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Leonardi, Paul M. (M.A. Communication) The Mythos of Engineering Culture: A Study of Communicative Performances and Interaction Thesis directed by Assistant Professor Michele H. Jackson Across a wide variety of literatures, researchers consistently identify similar values and practices that characterize "engineering culture." Engineers themselves are aware that they belong to a professional culture that sets explicit guidelines for what it means to be an engineer. The amazing coherence and persistence of engineering culture suggests that there is a certain mythos surrounding it. Recently, professional engineering associations and engineering scholars have pointed to the importance of group work in the field of engineering and have suggested that engineers are not adequately prepared to work well with others. As Barley (1996) contends, the nature of work in the U.S. is changing dramatically and the most serious barriers to adapting successfully to these changes are likely to be cultural. Moreover, in passing, recent engineering scholars have suggested that the culture of engineering may impeded the collaborative process of a team (Ingram & Parker, 2002). This thesis explores the intersections between engineering culture and group interaction by examining the ways in which the mythos of engineering culture plays out in communicative performance. Through interviews and participant observation iv of engineering students at the University of Colorado, I adopt a cultural communicative performance perspective (Pacanowsky & O'Donnell-Trujillo, 1983) to study how the mythos of engineering culture is performed in engineers' interactions with one another. This study shows that the mythos of engineering culture does shape the communicative performances constitutive of engineering c...

Trust is a key element of knowledge work: what we know depends largely on others. This paper discusses the concepts of communities of practice and epistemic cultures, and their implication for design of digital libraries that support data sharing, with particular reference to practices of trust and credibility. It uses an empirical study of a biodiversity digital library of data from a variety of sources to illustrate implications digital library design and operation. It concludes that diversity and uncomfortable boundary areas typify, not only digital library user groups, but the design and operation of digital libraries.

The ways in which scientists communicate have long attracted scholars ’ attention (e.g., Meadows, 1998). Structural-functionalist accounts of how science works as a social system (Merton, 1976) coexist (and sometimes compete) with thickly descriptive laboratory accounts of science-in-action (e.g., Latour & Woolgar, 1979), discipline-specific mappings of communicative processes (e.g., Garvey & Griffith, 1971) and painstaking socio-historical accounts of scientific practice (e.g., Shapin, 1994). Science, sometimes seen as “the premier knowledge institution throughout the world ” (Knorr Cetina, 1999, p. 1), has been studied intensively, and scientists themselves are a much-observed species, both from afar and also up close in their natural habitats. Knowing how scientists work, how they interact with their peers and publics, is not just intrinsically interesting to ethnographers, sociologists of science, and sundry others, but has a bearing on the development of effective academic information resources and information support systems. Why that is the case will shortly become clear. A great deal of scientific communication, indeed, scholarly communication in general, is informal in nature. Information diffusion depends on the conductivity of socio-cognitive networks, sometimes referred to as “invisible colleges ” (Crane, 1972). Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of science, to appropriate the language of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979), is to produce inscriptions—to publish. Scientists,

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Many people contributed to the completion of my dissertation, and it gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the numerous forms of assistance I received. Faculty and staff of the University of Michigan (UM) School of Information (SI) provided unlimited support, encouragement, and guidance throughout my studies. Initial thanks go to my committee members. My chair, Associate Professor Margaret Hedstrom, mentored me through each stage of the program. Her wisdom, her confidence in me, and her ability to offer comments of just the right kind at exactly the right time helped me to sharpen my thinking, to improve my writing, and to achieve more than I thought possible. Associate Professor Paul N. Edwards introduced me to the field of science studies and offered advice that enhanced the presentation of my research. Professor Jeffrey K. MacKie Mason and Assistant Professor Brian Athey accepted a methodological approach different from their own and offered comments that substantially improved my dissertation. Others at SI also assisted me. Associate Dean and Professor Gary Olson played a substantial role in making SI a wonderful place to pursue a doctoral education. Professor Judy Olson provided support at a critical time in my research. Associate Dean

Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation Ecole des Mines de Paris

Since the advent of the world-wide web, academic researchers have constructed web pages to present a view of themselves, their work, their associations and their interests. This novel form of self-presentation has drawn a lot of attention over the past few years, prompting not only psychologists, but also social analysts, educators and software developers, to reflect on the ways in which technology pervades our self-presentations. Personal home pages are not, however, the only way in which scientists present themselves through technology construction and use—nor even the primary way. In this paper, we examine the technologies that oceanographers use to manage professional identity within their sociotechnical networks.

In this paper, I draw on interview data gathered in the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to address recent problems stemming from collaborative research activity that stretches the boundaries of the traditional scientific authorship model. While authorship has historically been attributed to individuals and small groups, thereby making it relatively easy to tell who made major contributions to the work, recent collaborations have involved hundreds or thousands of individuals. Printing all of these names in the author list on publications can mean difficulties in discerning the nature or extent of individual contributions, which has significant implications for hiring and promotion procedures. This can also make collaborative research less attractive to scientists at the outset of a project. I discuss the issues that physicists are considering as they grapple with what it means to be “an author, ” in addition to suggesting that future work in this area draw on the emerging economics literature on “mechanism design ” in considering how credit can be attributed in ways that both ensure proper attribution and induce scientists to put forth their best effort. 2