Building Bridges: A Study of Coordination in Projects
On August 13, I successfully defended my dissertation. Today, I submitted my final, approved version to University of Michigan's institutional repository. That version won't be available until after I receive my degree in December, but you're welcome to read a nearly identical version of my complete dissertation.
Dissertation Abstract
In our efforts to understand how collaborative work can be accomplished, we often turn to discussions of “coordination” for help. However, the concept of coordination is inadequate for explaining the many interdependent processes at work within successful collaborations. In this dissertation, I examined a collaborative construction project – the Woods Avenue Bridge (WAB) Project – with many coordination demands. I used data from this project to develop the concept of adaptive capacity – the set of capabilities a team develops that enable them to adjust to internal and external stresses.
Through analyzing meeting minutes, interview transcripts, and documents the project team developed, I was able to identify behaviors and approaches the team took that may have enabled them to better respond to changes in their environment. I use a specific example of a time when the team successfully redesigned the structure they were building in the field to illustrate the kind of coordination work adaptive capacity enables.
From data about the WAB Project, I identified components of adaptive capacity including perspective taking, multimembership, affect, and social capital. Understanding these components and the adaptive capacity they can develop helps us understand what about a team enables them to accomplish coordination work. Without adaptive capacity, we lack an integrated explanation of the ways in which different components interact and how those components address coordination.
This dissertation contributes to our understanding of how collaborative teams accomplish coordination by refining the concept of adaptive capacity and integrating earlier literatures on coordination, collaboration, and adaptation. The concept of adaptive capacity helps us understand the resources collaborative teams develop that make it possible for them to find flexible and creative solutions to their coordination problems.
What is an actor?
Some colleagues and I recently submitted a paper to a conference, and last week I sent in our rebuttals to the reviewers' comments. Our paper introduces some terms from actor-network theory (ANT) to an audience that isn't terribly familiar with ANT. I like ANT as a method, not really a theory, for helping sort through really dense, unfamiliar data. For instance, you can use ANT to help you figure out where to focus. If you enter a scenario as an ignorant sponge (as many qualitative methods ask that you do), it can be difficult to figure out what's important. It's also impossible to pay attention to everything all the time. ANT can help you find some important actors on which to focus your attention. Actors seems like a familiar term - we know of many in Hollywood, we understand what it means to act even off screen. That's not what ANT means though. For ANT, actors are something like things that cause change, or things that other actors say are actors. You can probably see why some of our reviewers got a bit confused.
I use ANT in my dissertation to talk about what had to happen for a specific bridge to be built. I couch the study in terms of actors who did work to produce the bridge. I borrow actors from ANT in that I consider non-human actors (e.g. bendable concrete) symmetrical with human actors. Objects and ideas can do work even though they're not human. They're identified as important by other actors. For instance, using bendable concrete in the bridge deck required changes in how the sidewalk was connected, how the deck connected to the regular concrete deck on either side. The bendable concrete was acting in that it was creating change. Other actors, such as a construction consultant, identified it as an actor by saying things like, "If we use that bendable concrete, then we can't use rebar there. We'll have to use something else." In that excerpt, he identified bendable concrete as the thing that caused a change. Bendable concrete has some agency. Had we entered the construction project without knowing anything, we'd know from the way the consultant talks about the bendable concrete that it is something important, that determines what other actors may or may not do (e.g. use rebar).
I think our paper does a good job of describing how ANT can help identify the important things in a set of data. When I find out if it got accepted, I'll blog about the conference itself. I have pretty strong feelings about the conference to which we submitted, and they will either grow stronger or remain in check, depending on the outcome of our submission. Oh, that drama! The intrigue! Stay tuned.
Research is messy
Last week I participated in a mixed methods workshop with John Creswell. The workshop was quite valuable; we worked through designing a proposal for a real research project. I forget the name of the student whose project we outlined, but he was proposing to study biodiversity sustainability programs in Vietnam and Cambodia. We worked through various stages of his proposal including writing a problem statement, asking research questions, titling the project, etc. But, we didn't do those things in that order. In fact, we started with the title and ended with the problem statement 4 hours later. That exercise served as a reminder that no matter how straightforward work seems when it's written for publication, or even in a methods textbook, the actual moment-to-moment work is unlikely to be so linear.
I've tried to keep in mind that work is not linear, but I often get tripped up trying to follow outlines or to make my research fit into a step-by-step program that gets me to graduation next year. That's not how the world works though. I've been hunting for the right methods approach to studying the ECC story, and I've finally figured out that my study is probably best structured as a case study. And so, I've been re-reading Robert K. Yin's case study books from Sage Publications.
Yin is careful and persistent when discussing the role of theory in designing case studies, and that's the point where I'm currently stuck. My instincts (pretty well-honed by this point) tell me that communities of practice, social capital, actor-network theory, activity theory, and organizational learning have something to contribute to the theoretical framework I should use to address the ECC case. What I haven't been able to do to this point is to make them all fit together in a way that would provide a set of patterns against which I will be able to check my case study data.
My dissertation proposal has morphed into two different documents - the proposal itself and a case study protocol document. I'm even still working in both Word and LaTeX. I just received helpful feedback on the proposal document (that one's in LaTeX) from one of my committee members. He recognized that my current struggle is about clarifying the questions I want my project to answer. He says, "You need a statement of what you'd like to accomplish..." Yeah, he's right.
Part of the problem relates to the negotiated nature of this dissertation project, I think. It took me a year, but I've finally given in. I will do a study that relates to the grant that feeds me because it involves collaboration, and collaboration is definitely interesting and significant to me. Now my task is to find a set of questions that are clear, answerable, and related to the CI-TEAM grant in some way.
I blogged this because I thought it was important for me to write a stream-of-consciousness piece in case another struggling A.B.D. happens to be searching the internet for others in her boat. Sister, I'm in it. Dissertation-writing is messy. It's takes a great deal of humility, negotiation, compromise, and patience. It's not linear. It requires one to go back and forth between literature, data collection, and analysis repeatedly and in different orders. I'm pretty sure I'll have written about 10x as much content as actually ends up in the final version of my dissertation, and all of that writing is necessary and important work. Plenty of people and dissertation books talk about how dissertation writing is hard, but very few admit that it's also incredibly messy. Just when I start to feel like I've made some progress, I get thrown a curveball by some theory or data, and I'm in a whole new spot. Frustrating, yes, but I think that's just the way it is.
ECC Trivia: slump test
I spent about 3 hours with the students in the ACE-MRL lab this morning while they mixed and poured some engineered cementitious composite. I learned lots of things, but right now, I'm offering you this linguistic tidbit: slump.
In this case, slump refers not to the Hawkeye football season or some other sudden, severe decline in value but to a kind of test performed on concrete. In the slump test, fresh concrete is poured into an almost-cone, someone pulls the cone up, and then someone measures how far from the center of the cone the concrete ends up. Basically, you make a pancake of concrete and measure its radius. The results of a slump test tell you something about how "workable" the concrete is - how easily you can "place" it in a structure or form of some kind. It also tells you how cohesive that mix is.
So there you go. Today's bit of flexible concrete trivia is "slump." Pictures to come!
Transformation of practices
Here's some text from a recent proposal draft (I'll add citations later). I'm still editing the document from which these are excerpts, but the people have spoken, and they asked for drafts. So here you go. This is what I'm working on now.
Much of the research on practice focuses on how it may be transfered from one firm to another, from one
person to another, or from one group within an organization to another part of the same organization.
This study builds on those literatures, but asks a different question - how do networked practices change when
one or more parts of the network change? Instead of exploring a sender-receiver model of transfer of practice,
this study explores scenarios in which the source and target of a new practice are the same. Instead of focusing
on practice within a single community of practice (CoP), this study explores how multiple, interacting CoPs
influence one another. To refer to the set of changes that occur in the network, I use the term transformation
of practices. The following describes relevant terms and literature and proposes a study designed to produce
data necessary to describe the processes involved in transformation of practices. The plural of ”practices” is
necessary here; that I explore the relationships among communities of practice and their impact on one another
sets this study apart. The goals of the study are to describe the network of actors in such a way that enables us to understand the
practices in which those actors engage and how those practices relate.
The transformation of practice seems like a learning and coordination problem. First, someone must develop a
new material or method - broadly a new technology - that is a candidate for adoption by the network. Then, the
technology must be successfully adopted by a number of communities within the network. This sounds much
like Rogers’ diffusion of innovation work, but there still he described the uptake of innovations by people
engaged in the same kind of work. Here, the problem is a little different in that many communities are pursuing
a common goal, a technology with the potential to change how that goal is achieved is introduced, and each
of those already distinct practices must adjust to account for the new technology. This proposal describes a
study that focuses on a case of a transformative technology - engineered cementitious composite (ECC) - and
the resulting transformation of practices within the civil infrastructure building network.
Notes:
I want to be able to talk about something like a network of practice (NoP). Brown and Duguid characterize
NoPs as members sharing a common practice but not needing to coordinate their work. I’d rather think of
an NoP as members needed to coordinate work but whose practices are not the same. The members have a
common goal (e.g. build a bridge) but none of them do the same thing (e.g. design bridge vs. pour concrete).
This kind of activity seems more networked to me than Brown and Duguid’s characterization. However, I don’t
want to use NoP if a big name already did and means something different from what I mean. What else could
I call it? I’m thinking of practice at a higher level of granularity, maybe? Maybe I mean ”system” and not
”network”?
From May – a found post (networks, communities, practice)
Here’s a little blog post from a couple months ago that hadn’t made it off my laptop and into the world. I’ve edited it a bit, but most of the text is from May. I was reconsidering the communities of practice literature.
The project I’m currently funded on is ostensibly about facilitating the implementation of civil infrastructure. When I was first presented with the project, the part that seemed most interesting to me was the “transfer of practice” (TOP) problem. The TOP problem goes something like “it’s difficult to move practice from research labs to the real world.” Sure is. I looked forward to working on that problem. As I got into the project more, my focus changed. It seems like now the problem is not so much how do we move a practice from over here in research land to over there in construction but rather, how do the practices of civil infrastructure design and construction change when the materials available change?
Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) have the potential to change the practices of civil infrastructure design and construction. I don’t know enough about that design and construction to yet know what the possibilities are, but I get the sense that they are big and dramatic. Iron and steel certainly made a big difference. Concrete, the rigid kind, is sure important. Imagine what happens when you change the tools again! At least, that’s what I’m imagining. With a little help from my colleagues, I’ll do some more definitive imagining.
So what does any of this have to do with communities of practice (COPs)? The problem of TOP is something like moving a practice from one community to new individuals. Here, I’m describing what happens when new people learn about ECC and start to learn how to work with it. It’s tough to make – the recipe is incredibly precise and the underlying theory is important – and it’s deceptively similar to regular concrete. To solve TOP, you simply send that newly trained person off in to the world, much like a PhD from the lab at Michigan is now off in the world getting his company to use ECC. Obviously I’m oversimplifying here, but you get the idea. By characterizing the problem of developing new infrastructure as a TOP problem, we make the research lab and its practices the goal, and the “real world” and its practices the target. This could even be a transfer practice from one community to another problem.
However, that’s not what I think is going on. Rather, I think the communities of practice involved are a little broader than that TOP conception allows. I don’t think the problem is one of trying to ease the problems with throwing ECC over the wall between lab and field. The really interesting problem, I think, is how does a change in practice within the civil infrastructure design and construction community happen? Much of the existing COP literature is about moving practice from a community to an individual. What about changing a practice within the community? How does that happen?
To start to answer those questions, I’m off to explore a variety of literatures including innovation (generally), innovation (in construction), organizational change, apprenticeship, public policy and infrastructure, and standards development and negotiation. That’s just to get me started. I’m likely to blog about this quite a bit in the near future as I try to figure out what I think is going on, or rather where I think something interesting is going on. In doing so, I hope to avoid the plague of reductionism against which Latour warns. Instead, I’m looking for the details of the network of forces at work in these communities and affecting their practices.
Argh. Again.
I’m having trouble convincing myself that staying involved in big science projects is a tenable arrangement for me. Big science drives a lot of SI’s money, and I’m starting to feel a bit like a puppet. Sure, I think big science is interesting and valuable. Who doesn’t want an anthrax vaccine or concrete that bends? I just don’t want to spend all my intellectual time and energy watching people make those vaccines or bend that concrete. I’m tempted, again, to leave big science collaboration studies to someone who cares more about technology. After spending a couple days at an NSF symposium ostensibly about cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, I am even more convinced that NSF and its CISE program are not the place for me to make my splash. Sure, NSF money is nice in that it’s often big and makes work possible. But do I want to do that work? I don’t think so. This symposium has served very effectively to convince me, at least for now, that my summer enthusiasm about using these big science collaborations as cases for a general study of collaboration was foolish. Right now, there are equations being projected. Equations. I came to Troy, NY to wave the sociotechnical banner and learn about physics, apparently. I think I’d rather dump the banner and put my “social” t-shirt back on.
So now I'm done presenting, and I feel a little better. Perhaps some of my earlier crankiness was due to my stress over having not finished my presentation to include said crankiness. In the end, I got to wave the sociotechnical banner and ask for funding to support social science enabled by computation. Not bad for a day's work.
Before I hit "Publish," let me mention one more battle raging at this symposium. Gender. I was the second woman to present in as many days. We've seen a new presentation about every 20 minutes. This is not only shocking and accurate, it's unacceptable.
My Dissertation Topic (for real!)
I met with Stephanie today and showed her "my paragraph." I finally managed to get my dissertation topic into less than 300 words, and it feels fantastic! You might've read my other post on Collaboration and Identity, and this topic is something close to that. Obviously there are ambiguities in this paragraph; it's an introduction, and it will take an entire dissertation to explain. I need to tweak the paragraph a bit, but here it is in its rough glory:
I am proposing to conduct a qualitative study that focuses on participants of interdisciplinary collaborations where the collaborations are designed to a) encourage team science and b) marshal practices from multiple disciplines to address problems too large and/or complicated for a single discipline to solve. The emphasis will be on understanding how a research community changes its practices when collaborating with participants from one or more different communities. I employ an understanding of practice from Wenger – practice connotes a repertoire of resources for accomplishing work; it includes experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems (Wenger, 1999). I contend that a community’s practices, the way it thinks of itself, and the way it thinks of other communities influence 1) its adoption of innovations and 2) its collaborations with other communities. It is also important to consider the nature of the work involved, the funding mechanisms supporting the collaboration, and a community’s prior experience in collaborations. Funding agencies and experts have highlighted team science as a high priority, and even called it a scientific necessity ("Who'd want to work in a team? [editorial]", 2003); the push in team science provides interesting opportunities for studying this kind of interdisciplinary, distributed collaboration. My study will provide insight into how a community’s sense of itself, its practices, and its sense of others affect collaboration so that we may be better equipped to encourage successful collaboration. The research will incorporate in-depth interviews with members of two interdisciplinary collaborations (one in biomedical research and one in civil engineering), observations of their work (both independent and collaborative), and analysis of the funding and policy mechanisms supporting these collaborations.
That’s a wrap!
We finally finished shooting around 8:00pm tonight, and now I'm not sure what to do with myself. Some of you got email updates during the filming, and I appreciate you being there to hear my rants and excitement. Filming takes a lot of flexibility and patience, and it was quite an experience. I managed to get everyone involved to sign my IRB consent forms too, so all the data I so painstakingly gathered should be usable! Woot!
The series is likely to air near the end of the year or early next year. I'll let you all know as soon as I can. You can see me in my little blue polo talking shop. I also did an excellent job prepping my advisor, and she did a great job during her part. Well, everybody did a great job, but I was mostly concerned with Stephanie's part since it was a direct reflection of my ability to tell a good story about what I know about the engineers' work so far. The engineers assured me that I do "get" what's going on, and that was a relief. Now you can all ask me about ECC, and I can give a decent 30 second soundbyte. The show itself will focus on the material's properties, but my piece focuses on supporting and improving collaborative science and engineering work. Stay tuned for big news about how to get civil engineers from around the world to agree on a testing method for ECC.
Next up, transcription! I've started running Boot Camp on my POS MacBook, and so far, it works ok. I got a student version of Atlas.ti for my qualitative analysis tool, and I'll be poking around in there tomorrow. I have less than an hour of video, but I have pages and pages of notes. I also have about 200 pictures, but I'll spare you most of those.