This two-year project employes social network analyses and ethnographic methods to study innovation and organizational change in two emerging multipurpose, multidiscipline university research centers (MMURCs). MMURCs involve collaboration across disciplines and institutions and are becoming increasingly common tools for advancing both basic and applied research in the U.S. By studying how researchers adapt to the organizational and intellectual challenges wrought by MMURCs, the researchers aim to enable better evaluation and management approaches for collaborative science and technology research.
This study applies and extends the concepts of participation customs and boundary work, using social network analysis and ethnographic methods, to yield better understanding of competition and cooperation MMURCs. Previous social network analyses of organizations have significantly contributed to understandings of how social structure relates to innovation and productivity. This project complements and extends those insights through careful attention to the subjective meaning of social ties, how they change, and the implications of those changes. By treating the dynamics of network ties as analytically grounded in participation customs, the insights of social networks analysis will be extended to the study of social interaction.
