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Reed Stratton

Scott Graham

English 715: Theories of Professional Writing

Final Draft

20 December 2013

Constructing Innovation Networks through Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

Literature Review

Professional and technical writing is on the precipice of what Rachel Spilka calls a

"seismic shift" (ix) resulting from an influx of technology in our field and changes in

management philosophies in response to economic turmoil. The result we’re seeing now is an

unprecedented rate of distributed labor in technical communication (TC) and all fields. In his

2007 introduction to a Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ) issue about distributed work,

Clay Spinuzzi asserts that traditional workplaces for TC’s used to be stable, clearly defined, and

long term (Nardi, Whittaker, and Schwartz; as qtd in "Technical Communications"). Disciplines

were articulated and work occurred within a "particular domain: a particular activity, discipline,

field, or trade carried out in a particular setting" ("Technical Communications" 265). Now,

increasingly, TC’s must grasp for equilibrium in work settings destabilized by "downsizing,

automation, flattening of work hierarchies, increasing numbers of relationships between

companies, continual reorganization, the breaking down of silos or stovepipes in organizations,

and perhaps most importantly, the increase in telecommunications, which has made it possible to

connect any one point to any other, within or across organizations (Nardie; Albert & Hayes;

Deluesue; Engestrom, Engestrom and Vahaaho; as qtd in "Technical Communication" 265). As a

result, work is no longer "co-located (Dicks 73) but traverses space and time.

It would be easy for technical communicators to acknowledge these changes and

embrace the angst of this existential destabilization. Instead of choosing to "adapt" as Myers calls

us to, we could "die" and relegate our field to the dispensable work of translating between

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companies and end-users (as qtd. in "Introduction" 4). Or, as Spilka suggests, we could

"reexamine and revise our current understanding of the field-- that is out theories-- so that we

can all begin the process of understanding better the dramatic changes we have witnessed"

("Introduction" 4). Re-envisioning our theories of workplace processes such as cross-disciplinary

collaboration, which become essential in this changing landscape will help us adapt and evolve

by reframing ourselves not as outsourcable translators or mere writers but as knowledge

managers, uniquely situated to enrich companies because of our understanding of how

communication, cooperation, and creativity can span far-flung disciplinary realms and unite

workers around common workplace goals. This understanding will ensure that technical

communicators add the values of cost reduction, cost avoidance, revenue enhancement, and

intangible contributions that Dicks talks about in "The Effects of Digital Literacy."

Statement of Purpose This review addresses one particular component of the values we can add to the work that

we do in redefining our roles as technical communicators: cross-disciplinary collaboration for

innovation. I suggest we look at this innovation through new theories, those more in touch with

the changing landscape of our workplaces due to economic, management, and technological

fluctuations. If we can foster innovation among our workplace using the theories that I will

address below, we can enhance value of our companies, by communicating that "what we create

is a part of the product or service being offered and not some external, non essential cost

associated with creating it" (Dicks 63). As a matter of fact, if we can foster innovation in a

collaborative environment we may actually be contributing to the invention or the improvement

of a product or document for our customers, which makes us the indispensable knowledge

manners we all need to be.

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Thus far the crux of TC research in cross-disciplinary collaboration has explored how

different cultures, disciplines, and communities of practice talk to one another. This

communication is necessary for collaboration because most of the research has focused on

perspectival differences and dividing lines between cultures, disciplines, communities of

practice, and viewpoints and how to eliminate the divisions. However, this research ignores the

value of diverse perspectives, especially when the objective of the collaboration is to solve a

workplace problem or generate new ideas. Additionally, it ignores the material conditions and

context of collaborative sites whether they are physical or virtual.

For this task, a networked approach that counts each collaborator as a node in a

symmetrically agentive assemblage of human and nonhuman actants is needed. This framework

acknowledges actants as heterogeneous contributors united by common objectives. Divisions

between actants are acknowledged and regarded indispensable rather than flattened as

perspectival models tend to do. Furthermore, it reveals that as more and more heterogeneous

actants are enrolled into the network not only will it become durable, but it will also become

more creative because the different backgrounds of each actant will play symmetrical roles in

problem solving and generating new ideas.

In making that argument, I will outline the history of cross-disciplinary scholarship in

technical communication, elaborating on a few previous TC projects. I will then detail the

perspectival models of collaboration that have emerged in this and other TC scholarship

including incommensurability theory, discourse community theory, and boundary object theory.

With boundary object theory, I will reveal its flexibility for both perspectival and networked

theories of collaboration and discuss how scholars within organizational science have helped this

transition from perspectival to networked. Next, I will provide a foundation of networked

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theories by describing the collaboration implications of actor network theory. Those implications

are as follows: the union of human and nonhuman actants, the nonmodernist concept of

temporality and what it reveals about collaborative processes; and how network durability

attained from the enrollment of heterogeneous actants can also be networked creativity for

innovation. My conclusion asserts that if we are to gain a more nuanced idea of how

collaboration works in innovation and cross-disciplinary problem solving we must favor

networked models over perspectival ones.

For now, this next section gets us started by identifying major themes in TC collaboration

research up to this point and expounding on some projects that are similar to mine within these

themes.

Collaboration Scholarship in TC

In her 2001 qualitative analysis of collaboration in technical communication research,

Isabelle Thompson identified six themes of cross-disciplinary collaboration as determined by a

survey of 55 articles across five TC scholarly journals. For my own purpose of challenging social

constructivist models of collaboration and posing new theoretical frameworks, I will address

research from only the first three themes and leave the last three for future scholarly work. The

themes were as follows:

1) Social construction theory and collaboration

2) Modes and models of collaboration

3) Effectiveness in collaboration

4) Electronic technologies and collaboration

5) Managing and administering workplace collaboration

6) Collaboration between the university and the workplace (165).

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1) Social Construction Theory Research

The majority of the research in collaboration has been rooted in social constructivist

theory. According to Thompson, though many of the essays didn't directly explain social

constructivist theory, nearly 80 percent were shaped by it (166). For example, in Hedden's

"Constructivist Theory of Computing as both a model of knowing and a metaphor of the mind"

he asserted that "knowledge, reality, and even facts are community generated" (as qtd in

Thompson 165). Because knowledge is created in communities, he concluded, the writer and his

audience must collaborate with one another to reach each other across their respective

communities. This notion was affirmed by Blakeslee in "Readers and Authors: Fictionalized

Constructs of Dynamic Collaborators." The qualitative study followed three physicists as they

wrote a paper about computer simulation of biological models (Blakeslee 24). A cross-

disciplinary problem arose in the process because the physicists' report was to be targeted to

biologists and chemists operating in discourse communities with different sets of expectations,

methods, and perceptions of problems. The physicists ultimately bridged the disciplinary gap by

distributing first drafts of the reports to biologists, and engaging in conversation and feedback

sessions with them (Blakeslee 26) to unite the two communities. Though collaboration did occur;

I assert that something is lost in this type of cooperation, that perspectives must be sacrificed in

order to come to a consensus. I will elaborate later on why that is not the most effective way to

understand collaboration. For now, I will outline some modes of collaboration processes

identified in the literature.

2) Modes of Collaboration Process

Thompson identified four commonly discussed modes of collaboration in her qualitative

survey. The first is the "hierarchical" or "assembly line" mode where individuals perform tasks in

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isolation from one another (Thompson 166). In "Design Teams and The Web," Wambeam and

Kramer examine the interactions of two web project teams using a dialogic model, concluding

that this is the best approach for when web designers are using hyperlinks to work in isolation

from one another throughout the collaborative process (Wambeam and Kramer 349). The second

mode is the swap meet form of collaboration wherein "individuals perform tasks in isolation but

come back together to review or revise" (Thompson 166). This was evident in Mirel, Feinberg,

and Allmendinger's work on collaboration between designers and software manual writers in

which they conclude that when developers dialogue, draft iteratively, and make joint decisions

they produce work that does not come from a linear process but from departing from one another

and then rejoining each other to share ideas (259). Thirdly, the asymmetrical model where

collaborators are not viewed as equals was discussed in "Gender and Modes of Collaboration in a

Chemical Engineering Design Course." Through qualitatively analyzing an undergraduate

engineering course, the authors determined that modes of collaboration are "gendered in that

they define power relationships" (Flynn, Savage, Brown, and Watke 444). They concluded that

when different culture or different genders are collaborating, effective collaboration is

"characterized (by) flexibility, open-ended inquiry, and concern for the growth and development

of the individuals involved" (Flynn, et al. 44). This applies, I imagine, to collaboration across

differing disciplines as well because collaboration works best when hierarchies are flattened and

diversity embraced. This flattening of hierarchies was also called for in the integrated model,

which was the fourth model the research addressed. According to it, collaboration is symphonic,

meaning that the multiple parties represented in it should embrace the unique aspects of their

cultures and disciplines. This "integrated team" (259) model as Thompson called it can be found

in "Recent Research on Collaborative Writing in Industry." In it, Debs reviews sources that

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express the importance of the individuality of authorship and ultimately concludes that an

integrated approach to collaboration is most effective because individual authors bring to the

collaboration table their own set of strengths that should be embraced (Debs 476). Each

previously mentioned research problem, you’ll notice, strongly commits to the perspectivialism

present in the post-modern framework of social constructivism.

3) Effectiveness in Collaboration

Thompson says effectiveness in collaboration, thus far in the research, has been

determined by the satisfaction of the collaborators more than by the quality of the collaborative

artifact produced (259), which again hints at an overemphasis on social processes and a disregard

for artifacts. Janis Forman’s 1993 article examined characteristics of writing groups of students

in their second year in an MBA program. The study than evaluated the reports as well as the

group members. Forman concluded that group members who have worked together before had

the most positive experiences and produced the most effective and well-documented

collaborative writing. Barnum’s 1994 article about collaborative writing in graduate technical

communication uncovered slightly different results that were still overly focused on the social

processes of collaboration. In a usability study of graduate work in technical communication,

Barnum hypothesized that graduate students would be able to collaborate with minimal guidance

from an authority figure but was proven wrong and concluded that all levels of collaborative

communicators can be most effective with some element of guidance in the collaboration process

(405).

Though these studies have made headway in what collaboration looks like, how it can be

organized, and what makes for effective collaboration, they have not looked enough into

collaborative theory building, especially explicit theories that result from their fixation on social

constructivism.

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Models of Collaboration

Now you've seen the research projects that have emerged within TC to learn more about

collaboration, its theories, its modes, and its effectiveness. The various projects have originated

multiple models for understanding collaboration that have come mostly from science studies.

These models can be divided into one category called "perspectival," which focuses on how

different disciplines look differently upon the same phenomena and another category called

"networked," which posits that collaborators, human and nonhuman, share agency and authority

across interlinked knowledge networks. In this section, I will identify three perspectival theories

of collaboration and how they arose. I will then explain why they are insufficient for my inquiry

about the role cross-disciplinary collaboration plays in innovation and problem solving.

Perspectival Models of Collaboration

This section reviews the perspectival theories that TC scholars have built to understand

and analyze workplace collaboration across boundaries. The perspectival approach is the most

common in theory building in the collaboration research so far, which is a detriment. According

to Anne Marie Mol, it embraces pluralism; instead of asserting that one individual or one field

has a monopolistic right to the truth about the world around us, it asserts that multiple people

looking at one thing phenomena can have plural viewpoints about it (76). This essentially

relegates knowledge to relativism, whatever is true for one may not be true for another. Thus,

nothing is actually true or sound. It is, however, understandable why collaboration theories have

leaned toward perspectivialism, for collaboration by nature engages a heterogeneous group of

people with another heterogeneous group seeking common ground. However, perspectival

theories problematically "imply that the worlds of our objects of analysis are rather stable entities

that can be approached from different angles" (Plesner 255). Though this original notion of

perspectivalism is rooted in science studies and looks at scientific objects under analysis, I will

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apply it to the professional writing workplace by considering the objects and people that

permeate that field, whether those objects already exist or are yet to exist through creative

problem solving and concept generation. Either way, perspectivalism is not nuanced enough to

account for the "ever-shifting attachments and configurations that make up this world" (Plesner

242) when it comes to both communicating and creating through collaboration. Not only that, but

these theories tend to over-emphasize the standpoints of individuals without accounting for the

other elements that play a role in collaboration.

The first perspectival model I'll address is Kuhnian Incommensurability, which attempts

to identify and explain the nature of cross-disciplinary incompatibility with its assertion in

science studies that demarcation always occurs between communities. Next in this section will

be a discussion of the "communities of practice," a tenant of the social constructivist framework

of knowledge creation. Communities, it posits, organize themselves around shared work, shared

expectations, and shared languages, which eventually become exclusive to the community,

isolating them from other communities to the determent of collaboration. Additionally, it says

that, through this work, communities actually create knowledge among themselves, which

degrades and devalues a universal stance of knowledge-creation and simultaneously marks

knowledge that belongs to one community off limits to another, hindering collaboration for

creativity from diversity. Finally, I address boundary object theory-- a move in the right

direction-- which does evade the perils of social constructivism and post-modernism by

integrating non-human objects but still fixates on how non-human objects can unite differing

perspectives and not enough on how they are equally agentive to the humans utilizing them in

collaborative creativity and problem solving. Essentially, if differing viewpoints are

acknowledged, and lines are overcome then the groups in collaboration lose their originality for

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the sake of a compromised solution. These solutions, because they are compromised, are neither

as effective nor complex as those that result from a strategic embracing of differences.

Kuhnian Incommensurability

When it comes to perspectival models of collaboration the framework that supposedly

helps us understand the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration is Thomas Kuhn's

incommensurability theory native to science studies. Incommensurability is an informative lens

for examining why collaboration often fails or is impossible to achieve in the first place at least

as it relates to communication. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn says that new

scientific theories emerge to explain, revise, and correct previously accepted conclusions.

Scientific findings, Kuhn tells us, create paradigms, which are "universally recognized scientific

achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of

practitioners (10)." They are frameworks that identify what object is to be observed, the

questions to be asked about that object, the structure of the questions, the interpretation of the

results of scientific investigations, and the process for conducting scientific experiments. (Kuhn

10). Because this set of tasks is so neatly defined, communities seeking to answer specific

questions to specific problems emerge.

This is important to collaboration because collaboration often needs to occur between two

groups existing in incompatible paradigms and, therefore, not understanding the other. However,

a paradigm is a construct that helps us articulate differences rather than a reality. Perspectivalism

tells us that neither of the members in neither paradigm is wrong because each member brings

"their own particular skills, habits, histories, (and) preoccupations, which means their eyes are

different. They look at the world from different standpoints" (Mol 76). To the community

practicing the accepted science, the paradigm seems so self-explanatory, so infallible, and so all-

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encompassing that it is impossible to accept findings beyond the paradigm. In fact, those

working from within the paradigm, Kuhn says, are so committed to it that the only way to reject

one paradigm is to replace it with another. This new paradigm is incommensurable,

incompatible, with the previous one, so those in support of the new paradigm must initiate a

crisis in order to truly challenge the paradigm (Kuhn 77). Incommensurability, then, identifies

extreme and rigid divisions between communities based on their viewpoints of the objects under

study rather than the objects themselves. It further says that these communities are isolated from

one another unless they can eliminate or at least blur their differences. This may work for

communication for collaboration, but it doesn't help collaborating communities leverage their

differences to initiate divergent thinking and innovate.

This specifically looks at how cooperation often needs to occur within one particular

discipline. According to Paul Hoyningeny-Huene, the first aspect of incommensurability

indicates that "through a scientific revolution, there is a change in the field of scientific problems

that have to be addressed by any theory of that domain (482). In this process old problems that

seemingly have been solved by science might reemerge, or new problems will arise. This

incommensurability is "diachronic" because it is incompatible across a span of time (Harris 24).

This is the incommensurability Kuhn addresses when he analyzes anomalies being introduced, a

crisis occurring, and a paradigms emerging as a result over time. It boils down to different

groups and their commitment to certain theories that keep them from understanding or agreeing

with differing groups.

The notion helps us understand the need for collaboration because it draws dividing walls

between the various disciplines, but it doesn't provide us with a concrete solution for

collaboration problems because it says that it is impossible for one paradigm to commit to

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another paradigm. This is the incommensurability that exists within fields and is referred to as

synchronic incommensurability, "the moment when two programs are on the disciplinary table at

the same time" (Harris 24). From here we will abandon diachronic incommensurability in favor

of synchronic (Harris 24) incommensurability which is more practical when inquiring about how

discourse communities can effectively collaborate with one another at least through

communication. Nonetheless, incommensurability doesn't provide any solutions to collaboration

problems, nor does it identify how communities can leverage their differences to create entirely

new perspectives. However, one model that has emerged in the TC literature in attempts to solve

this problem is that of "communities of practice" and "discourse communities." The next section

will detail that model.

Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice

The discourse community model is closely related to the paradigm model because it

acknowledges that differences emerge between communities with different priorities and

philosophies. However, it attempts to move beyond identifying problems of incompatibility with

communities and into actually solving them. The model tries to explain the phenomena of

community forming around common practices and goals. Swale's observation of the six

characteristics of discourse communities as cited by Patricia Bizzell are as follows:

1. There must be a common public goal the group seeks to accomplish.

2. There must be a discursive forum accessible to all participants.

3. The group must use the forum to work toward the goal.

4. The group shares expectations for how productive exchanges of information should

proceed.

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5. The discourse exhibits the tendency to become increasingly specialized as the

community goals (as the specialization increases the language starts to isolate the

community from other communities).

6. There must be a 'critical mass' of experts in the group at any given time (as qtd. on

225-226)

In 1987, Freed and Broadhead indicated that the theory was adopted by the composition

and rhetoric community for pedagogy purposes but also to establish composition and rhetoric as

its own community to "foster standardization, autonomy, historicity, and vitality" (Fishman 18;

as qtd in 155). This ties discourse communities to validation. Freed and Broadhead tell us that

communities seek authority through establishing community-based languages and practices that

"establish its uniqueness from other similar and sometimes dominant communities" (155).

This is where the problem arises with collaboration. Discourse communities, either

because they are seeking vitality or clout, isolate themselves from other communities almost in

competition, which stymies collaboration. Freed and Broadhead say, "The paradigms reign like

prelates and governments reign: they set an agenda and attempt to guarantee its meeting, often

rewarding those who do and discouraging those who don't" (156). According to Anne Marie Mol

while perspectival models like the discourse community theory attempt to make us equal by

saying that each community interprets the phenomena differently, it also "reinforces division"

because the interpretations of the various groups must differ "linked as they are to specific

history, interests, roles, and horizons of each group" (10). Because of this rewarding of those

who adapt and punishing of those who don't, the discourse community model tells us that if

collaboration is to happen between two communities, it is in the realm of compromise, which

weakens both the creativity of the collaborating community and the solution they agree upon.

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Granted, the discourse community model was never intended as a collaboration theory, but it

does provide another construct similar to incommensurability that tells us that collaboration is

difficult if not impossible because of the divisions between communities.

An additional downfall of the discourse community model for collaboration is that,

because of its focus on communication, one of the only solutions to cross-disciplinary

collaboration conflicts comes through language. Bizzell tells us, "a discourse community is a

group of people who share certain language usage practices" (222). As such, incommensurable

communities speak incommensurable languages, and collaboration can only be achieved by

translation of one language to another. Even Kuhn tells us that paradigms embody entire

languages. For example, science currently unanimously rejects the term "phlogiston" but in the

days before Lavoisier discovered an element called "oxygen" it was a main unit of measurement

for determining how the air interacted with other substances. Kuhn uses another example with

the word "planet." The very term changed after the Copernican revolution and the rejection of

geocentrism (79).

Problematically, language is a social construct and it emphasizes the social aspect of

these communities. The idea that two communities speak two different languages and need to

either adopt a third language or learn each others' languages is perspectival because language

embodies viewpoints. Not only does each community member have its own way of looking at

phenomena, but they also have their own way of expressing it through language, "emphasizing

how different individuals understand the world differently depending on their position" (Butler;

as qtd. by Plesner 55). In The Body Multiple Mol, uses the example of the term "disease" and the

term "illness." "Disease" belongs to the perspective of doctors; it is a way of labeling a unified

set of symptoms that present in the human body. "Illness" on the other hand is in the realm of the

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patient's discourse community because it accounts for the social implications of the health

problem as well as an implied lifestyle that corresponds with it. Mol is not interested in the terms

and interpretations of this thing that doctors and patients unite to discuss; rather, she wants to

know more about the "object" itself, but the object remains untouchable because our ability to

understand it is blocked by the languages and the interpretations we use to label it (12). In other

words, language because of its relativity is not useful for understanding how collaboration can

yield innovative concepts and ideas. Therefore, if discourse communities isolate themselves

based on exclusive languages than it is nearly impossible for differing communities to talk to

each other much less to develop new concepts and solve problems. Additionally, this approach

doesn't account for the objects that either play a role in the collaboration or actually help us to

collaborate altogether. The next section will detail the boundary object model of collaboration,

which is still perspectival, but makes progress on accounting for objects, non-humans, within the

collaboration process as Mol calls for us to do for a more nuanced understanding of

collaboration.

Boundary Object Theory

The object in boundary object theory is a mediator between incommensurable discourse

communities. The model moves us away from focusing on the communities who are trying to

collaborate and complicates the collaboration process and site. It identifies that collaboration

occurs when either abstract or concrete common ground can exist between incommensurable

communities. Described as "objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and

satisfy the informational requirements of all of them" (Star and Griesmer 393), a boundary object

is an entity shared among heterogeneous communities which is flexible enough to adapt to local

needs of social worlds but robust enough to establish a common identity among all collaborators

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(Star and Griesmer 393). Herndl and Wilson's work at Los Alamos laboratory, which examined

“rhetorical activity that occurs at the boundaries between diverse communities of practice…”

(129) yielded a concrete example of a boundary object. In their case study analyzing

communication across scientific disciplines, a knowledge map emerged as a boundary object.

The map depicts an inter-dependent network of system priorities such as vehicle stability,

environmental protection, power, thermal protection, roll control, and commands that all of the

scientists needed to know in the creation of the missile system. Herndl and Wilson also identified

as an abstract boundary object the exigency of United States security, essentially saying that the

communities were able to come together out of mutual concern for protecting our country and its

allies (135). Collaboration is occurring here through the mediation of an object at this point.

However, the notion still acknowledged the perspectival approach to communities and their

priorities.

The idea of the existence of objects at the intersection of discourse communities is

essential to collaboration. Not only does it reveal how to unite incommensurable groups in work,

but it also welcomes non-humans into the collaborative mix, which both Mol and Bruno Latour

praise. The notion of the "social worlds," that the boundary objects unite, though, is still

perspectival because the boundary object gravitates toward epistemology rather than ontology.

That is, it focuses on what the objects reveal about the collaborating communities and how both

communities can know what the object reveals without delving into the existence of the object

and the inevitability of the object to alter its existence throughout the collaboration process.

Additionally, the establishment of a common identity among incommensurable groups threatens

to dilute the creative durability of each group. In other words, both groups here have to sacrifice

unique parts for collaboration. However, some useful alterations to boundary objects and their

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roles have been posited in recent research, and I will address those briefly below as a lead-in to

the collection of networked theories of collaboration.

Boundary Objects as Shiftable and Changeable

While Star and Griesmer emphasized the importance of object stability throughout

collaboration, in 2012, Nicolini and Mengis challenged their assertion. They also questioned

what item, object, or space could be a boundary object, asserting that if every artifact in cross-

disciplinary is a boundary object for every community, then the theory is thin and powerless

(Nicolloni and Mengis 614), which moves us towards Mol's concept of multiple ontologies, the

multiple beings of boundary objects as they move through collaboration. Indeed, if boundary

object theory adopts a perspectival approach it will reveal that boundary objects are relative; one

boundary object for one community may not be the same boundary object for another.

In "Understanding the Role of Objects in Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration," Nicolloni

and Mengis pose two modifications to the accepted understanding of boundary objects. Both

progress toward the argument that collaboration occurs in networks that consist of equally

agentive humans and non humans. Nicolloni and Mengis' modifications are as follows:

1) The roles and functions of objects changes over the course of the collaboration

2) Approaching boundary objects from a pluralist perspective elucidates the nature of

conflicts and communication breakdowns prevalent in cross-disciplinary collaboration

(Nicolloni and Mengis 610).

Nicolini and Mengis employed three organizational theories-- epistemic things, activity

theory, and material infrastructure-- to complicate and expand upon boundary object theory to

support their claim that we can get a more nuanced understanding of boundary objects by

applying a collection of theoretical approaches to the current singular theory. I will now briefly

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outline these theoretical approaches and explain how each rejects perspectivalism in favor of

what could be called networkness, especially as the collaboration relates to the generation of

ideas within the workplace.

Epistemic Things

Nicolini and Mengis' first assertion is that collaborators should consider "epistemic

things" that represent what collaborators do not yet know to be types of boundary objects"

(Rheinberger 28; as qtd by Nicolini and Mengis). Though this is still rooted in perspectivalism, it

reveals that collaboration has potential to discover what has yet to exist, whether that discovery

be a solution to a problem or an idea about a new method in the workplace. "(Epistemic things)

are open ended and work as a source of interest and motivation by virtue of their opacity, their

surplus, (and) their material transcendence" (Rheinberger 406; as qtd. by Nicolini and Mengis

618). Objects that do not yet exist, according to Knorr Cetina, embrace the sense of 'wanting'

and a lack of fulfillment (as qtd. in Nicolini and Mengis 618). The promise of discovery unites

disciplines, transcending demarcation and incommensurability. This view overcomes the

perspectivialism of post-modernist theory in elucidating that cross-disciplinary groups can unite

over knowledge that does not yet exist in order to move the item to existence. This, then,

progresses us toward collaboration as innovation.

Partial and Disruptive

Employing activity theory to the examination of the role of the object in collaboration,

Nicolloni and Mengis, conclude that "collaborative action is thus maintained around the pursuit

of a partially shared, partially fragmented, and partially disputed object" (614). Because the work

that a community does is embodied by the objects that the community produces, if we accept the

perspectival approaches to collaboration, it is simply not possible for boundary objects to remain

stable, for they will keep changing, even if slightly, as different groups use them and produce

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them. Essentially, what they are saying here is that boundary objects change over the course of

collaboration depending upon which community is interacting with and utilizing the object. 1

Material Infrastructure of Collaboration

The final theoretical approach that Nicolloni and Mengis suggest to complicate how

boundary objects help us to collaborate is "the material infrastructure of collaboration" (620) The

infrastructure, they say is "any web of objects that emerges for people in practice and allows

them to resolve the tension between the local and global "(620). This infrastructure is a

collection of nonhuman objects that move collaborating groups away from seeing themselves as

local communities with different viewpoints and into seeing themselves as a part of the global

collaboration process with the items used in the collaboration as well as the people who make the

collaboration possible. With this idea, objects emerge from the shadows of collaboration and

begin to be to take center stage in the process (622). It acknowledges that objects are extremely

important if not indispensable when trying to make collaboration happen.

Though this research is from organizational science, technical communications calls for

the same kind of research under the moniker of Actor Network Theory, but that is precisely what

material infrastructure is. Thus, this notion that collaboration occurs best in an infrastructure of

human and nonhuman actants is the solution to our problems of the perspectival approach to

collaboration, as well as the issue of divisions that constantly arise between differing

communities because networked collaboration lets us acknowledge that lines exist and leverage

them to enhance creative collaboration.

1 This change over the course of collaboration can best be understood be studying the very ontology, the being, of

artifacts that are considered boundary objects. If this is the case boundary objects constantly change though they are

still boundary objects and they have different ontologies about them, which opens us up to Mol's theory of multiple

ontologies when it comes to boundary objects. This would be a rich area of scholarship in collaboration.

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Of the mentioned perspectival views, boundary object theory is the closest to the

networked models of collaboration because it looks beyond the social elements of collaboration,

the humans engaged in it, and into the role that objects-- nonhumans-- play in that collaboration.

Indeed, it could even be said that boundary object theory is a boundary object between

perspectival collaboration models and networked collaboration models. Once the effect of

objects on collaboration is acknowledged, we move away from divisions and demarcations

between people groups. We stop looking at collaboration as a tug of war between opposing

communities and their perspectives and start focusing on the rope the groups are pulling on as

well and what that means to their back-and-forth process. This leads us to see the collaboration

task not as a stand-off between people group A and people group B, but as a collective of all of

the objects affiliated with people group A and people group B and the objects and ideas that

unite them across the divide. Thus, the collaboration process moves from merely communicative

to communicative as well as creative and inventive. The following section will detail networked

theories of collaboration, particularly Latour’s ANT and support my assertion that networked

collaboration is more effective and more creative than perspectival collaboration.

Networked Theories of Collaboration

The previously addressed theories are rooted in perspective. They tell us that many

different people have many different ways of looking at the same phenomena, whether that

phenomena be an object or task. The problem with the theories thus far that attempt to solve

perspectival conflict in collaboration is that they are too focused on modernist divisions. The

most pervasive division among them is the nature/culture divide, but because the theories

themselves are based on dividing lines, they also focus too much on demarcation between

communities, divisions in culture, divisions in languages, divisions in priorities, divisions in

tools, and divisions in processes. Though there is some merit in overcoming these for

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collaborative communication, divisions need to be somehow acknowledge and, to some extent,

embraced so that the diversity among collaborating communities can yield creativity and

problem solving. The best set of models in TC for understanding the importance of differences

without being discouraged by differences are networked models of collaboration.

This next section will tote the merits of actor network theory with its obliteration on

modernist bifurcation in favor of nonmodernist networked actants. It addresses the ANT concept

of interssement for understanding translation among actants. I will then claim that Latour's

concept of network durability can be extended into networked creativity, using it to assert that

the more diverse actants that are enrolled in a collaborative network, the more creative that

network will become.

Actor Network Theory

Communities of practice engaged in collaboration may face obstacles such as competing

paradigms, incompatible language, differing approaches to interpretation, and, overall, different

worlds from which they operate-- so says incommensurability. The problem with

incommensurability theory, though, is that it is division-phobic and favors blurred compromise

over sharp distinctions. Bruno Latour, in his promotion of non-modernism, considers this

division-centrism symptomatic of modernist thinking with its bifurcation between nature and

culture and post-modernist, which attempts to overcome the nature-culture, divide by overly

embracing the cultural. In "Why Critique has Run out of Steam" he criticizes the logical

positivists of modernism who believed that simple observations of objects could reveal scientific

truths about them simply by looking at them; this is the "fact position" (Latour 227). On the other

hand, he challenges proponents of the "fairy position" who subscribe to post-modernist thinking

that objects are screens onto which we project our own culture, languages, thoughts, values, and

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desires ("Why Critique" 228). This "fairy position" is a product of social constructivist theories

that have yielded the perspectival models of collaboration addressed earlier.

Both of these paradigms, he believes, miss the role that objects, or what could be called

nonhumans, play both in epistemology and ontology. Because they focus on divisions within the

human realm, they hide possible solutions to incommensurability that can be seen in the

interaction of humans and nonhumans. Though new materialism is a huge portion of Latour's

thinking, he not only accounts for the role objects play in collaboration, but also the people who

use those objects and interact with one another. That's why his theory is so important for cross-

disciplinary collaboration; it preserves the diversity in communities as actants while linking

them. This renders the differences of one community indispensable for collaboration with

another community by "weaving (social relations) into a fabric" ("Technology" 103).

With actor network theory (ANT), Latour posits a new approach to our relationships with

objects, which provides a framework for examining collaboration between seemingly

incommensurable discourse communities. All entities, human or nonhuman, are "actants" in

complex networks across which agency is symmetrically distributed (Woolgar, Spinuzzi,

Latour). No longer do objects exist for people; no longer are they even shaped by people.

Instead, ANT says objects exist for themselves, and objects shape humans as much as humans

shape objects (Woolgar, Spinuzzi, Mol, Latour). This thinking has tremendous implications on

collaboration-- whether it be humans collaborating with humans or humans collaborating with

nonhumans-- because it asserts that agency and authority is always distributed equally. For

example, think of a tech company brainstorming new names for a product, the marker the

manager is using on the board, the board, the desks on which the colleagues are sitting, the

laptops on which they are typing, the representative from marketing, the representative from

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engineering, the pencils they are all using to write, and the customer service rep all have equal

authority and agency in this collaborative process. Remove one node from the network and the

result will be different and less effective. This is because these collaborative networks, according

to "Technology is Society Made Durable" allow for "actants to hold society together as a durable

whole" (Latour 103), which overcomes the obstacles of bifurcation and separation that ruptures

collectives and demarcates disciplines.

Pragmatically, understanding society as a network of human and nonhuman actants also

provides us with an entry point for making collectives more durable, coherent, effective,

dominant, and creative (Latour 103, Spinuzzi 49). Thus, if cross-disciplinary collaboration is an

attempt to overcome incommensurability and build a durable collective, ANT can give us a

perspective of how that can be accomplished, a perspective that rejects the perspectival

approaches of modernism and postmodernism.

I will now address specific components of ANT that inform cross-disciplinary

collaboration for innovation starting with interssment, which is basically translation that

generates ideas and moves them across the various actants in the network. I next address Latour's

notion of the movement of time as networked rather than linear and discuss its implications in

the innovation process related to improving current ideas and products and seeing each

collaborator as a symmetrical actant within an innovation network. I next acknowledge Latour

and Callon's notion of network durability but, for the sake of discussing innovation, adapt it to

network creativity. In essence, the more actants enrolled in the network and the more

heterogeneous they are, the more innovative the network can become.

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Interssement

A model of translation that Latour devised in his ethnography of scientists working in

labs, interssment reveals that scientists create authority in their findings by enlisting actants from

different networks, reinterpreting the actant’s concerns to fit their own and then deeming

themselves gatekeepers of that information (Callon and Law; Star and Grismer 389, as quoted in

Adam Worrall). When it comes to sociology of science, Latour and Callon use this model to

explain how the priorities of the non-scientist can be translated into the priorities of scientists

(Star and Griesmer 389, as qtd in Adam Worrall). Interssment enrolls more actants into the

network by creating "obligatory points of passage" (Callon and Law, as qtd in Adam Worral). As

more actants are enrolled in the network, the durability of the network increases and the network

becomes more effective at reaching its goal, so it is important that these passage points are open

(Callon and Law; Adam Worral; Spinuzzi 50). Interssment is not the same kind of translation

discussed in the above perspectival models of collaboration. Rather, than creating common

ground between incommensurable perspectives, interssment involves welcoming new actants

into a network by convincing them that the priorities of the network are in-step with their own

priorities and that they will receive equal agency and authority in the network if they enter it.

Though Latour focuses on interssment of scientists, this model can be expanded to

encompass any collective of communities in a workplace. For example, in 2010 Straightway

Vineyard Church of Milwaukee purchased a former brewery to convert it into a worship space

and community outreach center. A nonprofit called Rethink factory, dedicated to sustainable

urban planning and design, learned of the project and convinced Straightway to let it use the

property as testing grounds for sustainable architectural design. Rethink created a portal into the

network by identifying the church's need for funding, planning, and design and translating it into

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its own sustainable practice project. As a result, Rethink entered the network and strengthened it

by identifying the needs of the currently existing actants as their own needs. Thus, they gained

access to the human actants volunteering to help Straightway build as well as the multitude of

nonhumans such as community-donated tools within the network. Latour says this kind of

translation changes the entire network and the actants of the network ("Technology" 105).

Rethink and any other actant it enrolled for its part, now has symmetrical agency over the other

actants and has the same influence over decisions as Straightway and its affiliates. What this

means to collaborative networks for innovation is that any actant wishing to galvanize the

creativity of the network must enroll more actants into the network and align those actants with

the end result, of creating something new, the "epistemic thing" that Nicolini and Mengis

identified (205). All actants, then, are equalized by focusing on what is yet to be in the

innovation, and each actant plays a unique and indispensable role in bringing that result to

fruition ("Technology" 105). Furthermore, because the end result, the innovation, has yet to exist

we can use Latour's nonmodernist concept of the movement of time to conclude that even about-

to-exist actants play symmetrical roles in networked innovation; that's what this next section will

now discuss.

Latourian Time and New Iterations

Modernists consider time linear and progressive. This bifurcates the past from the present

as does post-modernist viewpoints associated with perspectival models of collaboration. ANT,

however, challenges this forward-moving time flow and opens the possibility of innovation

based on past iterations of a product or idea. In We Have Never Been Modern Latour says

"calendar time may well situate events with respect to a regulated series of dates but historicity

situates the same events with respect to their intensity... and the modernist passage of time is

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nothing but a particular form of historicity" (68). The problem with this idea of the passage of

time is that it doesn't think in terms of temporality. Instead it asserts that time eliminates

everything in its wake. To modernists, reality disappears as soon as it becomes reality from a

different time than this. With this disappearance go all of the previously created concepts (68).

This impinges on the possibility of collaboration by overlooking that the past and its actants can,

in fact, collaborate with the future, allowing for the very possibility of reconfiguring certain ideas

or products. Future actants are networked to past actants, and time makes no distinctions.

Latour's example in "Technology is Society Made Durable" is that of the Kodak instamatic

camera; the modernists consider the camera as the same camera that has undergone a few

changes as time has progressed; however, Latour acknowledges the importance of every iteration

of that camera as an actant in the time-spanning network. There is not one camera with a

multitude of improvements because that would render the previous versions unrealistic or useless

(116-117). Rather, ANT tells us that all versions of a thing need to be considered symmetrically

as we are considering what new approaches we want to take to the thing. This informs

collaboration by recognizing all previous iterations of ideas that are being created or built upon.

Latourian Time and the Process of Innovation

` Furthermore, Latour's understanding of temporality also informs the innovation process

itself as a collaborating community changes from having no new ideas to having powerful new

ideas, and here is how that happens. As an example, I'm going to use the brainstorming session I

led when I was the editor of my college newspaper. The staff and I were brainstorming the

characteristics of a new humor section for the paper and a name for that section. The paper is

called The Mirror, and we wanted that name to inform the name of our section. To start the

session, I opened the floor to suggestions. One staff member “suggested” chuckles, but another

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said that doesn't really fit with the title of the paper. Another one said "looking glass," which did

fit with the title of the paper but didn't express what the section would be about (we decided it

would be a humor section, by the way). A different staff member, trying to comply with the

name then suggested "curved mirror," and before long, staff members were contributing to that

response until we finally discovered the name "Fun House," which met all of our creative goals

of both linking us to the title of our paper and revealing what the section content.

If a modernist were analyzing this brainstorming session, he/she would say that the

previous suggestions were weak and thus destroyed by the progression of time, which always

moves us toward the better by eliminating the past. On the contrary, ANT tells us that time, in

this brainstorming session, is not irreversible, nor is it linear. Each suggestion as the session

progressed is an actant in the innovation network. Each suggestion, too, is dependent upon the

other suggestion. Without the suggestion, for example, of "curved mirror" the "funhouse"

suggestion never would have emerged. So this reveals to us that the suggestions, the nonhuman

actants, played symmetrical roles in the creation of the section-naming network. This opens up

remarkable possibilities for looking at the vital role that each actant within a collaborative

network plays in the yet-to-happen idea of the innovation

Durability as Creativity

Latour's notion of time as a network of interdependent, symmetrical moments coincides

with the concept of network durability that Spinuzzi discusses in "Who Killed Rex?" He says

"The longer these networks are and the more entities that are enrolled in them, the stronger and

more durable they become" (49)." For example, the Kodak camera network is more durable now

because of the size of its iteration collective. Durability means stability in the network, but it also

means growth and creativity if the network considers itself an innovation network and the goal of

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all actants, non-human and human, is to create new ideas or products or improve upon new ideas

or products. After all, "the actor-network is continually finding ways to strengthen its existing

alliances and make new ones" (Spinuzzi 50). If a network, then, wishes to create something new,

members within that network should use interssment to enroll new thinkers and objects into the

network. Additionally, each member in the network must be considered equally agentive in order

for creative solutions to emerge from it, and that agency can be distributed across both space and

time. This wipes out all of the bifurcation of modernism, and overcomes the over-emphasis on

the human and the community in post-modernism in order to help us be more innovative as

cross-disciplinary collaborating communities. 2

Conclusion

We cannot let our field become the victim of rapidly shifting workplace conditions due to

economic pressure and the prevalence of new communication technology. To keep ourselves

relevant and our work fresh in this day and age we need to redefine ourselves not as simple

translators but as knowledge managers who concretely understand the way communication

works. Research in collaboration is moving in the right direction, but it tends to be too

perspectival, which doesn’t articulate clearly how collaborators can unite around innovation

while still maintaining their own identities and without compromising their ideas.

After recounting previous research in multiple areas of collaboration in TC, this article

identified several perspectival models of collaboration and then asserted why they are not

nuanced enough to account for workplace innovation. Rooted in modernism with its inherent

divisions and post-modernism with its tendency to overemphasize the human factor within

2 Theories of object-oriented ontology such as Mol's multiple ontology are also extremely useful for understanding

collaborative innovation. Mol's notion tells us that the very objects that we collaborate with or collaborate to create

carry with them completely differing ontologies as they progress through the collaboration process. THis is useful

because it also allows us to embrace differences while still maintaining that there is distinctions between all objects.

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collaboration, these perspectival theories may show us how communities form and isolate

themselves from others, but they don't reveal how these communities collaborate. It is not

enough to say that communities must dissolve lines between them because this eliminates the

very elements that make each community, each actant, unique and creative. Additionally, these

models overly focus on the roles of human beings and social collectives in collaboration and not

enough on the symmetrical roles that nonhumans play in the collaboration process. The paper

then addressed boundary object theory with one foot planted firmly in perspectival models of

collaboration and one foot planted in ontological models of collaboration that will eventually

usher in networked models of collaboration, which I think is the best approach to collaboration

for innovation. Boundary objects get close to giving us a more nuanced understanding of

collaboration but don’t accomplish what they need to because of their focus on eliminating

dividing lines rather than accepting that they exist and embracing them.

The model that does this best, I argued, is the networked model of Latour's ANT, with its

assertions of the importance of the non-human, its commitment to the symmetrical agency across

collaborative networks, and even its theory of the flow of time and implications on the temporal

collaboration process. ANT opens up more possible research in object-oriented-ontology, which

could ask questions such as “How does Mol’s multiple ontology theory help us embrace the

differences in collaborators while still working together? Within object-oriented-ontology a

scholar could also venture into affect theory and notions of Rickert’s “Ambient Rhetoric,” which

might help us understand how the non-human actants of the site where collaboration occurs can

enhance and change the collaboration process.

In this turbulent economic system constantly reformed by technological advances, the

work we do is in flux, and it sometimes seems that those who pay our checks are just looking for

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ways to render us irrelevant to today’s work, but understanding collaboration for innovation in

the way I mentioned will make this impossible. These theories must reveal how collaboration for

innovation, looks, works, and changes. In order to stay on top of revolutionary new theories in

organizational science and technical communication, we must understand the material conditions

of workplace communication, the role that differences play in creativity, and the important

element that nonhuman objects play in the work we do. In the era of divided work, collaboration

is not going away. Like everything else we study in TC it will constantly change and reshape

itself, and we can position ourselves to anticipate these changes before they happen and continue

to make ourselves relevant with the understanding of collaboration that I promote in this essay.

If we know how to get a group of people to collaborate cross-disciplinarily to innovate, we

suddenly become much more valuable in the eyes of the decision makers who sign our pay

checks and determine whether we keep working.

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