Uptown

Today I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal in an article on scientific collaborations by Robert Lee Hotz. The talented Lauren Goode also did a short video accompanying the online edition, in which I talk a little bit more about the advantages and problems of collaboration. Here's an excerpt of the piece:

Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.

To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. "We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork," says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.

As research projects grow more complicated, management becomes a variable in every experiment. "You can't do it alone," says research management analyst Maria Binz-Scharf at City College of New York. "The question is how you put it all together."

The key is bringing the people together in the first place, which has sped technological advancements that often benefited the rest of us. The ease of global business and social networking today owes much to the World Wide Web, which was designed to aid information-sharing between scientists. It was invented at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the home of the Large Hadron Collider.

New online science management experiments are underway. Last year, the National Science Foundation started a $50 million project to map all plant biology research, from the level of molecules to organisms to entire ecosystems, so scientists can swoop through shared data as if they were using Google Earth. Last month, U.S. computer experts launched a $12 million federal project to create a national biomedical network called VIVOweb to encourage collaborations.

Scientists are experimenting with the new technology of teamwork even in mathematics, where researchers customarily work alone.

This is such an exciting area of research. Together with Leslie Paik and Avrom Caplan, I will be devoting a good part of the next three years to study how scientists collaborate. This work is supported by the NSF (see here for the project abstract and here for the CCNY press release).

I have been very silent this semester, at least on this blog. Attribute this partly to the headaches of creating and managing my first service-learning course, doing quite a bit of traveling, and starting some new projects, accompanied by hopping from one sublet to another while renovating our new apartment. Another reason was one I regaled myself with: a colleague and friend in the English Department at CCNY, the writer Salar Abdoh, was gracious enough to let me audit his Creative Writing course, and so I found myself engaged in quite a bit of very pleasant, and indeed creative, writing over the course of the semester. I had forgotten how much discipline and work it takes to successfully complete a course...but it was a fantastic experience all around, and I highly recommend it.

What else is new...I've just made it back from Paris, where I presented a paper with Emmanuelle Vaast at ICIS 2008, entitled "Bringing Change in Government Organizations: Evolution Towards Post-Bureaucracy with Web-Based IT Projects". The conference proceedings are now online, and you can find our paper here. We used an evolutionary perspective to explain how government organizations move toward a post-bureaucratic form of organization. Below is the abstract:

This paper examines the following question: How do government organizations become more "post-bureaucratic" with web-based IT projects? It draws on evolutionary thinking to conceptualize processes of change in government organizations as involving sequences
of variation, selection, and retention as well as to identify various sources of change: internal ones (e.g. administrators), as well as external ones (e.g. technological innovations and institutional pressures). The paper relates findings from four in-depth qualitative case studies of web-based IT projects in different government organizations. The interpretation of these findings helps expand the evolutionary conceptualization by suggesting how different sources of change interact in the change process and variously
affect different stages of the evolution.

In case you missed this, here it is:

"Study: Not Being An Asshole Boss May Boost Employee Morale

July 30, 2008 | Issue 44•31

WAUKEGAN, IL—In what is being called a breakthrough discovery in worker-administrator relations, a study released Monday in the Journal Of Occupational Science found that not being a total asshole supervisor may be linked to improved worker spirit. "In nearly every trial, we found staff morale runs considerably higher when bosses don't read workers' e-mail over their shoulders, complain about their superior salaries, or act in any way like giant, self- centered assholes," said Erica Gorochow, one of the study's researchers. "Similarly, we found that typical dick manager phrases like 'I don't disagree' can weaken worker disposition by as much as 63 percent." Although the study's findings have already sent shock waves through the business community, Gorochow warned that some of the results may have been compromised, as the bitch lead researcher was breathing down her neck the whole time."

(Crossposted at Complexity and Social Networks Blog)

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why individuals make the time and effort to answer questions directed at them. In a multi-level framework we identify several influencing factors at the individual, relational, group, and informational level. Here's the abstract:

Knowledge is essential for the functioning of every social system, especially for professionals in knowledge-intensive organisations. Since individuals do not possess all the work-related knowledge that they require, they turn to others in search for that knowledge. While prior research has mainly focused on antecedents and consequences of knowledge sharing and understanding why people do not share knowledge, less is known why people provide knowledge, and what conditions trigger voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Our article addresses this gap by proposing a multi-level framework for voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing: individual, relational, group, and informational. We provide illustrations from a particular knowledge-intensive community, DNA forensic scientists who work at public laboratories.

A pdf version is available from the Inderscience website.

I have two chapters in "Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government", edited by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and David Lazer. The book just came out with MIT Press. An excerpt from the intro describes the chapter I co-authored with David Lazer:

"David Lazer and Maria Christina Binz-Scharf look at the process of evaluation [of the consequences of changes in information flow in government] from within the system. Rather than offering another method of evaluation, they examine the mechanisms and structures that may help spread evaluation information on the use of information and communication technologies in the public sector. Utilizing network theory, they highlight the role that a variety of intergovernmental organizations play in connecting otherwise distant parts of the informational ecosystem regarding information technology and government."

Here's the book announcement by David Lazer on the Complexity and Social Networks blog.