This study explores the premise that knowledge in new product development proves both a barrier to and a source of innovation. To understand the problematic nature of knowledge and the boundaries that result, an ethnographic study was used to understand how knowledge is structured differently across the four primary functions that are dependent on each other in the creation and production of a high-volume product. A pragmatic view of “knowledge in practice ” is developed, describing knowledge as localized, embedded, and invested within a function and how, when working across functions, consequences often arise that generate problematic knowledge boundaries. The use of a boundary object is then described as a means of representing, learning about, and transforming knowledge to resolve the consequences that exist at a given boundary. Finally, this pragmatic view of knowledge and boundaries is proposed as a framework to revisit the differentiation and integration of knowledge.

This paper uses the growing volume of scholarly work on ‘water and politics ’ to conceptually and methodologically frame an approach to the social analysis of water resources management. This paper sets out the thrust and focus of such a ‘political sociology of water resources management’. The framing draws theoretical insights from sociology, development studies, and, obviously, water resources studies. The main theoretical inputs are: a) critical realism as the general ontological and epistemological foundation (Bhaskar, 1989; Sayer, 1984); b) sociological theory on structure-agency dynamics (Giddens, 1984; Archer, 1995) and the notion of public sociology (Burawoy, 2005a); development studies ’ understanding of the different meanings of ‘development ’ (Thomas, 2000); d) theory on politics and social power (Kerkvliet, 1990; Lukes, 2005); and e) my own reading of the water resources literature through the lens of the boundary concept of ‘water control’. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 1 explains where the attempt at defining a field of water resources management studies in this particular way comes from. The section situates the field in relation to development sociology as the intersection of sociology and development studies; discusses how the notions of discipline and scientific community help to understand the field’s characteristics; and briefly presents my own intellectual trajectory as part of this account. Section 2 discusses the object of a political sociology of water resources management. That discussion has four

This work analyzes the central role of interpretation in non-routine design. Based on this analysis, a theory of computer support for interpretation in cooperative design is constructed. The theory is grounded in studies of design and interpretation. It is illustrated by mechanisms provided by a software substrate for computer-based design environments, applied to a sample task of lunar habitat design. Computer support of

Abstract: This paper presents a model of learning as a social process incorporating multiple distinguishable phases that constitute a cycle of personal and social knowledge-building. It explicitly considers the relationship of processes associated with individual minds to those considered to be socio-cultural. This model of collaborative knowledge-building incorporates insights from various theories of understanding and learning in hopes of providing a useful conceptual framework for the design of CSCL software, specifically collaborative knowledgebuilding environments (KBEs). By naming a set of cognitive and social processes, it suggests areas for computer support, including a set of specific illustrative KBE components.

This chapter discusses a core phenomenon for a theory of CSCL: building collaborative knowing. Rather than reviewing, one after another, various theories that are currently influential in the field of CSCL (and that are described in other chapters), a view of collaboration is outlined here that

Abstract: In the information age, lifelong learning and collaboration are essential aspects of most innovative work. Fortunately, the computer technology which drives the information explosion also has the potential to help individuals and groups to learn much of what they need to know on demand. In particular, applications on the Internet can be designed to capture knowledge as it is generated within a community of practice and to deliver relevant knowledge when it is useful. Computer-based design environments for skilled domain workers have recently graduated from research prototypes to commercial products, supporting the learning of individual designers. Such systems do not, however, adequately support the collaborative nature of work or the evolution of knowledge within communities of practice. If innovation is to be supported within collaborative efforts, these domain-oriented design environments (DODEs) must be extended to become collaborative information environments (CIEs), capable of providing effective community memories for managing information and learning within constantly evolving collaborative contexts. In particular, CIEs must provide functionality that facilitates the construction of new knowledge and the shared understanding necessary to use this knowledge

When I first became interested in in-depth case-study research, I was trying to understand how power and rationality shape each other and form the urban environments in which we live (Flyvbjerg, 1998). It was clear to me that in order to understand a complex issue like this, in-depth case-study research was necessary. It was equally clear, however, that my teachers and colleagues kept dissuading me from employing this particular research methodology. ‘You cannot generalize from a single case’, some would say, ‘and social science is about generalizing. ’ Others would argue that the case study may be well suited for pilot studies but not for full-fledged research schemes. Others again would comment that the case study is subjective, giving too much scope for the researcher’s own interpretations. Thus the validity of case studies would be wanting, they argued. At first, I did not know how to respond to such claims, which clearly formed the conventional wisdom about case-study research. I decided therefore to find out where the claims come from and whether they are correct. This chapter contains what I discovered.

. This work belongs to a family of research efforts, called microtheories and aimed at describing the static meaning of all lexical categories in several languages in the framework of the MikroKosmos project on computational semantics. The latter also involves other static microtheories describing world knowledge and syntax-semantics mapping as well as dynamic microtheories connected with the actual process of text analysis. This paper describes our approach to determining and representing adjectival meaning, compares it with the body of knowledge on adjectives in literature and presents a detailed, practically tested methodology and heuristics for the acquisition of lexical entries for adjectives. The work was based on the set of over 6,000 English and about 1,500 Spanish adjectives obtained from task-oriented corpora. Introduction The topic of this paper is the information about adjectival meaning which should be included in a computational lexicon. Thus, we concentrate on...

Highlighting the problems posed by a "unitary" conceptualization of the household, a number of economists have in recent years proposed alternative models. These models, especially those embodying the bargaining approach, provide a useful framework for analyzing gender relations and throw some light on how gender asymmetries are constructed and contested. At the same time, the models have paid inadequate or no attention to some critical aspects of intrahousehold gender dynamics, such as: what factors (especially qualitative ones) affect bargaining power? What is the role of social norms and social perceptions in the bargaining process and how might these factors themselves be bargained over? Are women less motivated than men by self-interest and might this affect bargaining outcomes? Most discussions on bargaining also say little about gender relations beyond the household, and about the links between extrahousehold and intrahousehold bargaining power. This paper spells out the nature ...

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