The role of boundary maintenance and blurring in a UK collaborative research project: How researchers and health service managers made sense of new ways of working. (April 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Smith, Simon; Ward, Vicky
• Is Part Of: Social science & medicine. Volume 130(2015)
• Page Start: 225
• Page End: 233
• Publication Date: 2015-04
• Subjects: Collaborative research -- Collaborative partnership -- Co-production -- Co-orientation -- Narrative -- Boundary object -- UK; Social medicine -- Periodicals; Medical anthropology -- Periodicals; Public health -- Periodicals; Psychology -- Periodicals; Medicine -- Periodicals; Medicine -- Periodicals; Médecine sociale -- Périodiques; Anthropologie médicale -- Périodiques; Santé publique -- Périodiques; Psychologie -- Périodiques; Médecine -- Périodiques; Electronic journals; 362.105
• DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.02.023
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0277-9536

Abstract

Abstract: The paper investigates whether, how and in what circumstances boundary blurring or boundary maintenance is productive or destructive of sense in collaborative research based on a case study involving researchers from two universities and two principal organisational stakeholders in a local healthcare system in England between 2009 and 2012. Adopting a narrative method, using meeting observation, document analysis and interviews, we describe two key sets of activities in the evolution of collaboration, which allows us to tackle the question at two levels. Studying the production of documents and their use as boundary objects in project management meetings, we show how these were used to enable cooperation by establishing a truce between worldviews, giving participants a better feel for the game and a clearer perception of its stakes. Studying how the partnership expanded to take in other organisations besides the two formal partners, we show how the project accommodated pre-existing organisational interests but thereby sacrificed its experimental ethos. In showing how actors needed to subvert their experimental script to enact collaborative partnership, we argue for understanding and evaluating the latter as the co-produced outcome of disputes and co-orientations towards a practical ideal, not as an organisational format for knowledge co-production. Highlights: UK case study questions the idealisation of collaboration to resolve translation gaps. Collaborating partners retreated from experimental to conventional scripts. Boundary maintenance, not blurring, gave co-production a practical sense. Study collaboration as a co-produced outcome not as a format for co-production.