Creating hybrid knowledge: A role for the professional integrationist.

摘要

Hybrid knowledge is introduced as a concept to describe the emergent result of an integrative synthesis of diverse kinds of knowledge. This is a frequent source of innovation and a core rationale of interdisciplinary collaborations, but it is usually only identified in retrospect; little is known about how hybrid knowledge is created in practice.; This study addresses the question of how hybrid knowledge is created in the collaborative design of an environmental information system that merged diverse people, documents and data sources in an explicit attempt to create new knowledge. The investigation focuses on the concept of connection work, defined as activity directed toward creating opportunities for the exchange of diverse types of knowledge. Data was collected via participant observation, document analysis and interviews, resulting in a narrative and social network analysis of the project, and a usability analysis of the system. The changing relationships of core and peripheral participants are identified, as well as the social and technical boundary objects across which people from diverse disciplines communicated. The results suggest that though some of the collaborative and integrative aspirations of the project were not achieved, connection work did take place both in document-related activities such as merging different classification schemes, and in social processes such as informal information sharing. The people who did connection work tended to be more central in terms of information sharing, tended to be higher information receivers, and could articulate partial understanding of the roles and concerns of other project members. A key boundary object was a narrative of exploration, which helped unify the design of the site and link disparate collection items, while illustrating the diverse roots of environmental knowledge. Some connection work was underestimated, delegated or ignored, which negatively impacted the finished system.; The results suggest a framework for a class of professional integrationists, who would function in tandem with specialists and actively seek to create connections between disparate forms of knowledge in future collaborative environments.