team creativity. Diverse teams performed more creatively than homogeneous teams when they engaged in perspective taking, but not when they were not instructed to take their team members' perspectives. Team information elaboration was found to mediate this moderated effect and was associated with a stronger indirect effect than mere information sharing or task conflict. Our results point to perspective taking as an important mechanism to unlock diversity's potential for team creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Many of the worlds critical problems involve hu- man interactions with nature and their long-term implications for environmental quality and the sus- tainability of resource/ecol ogical systems. These problems are complex-defined by the collective behaviors of people as well as by the structure and function of ecosystems-su ggesting that both the social and the natural sciences should focus efforts on dimensions of these problems. The separate efforts of social and natural sciences are unlikely to fully illuminate the fabric of or fashion solutions to environmental problems. Rather, much might be gained by truly interdisciplinary research-endea v- ors where each constituent discipline informs the investigation of the others and where hypotheses might even be jointly formed. Interdisciplinary re- search seems the best hope for unraveling the complex interactions between the collective behav- ior of Homo sapiens and their environment and yielding workable solutions to these problems. If interdiscipli nary research is needed to solve critical problems, it seems logical that interdisciplin- ary research journals would be forthcoming. Indeed it is only with credible platforms for communication that any scientific endeavor can persist. One could go as far as to define a science as simply an ongoing dialog among a group of scientists. Scientists are I successful only to the extent that they enter the dialog in a credible fashion, where credibility is
The theoretical framework presented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 yrs. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Dialogue has its origins in joint activities, which it serves to coordinate. Joint activities, in turn, usually emerge in hierarchically nested projects and subprojects. We propose that participants use dialogue to coordinate two kinds of transitions in these joint projects: vertical transitions, or entering and exiting joint projects; and horizontal transitions, or continuing within joint projects. The participants help signal these transitions with project markers, words such as uh-huh, m-hm, yeah, okay, or all right. These words have been studied mainly as signals of listener feedback (back-channel signals) or turn-taking devices (acknowledgment tokens). We present evidence from several types of well-defined tasks that they are also part of a system of contrasts specialized for navigating joint projects. Uh-huh, m-hm and yeah are used for horizontal transitions, and okay and all right for vertical transitions.
Despite several insightful empirical studies on how new knowledge is created in organizations, there is still no satisfactory answer to the question, how is new knowledge created in organizations? The purpose of this paper is to address this question by focusing on direct social interaction, adopting a dialogical approach. The following argument is advanced. From a dialogical perspective, new knowledge in organizations originates in the individual ability to draw new distinctions concerning a task at hand. New distinctions may be developed because practitioners experience their situations in terms of already constituted distinctions, which lend themselves to further articulation. Further articulation develops when organizational members engage in dialogical exchanges. When productive, dialogue leads to self-distanciation, namely, to individuals taking distance from their customary and unreflective ways of acting as practitioners. Dialogue is productive depending on the extent to which participants engage relationally with one another. When this happens, participants are more likely to actively take responsibility for both the joint tasks in which they are involved and for the relationships they have with others. Self-distanciation leads to new distinctions through three processes of conceptual change (conceptual combination, conceptual expansion, and conceptual reframing), which, when intersubjectively accepted, constitute new knowledge. Several organizational examples, as well as findings from organizational knowledge research, are reinterpreted to illustrate the above points.
Generally theorized and empirically examined as an organization phenomenon, collaboration may be more productively explored from a mesolevel model that simultaneously addresses group, organizational, and public frames. Examining how individuals communicate in those frames revealed four discursive productions of collaboration, which were previously undertheorized. Thus, we propose a communicative model that details the simultaneously occurring communication at multiple levels that gives rise to the emergence and effectiveness of collaborating talk. In this model, communication is no longer described as one of the component(s) of collaboration; communication is elevated to the essence of collaboration. Working from observations and records of a 9-month interorganizational collaboration, this article develops a mesolevel communicative model of collaboration and demonstrates that the bulk of collaborative communication occurs at the team level—indeed, the level where relationships among individuals and organizations is revealed and acted upon.
Using a grounded theory approach, this investigation addresses how an interdisciplinary research (IDR) team negotiates meaning and struggles to establish and sustain a sense of collective communication competence (CCC). Certain communication processes were foundational to building CCC, such as spending time together, practicing trust, discussing language differences, and engaging in team tasks. Demonstrating presence, engaging in reflexive and backstage communication, and shared laughter facilitated and often expedited CCC development, whereas sarcastic humor, unproductive debates of expertise, expressions of boredom, and jockeying for power challenged and deteriorated the team's CCC.
We explore the practical difficulties of interdisciplinary research in the context of a regional- or local-scale project.
We posit four barriers to interdisciplinarity that are common across many disciplines and draw on our own experience and on
other sources to explore how these barriers are manifested. Values enter into scientific theories and data collection through
scientists' hidden assumptions about disciplines other than their own, through the differences between quantitative and interpretive
social sciences, and through roadblocks created by the organization of academia and the relationship between academics and
the larger society. Participants in interdisciplinary projects need to be self-reflective about the value judgments embedded
in their choice of variables and models. They should identify and use a core set of shared concerns to motivate the effort,
be willing to respect and to learn more about the “other,” be able to work with new models and alternative taxonomies, and
allow for plurality and incompleteness.
Understanding complex socio-environmental problems requires specialists from multiple disciplines to integrate research efforts. Programs such as the National Science Foundations Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship facilitate integrated research efforts and change the way academic institutions train future leaders and scientists. The University of Idaho and the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Costa Rica collaborate on a joint research program focusing on biodiversity conservation and sustainable production in fragmented landscapes. We first present a spectrum of integration ranging from disciplinary to transdisciplinary across seven aspects of the research process. We then describe our experiences and lessons learned conducting interdisciplinary graduate student team research. Using our program as a case study, we examine the individual, disciplinary, and programmatic bridges and barriers to conducting interdisciplinary research that emerged during our student team research projects. We conclude with a set of recommendations for exploiting the bridges and overcoming the barriers to conducting interdisciplinary research, especially as part of graduate education programs.
50 articles dealing with stages of group development over time are separated by group setting: therapy-group studies, T-group studies, and natural- and laboratory-group studies. The stages identified in these articles are separated into those descriptive of social or interpersonal group activities and those descriptive of group-task activities. 4 general stages of development are proposed, and the review consists of fitting the stages identified in the literature to those proposed. In the social realm, these stages in the developmental sequence are testing-dependence, conflict, cohesion, and functional roles. In the task realm, they are orientation, emotionality, relevant opinion exchange, and the emergence of solutions. There is a good fit between observed stages and the proposed model. (62 ref.)
Traditional mechanistic accounts of language processing derive almost entirely from the study of monologue. Yet, the most natural and basic form of language use is dialogue. As a result, these accounts may only offer limited theories of the mechanisms that underlie language processing in general. We propose a mechanistic account of dialogue, the interactive alignment account, and use it to derive a number of predictions about basic language processes. The account assumes that, in dialogue, the linguistic representations employed by the interlocutors become aligned at many levels, as a result of a largely automatic process. This process greatly simplifies production and comprehension in dialogue. After considering the evidence for the interactive alignment model, we concentrate on three aspects of processing that follow from it. It makes use of a simple interactive inference mechanism, enables the development of local dialogue routines that greatly simplify language processing, and explains the origins of self-monitoring in production. We consider the need for a grammatical framework that is designed to deal with language in dialogue rather than monologue, and discuss a range of implications of the account.
Monday's failure: forgot research's place
Tuesday's failure: just wanted a face
Wednesday's failure: a product of pressure
Thursday's failure: a boundary by Escher
Friday's failure: was too loving and giving
Saturday's failure: worked too hard for a living
And the project conceived on the 7 th day was happy and faultless and without a delay.
This account of a week in the life of a transdisciplinary researcher draws on experiences from two closely connected transdisciplinary research projects aimed at managing the impacts of land use on freshwater in the Canterbury region of New Zealand's South Island. The first project, called the Selwyn Waihora Project, provided technical information to inform a policy-making process to establish acceptable water quality standards for a water catchment in Canterbury. The second, related project, called the Matrix of Good Management, estimated the quantity of nutrients likely to be lost to freshwater from farms that were using good management practice. Water is integral to New Zealand's identity, and Canterbury has many water bodies that are valued for cultural, economic, and recreational purposes. Declining water quality has led to increasing conflict over water resources between different stakeholders; for example, Māori, who assign particular cultural significance to water; farmers, who use water for irrigation; and community members seeking to fish and swim. In 2009, after a period without effective management of the region's water resources, the regional council embarked on a journey of collaborative water management and policy making, and consequently rethought the role of science for policy. The two case study projects discussed here had many successes. The Selwyn Waihora Project led to community-agreed standards for the quality of water in the Selwyn Waihora water catchment and far-reaching requirements for farmers. The Matrix of Good Management resulted in the first industry-agreed definitions of agricultural good management practice and a methodology for estimating nutrient losses for farms using good management. However, the projects also experienced six failures, discussed here, each one described as occurring on one of the six days of the week. Each day's failures are described and then diagnosed using the integration and implementation sciences (i2S) framework (Bammer, 2013). This framework provides a systematic way to describe research on complex, real-world problems, and aims to help researchers reflect on aspects of their research. Identifying where the failures in these projects 1 occurred in relation to this analytical framework revealed important lessons for future transdisciplinary projects.
Interaction is the distinctive feature of focus groups, yet little attention has been devoted to understanding techniques for enhancing the quality of interactions. We argue that using a quantitative survey instrument with focus groups has specific benefits beyond traditional open-ended topic lists or questions. We describe particular features of a survey that provoke reflection and reaction by participants, thereby deepening dialogue. When using this approach, we recommend that individuals complete the survey privately first, reflecting and taking a position on the statements individually, and then engage in discussion, which can surface differences and similarities. Drawing on our work with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative involving collaborative cross-disciplinary research, we demonstrate the benefits of such a survey instrument to initiate and sustain productive dialogue, in this case regarding scientific beliefs and values. We conclude with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, as well as recommendations for designing and using survey items for focus groups.
This paper explores provocation as an approach towards social science research. While routinely used in natural science and arts research, this paper argues provocation might enable the social science researcher to initiate critical reflection amongst participants on issues that are often otherwise overlooked, obscured or accepted as naturalised practice. By assuming the role of provocateur, stimulator and/or agitator, the social science researcher can interrupt the flow of everyday life in order to illuminate and draw attention to complex social issues. Using research interventions that embrace, rather than deny, the socially constructed nature of the research process, provocation provides an alternative to largely non-obtrusive methods favoured in much social science research. This paper concludes by outlining the practical and methodological issues associated with this approach – in particular the complicated ethics of provoking reflection on topics that might not have otherwise come to the participant’s attention.
Interdisciplinary environmental research has been deemed essential to addressing the dynamics of coupled social-biophysical systems. Although decades of scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) take the analysis of interdisciplinarity out of the realm of anecdote, there is almost no overlap between this literature and discussions of interdisciplinarity in ecology-oriented journals. The goals of researchers in these areas are quite different, and thus far, their analyses of interdisciplinarity have been incommensurate with each other's purposes. To introduce an STS perspective into how environmental scientists think about interdisciplinarity, I argue that biophysical and social scientists are not just bringing information and different understandings of biophysical and social systems to the intellectual table. Those knowledge claims have differential power associated with them: within the sciences, between social and biophysical science, and between science and society. Power can manifest in many ways, e.g., individual scientific status, the most accepted account of an environmental problem, inclusion or exclusion of researchers, or perceived relevance of research to policy decisions. I propose four possible scenarios: conflict, tolerant ambivalence, mutual identification, cooperation, and fundamental transformation for how an interdisciplinary undertaking might unfold. Then, to constructively confront the relationship between power and knowledge, I outline a three stage process to enhance the transparent development of interdisciplinary research. First, there is differentiation of the analytical elements of the research, then clarification of purposes, and finally, the steps toward intellectual synthesis. As core differences are encountered, e.g., "subjectivity" vs. "objectivity," active engagement with these issues will be essential to successful communication, collaboration, and innovation.
ABSTRACT— The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) carried out the Learning Sciences and Brain Research project (1999–2007) to investigate how neuroscience research can inform education policy and practice. This transdisciplinary project brought many challenges. Within the political community, participation in the project varied, with some countries resisting approval of the project altogether, in the beginning. In the neuroscientific community, participants struggled to represent their knowledge in a way that would be meaningful and relevant to educators. Within the educational community, response to the project varied, with many educational researchers resisting it for fear that neuroscience research might make their work obsolete. Achieving dialogue among these communities was even more challenging. One clear obstacle was that participants had difficulty recognizing tacit knowledge in their own field and making this knowledge explicit for partners in other fields. This article analyzes these challenges through a knowledge management framework.
Norms controlling how members deal with performance strategies were altered experimentally in small task-oriented groups. The basic task required assembly of small electrical components. In one task condition (equal information) all task-relevant information was provided to each group member; in another (unequal information) it was spread unevenly among members, requiring exchange of information for optimum group performance. In the unequal information condition, an intervention inducing explicit discussion of task performance strategies improved group performance. In the equal information condition, effectiveness was increased by an intervention that reinforced existing norms against explicit discussion of performance strategies. Spontaneous discussion of strategy did not take place in control groups for either task condition, and control groups were lowest in performance effectiveness. Measures of interaction process and of member reactions to the group were affected substantially by the experimental interventions.
A relational approach to the problem of interdisciplinary studies is presented and arguments made for rethinking our disciplinary identity from our experiential and aspirational vantage point of transdiciplinary participation. But transdisciplinary participation requires overcoming our disciplinary chauvinism and an openness to the perspectives of other disciplines. In transdisciplinary participation, the other perspective, the other disciplines, need recognition and invitation into the hard core of the disciplinary self and for this the method and weltanschauung of the conventional interdisciplinary research is not enough. Interdisciplinary research now calls for a transdiciplinary interrogation, opening and enrichment which transforms the pious hopes and waiting for interdisciplinarity into a calling of transdiciplinary striving.
Scientists are increasingly challenged by the call to develop more effective methods for working across disciplines in landscape analysis projects. The aim of this study was to improve our understanding of the barriers and facilitators to integration of perspectives across disciplinary and organizational boundaries. Two research projects with similar objectives served as cases. The projects were the assessment phase of the North American Interior Columbia River Basin Ecosystem Management Project and the Danish Boundaries in the Landscape. An inductive research design using qualitative data analysis methods was applied. Data sources included in-depth interviews, observations, and archival documents. Comparison of the two research projects, each conducted in a different western culture, revealed a set of similar barriers to cooperation and integration: individual-based, group-based, group- and individual-based, and organization culture-based boundaries. In three of the four boundary categories, barriers in one project were identified as facilitators in the other project. Furthermore, there were also barriers and facilitators that were only listed in one of the projects. Differences in barriers and facilitators in the two projects may be related to the scope, size, and political context of the projects, as well as the differences in national culture. We conclude the paper with a set of recommendations to scientists working across disciplines in landscape level assessments.
Groups, like individuals, often develop habitual routines for dealing with frequently encountered stimuli. Although such routines are consequential for group life and work, little is known about them. This paper reconnoiters the territory of habitual behavior in groups that perform work within organizations. We offer a definition of group habits, identify their functions and dysfunctions, suggest how they develop and are maintained, and identify the circumstances when they are likely to be altered or abandoned. Throughout, we give special attention to the social nature of habitual routines in groups, to the interaction between habitual behavior and group life cycle phenomena, and to the role of the organizational context in prompting, shaping, and terminating habitual routines.
Reflexivity and work group effectiveness: a conceptual integration
- M A West
West MA (1996) Reflexivity and work group effectiveness: a conceptual integration. In: West
MA (ed) Handbook of work group psychology. Wiley, Chichester, pp 555-579
Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: practice, principles, and challenges
- D J Lang
- A Wiek
- M Bergmann
Lang DJ, Wiek A, Bergmann M et al (2012) Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science:
practice, principles, and challenges. Sustain Sci 7(S1):25-43
The dysfunctions of power in teams: a review and emergent conflict perspective
- L L Greer
- L Van Bunderen
- LL Greer