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.

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.

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.

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!

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”?