This chapter sheds light on the content and structure of scientific knowledge that is interacted, namely shared and transmitted from one person to another. In the cognitive level, knowledge interaction is an issue at stake for the discussion on the extents to which a consensus can be reached on understandings of the joint project in interdisciplinary collaborations.
The boundary objects (Star and Griesemer, 1989) and the epistemic links (Laudel and Gläser, 2014) have been deployed to partially describe the process of knowledge sharing. By definition, boundary objects refer to the minimum sharing of cognition between people, requiring at least one physical or abstract object and a common identity on it; and epistemic links describes an extent of connecting personalised knowledge into the shared knowledge of a research area. They are targeting at slightly different perspectives in terms of the degree and content of the epistemic consensus among people. However, they emphasise the same essential tension in an IDCT between the needs of keeping heterogeneity of various professional rules and ways of thinking in the respective disciplinary research communities and of surpassing disciplinary boundaries in order to integrate different ideas and research methods (Laudel, 1999; Turner et al., 2015).
3.1.1 Boundary objects
Boundary objects, according to Star and Griesemer (1989), refer to not only physical objects but also abstract objects like concepts and events. In a classical sense, a boundary object is defined as
‘abstract or concrete objects, whose structure is sufficiently common to several social worlds to ensure minimum identity in terms of intersection whilst being sufficiently flexible to adapt to the specific needs and constraints of each of these worlds’ (Trompette and Vinck, 2009: 6). From this definition, we may deduce two features of the notion: linkability in the sense that boundary object has the potential to be the keyword connecting different research disciplines and areas, and flexibility, in the sense that it has a wide appearance in different disciplines. A boundary object functions as only shared identity in terms of an intersection, rather than common understandings of people. In other words, a boundary object may have distinctive meanings in different social worlds. But these meanings should be able to be translated through the boundary object among at least two social worlds (Star and Griesemer, 1989).
Wesselink (2009) deployed this concept specifically to the context of interdisciplinary collaboration and implied, though unknowingly, that the type of boundary objects for IDCs should be constrained by an extra condition of shared meanings. In particular, besides to fulfill the two features mentioned above, a boundary object for an IDC is supposed to be a consensus that at least two participants of the joint project share the same understanding of. In Wesselink’s case study on the project called ‘Integrated Assessment of the river Meuse (IVM)’, she examined the formation process of the concept ‘landscape quality’, a boundary object shared by various experts, ministries and administrative and political bodies in the Netherlands. This concept had not been clearly defined until the participants set up the landscape quality framework consisting of descriptions and pictures on eight sections of the river Meuse valley with different characters. Through this framework, the landscape quality was defined no longer as merely ‘an optimum allocation of land use functions’ nor as ‘a purely individual esthetical appreciation’ (Musters et al. 2005), but as a combination of both ‘the judgement of aesthetic values as well as the evaluation of relative importance of landscape functions’ (Wesselink, 2009: 409).
In Chapter Two, and Dai and Boos’s book chapter (2017), we have also elaborated that without the sharing of understandings of a certain notion, it is impossible for scientists to establish an IDC team.
A graphic network of notions helps to tease out the structure of boundary objects. For example, Wilson and Herndl (2007) designed the knowledge map to facilitate IDC projects. A knowledge map includes the common target, so called mission success, followed by several interconnected parts, steps and functions that should be worked out by each group of IDC participants. A knowledge map not only shows a boundary object, but also serves as one. It is constructed by all IDC participants during their group discussions, thus it plays a role of a common goal, or shared flow chart. Thus in order to read the map, people may identify at first which part of the work is taken over by him/herself. By finding the position of one’s work on the map, he/she may easily understand what would be the relationship between his/her work and others’. In this vein, Wilson and Herndl succeeded to deploy knowledge maps to help scientists to exchange ideas and to fulfill the collaboration by guiding them work on their joint project by the map constructed together.
That said, still, people in each research group may interpret the meaning of nodes in a knowledge map in different ways. Also, different from individual-based cognitive maps, knowledge maps are group-work flow graphs. Thus, compared with cognitive-map-illustrated knowledge sharing, knowledge maps work merely as a loose boundary object rather than as a means revealing details of how personal knowledge is run and shared among a group of scientists.
3.1.2 Epistemic links
The notion ‘epistemic links’, though deployed in existing literature (Laudel, 1999; Laudel and Gläser, 2014), has not been clearly defined. This notion generally refers to relationships between a scientist’s research content in his/her process of knowledge production and the current research content of other community members, that is the research field. These relationships are formulated as whether one’s research provides rich opportunities to other researchers of the academic community and whether one’s project is following the mainstream of the research area. In this vein, to establish the epistemic links requires an awareness of the overview landscape of the research contents in a certain community he/she belongs to. It implies that the concept of epistemic link concerns knowledge connections more on a macro-level than the knowledge sharing which, as examined in this dissertation, is taking place between a couple of scientists’
minds. In this regard, knowledge sharing offers a way of specify what exactly are epistemic links and how they change dynamically, which is not mentioned by Laudel and Gläser’s works.
3.1.3 Shared knowledge and its visualisation
The knowledge that is shared may be an overlapping of two scientists without changing their respective original points, or an integration of two similar ideas. It functions as the boundary object in the context of IDC. The structure of knowledge that is shared between scientists’ minds has been shown by Dai and Boos (2017, 2019). Summarised from factors of the process of scientific knowledge production, which are terminology, methodology and epistemology, we have defined two IDC research patterns characterised by two dimensions: first is the research topic and second is the same research procedure. In particular, in the theory-method IDC pattern people share the same research topic but differ in their research procedure, and in the technical IDC pattern people share the same research procedure but differ in their research topic. Research topics refer to the sub-topic of the theme people are working on. And there are two kinds of research procedures:
‘Theory-initiated research procedure begins with hypotheses derived from the literature or past research, followed by research design and data collection. In this procedure, data is collected and analysed to test the hypotheses. Data-initiated research procedure starts with observations and data analysis, followed by hypotheses formulation and data collection, an expansion or rejection cycle of the hypotheses, and ends with a more or less general theory.’ (Dai and Boos, 2019: )
We have argued (Dai and Boos, 2017) that these two patterns of interdisciplinary collaboration call for distinctive structures of knowledge sharing. In the theory-method pattern, people need to share a structure of knowledge, namely several notions as well as the same causal links between those notions. By contrast, in thetechnical pattern, they merely need to share one or several isolated notions.
However, there are a few extra things to be further developed from this approach. Even though we intend to answer how much knowledge sharing is enough for building an IDCT, we are not in a good position to prove that these two degrees of knowledge sharing are the minimum requirement for a successful collaboration. Furthermore, as the cognitive maps shown are based on a particular stage of the long-term collaboration, which eventually lasted for one and a half year.
In this chapter, I would like to extend the initial problematisation presented by introducing
the dimension of temporarily. In other words, this chapter will illustrate the whole process of the development of shared knowledge among group members in ‘CSP’. Only in this way can we check whether the degree of knowledge sharing found in the book chapter is the least requirement for building an IDCT or not, and examine the problem of instability of this shared knowledge.
As Star and his colleagues have emphasised (Star and Griesemer, 1989; Star, 2010), the structure of boundary objects should be flexible and shared by people using them. However, quite few of prior researches have illustrated the dynamics of boundary objects. In particular, when notions as shared knowledge play the role of a boundary object, how these notions are structured, shared and changed over time are key issues that has not been well understood. In this chapter, by deploying the method of cognitive mapping, we are able to not only reveal the structure of boundary objects, but also visualise how people construct them and embed them into their own knowledge systems. We will also show that with a certain structure of boundary objects unfulfilled, the collaboration is eventually dismissed.
Before we go into details of how knowledge sharing is fulfilled, it is necessary to at first introduce basic situations of the fieldwork where CSP is investigated.