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Integrating Communities Of Practice In Technology Development Projects, Karin Garrety, P L. Robertson, R. Badham
Integrating Communities Of Practice In Technology Development Projects, Karin Garrety, P L. Robertson, R. Badham
Karin Garrety
Technology development projects usually benefit when knowledge and expertise are drawn from a variety of sources, including potential users. Orchestrating the involvement of people from disparate groups is a crucial task for project managers. It requires finding a balance between differentiation, when teams work in isolation, and integration, when groups come together to exchange knowledge. This article argues that a “community of practice” perspective can help project managers to achieve this balance, by drawing attention to the assumptions, interests, skills, and formal and tacit knowledge of the different groups involved. Successful integration can be achieved by ensuring that the developing …
The Politics Of Sociotechnical Intervention: An Interactionist View, Karin Garrety, R Badham
The Politics Of Sociotechnical Intervention: An Interactionist View, Karin Garrety, R Badham
Karin Garrety
In this article, we apply concepts from symbolic interactionism - a well-established tradition of interpretivist sociology - to investigate the social and political processes involved in a sociotechnical intervention. The intervention was designed to elicit operator involvement in an experimental trial of an advanced manufacturing system at an industrial site in Australia. The interactionist concepts of social worlds, boundary objects and trajectories are used to explore the interrelationships among the theoretical, practical and contextual elements of intervention. We believe that these concepts are flexible intellectual resources that can extend and enrich our understanding of the politics involved in the shaping …