Comparing New Modes of Organizing Science: Traversing Disciplinary Borders and Bridging Professional Boundaries

Sponsored by CEREO and REACCH

John Parker, PhD
Honors Faculty Fellow, Arizona State University

Wednesday February 4th, 2-3 pm,  Lighty 405

Hyper specialization in science, combined with the need to solve complex socio-environmental problems, has created the desire and need for more integrative forms of scientific research and science-policy engagement. These trends have also resulted in new ways of organizing scientific research that are purposefully designed to catalyze interdisciplinarity and to link science to social action. Three organizational models have been particularly successful in this respect: boundary organizations, synthesis centers, and coherent scientific groups. The structure of these organizations and the quality of relationships they impose on collaborators demonstrably enable new forms of synthetic knowledge and science-policy relations. But each of these models does so differently and to different ends, and research has thus far considered these new ways of organizing science in isolation from one another rather than comparatively. This talk will compare the social environments, social relationships, and collaborative tools and techniques employed within each of these new organizational modes in order to identify their distinctive advantages and distinctive challenges with respect to producing particular forms of scientific knowledge. It will also discuss new tools and techniques for investigating the research process and for developing cumulative knowledge for building the research centers and scientific institutes of the future.

Video is available at Experience WSU