Abstract
This paper deals with emerging kinds of collaboration between researchers, funding agencies and ICT (Information and Communications Technology) experts. The goal of this paper is to analyze the challenges and opportunities for researchers presented by such collaborations. The analysis is based on a sociocultural approach, and leads to the following conclusions: (a) the main challenges to collaboration arise from the fact that partners’ communities have different goals and use different sets of mediation tools, (b) there are different ways for researchers to cope with more powerful partners such as major funding agencies (refusing collaboration, pseudo collaboration, asymmetric collaboration, and real partnership), (c) appropriation of mediation tools developed by partners could be useful for researchers, (d) collaboration with partners could be a source of new theoretically interesting phenomenon, and (e) communication with partners who are not familiar with our routine discourses might help us to improve our own understanding.
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Notes
It would be the case of mastery without appropriation described by Wertsch: “Indeed, some very interesting forms of mediated action are characterized by the mastery, but not by the appropriation of, a cultural tool. In such instances of mediated action, the agent may use a cultural tool but does so with a feeling of conflict or resistance. When such conflict or resistance grows sufficiently strong, an agent may refuse to use the cultural tool altogether. In such instances, we might say that agents do not view that cultural tool as belonging to them. If agents are still required to use this mediational means, their performance is often characterized by clear form of resistance such as dissimulation.” (Wertsch 1998, p. 56)
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Baucal, A. Reflective Sociocultural Psychology: Lost and Found in Collaboration with Funding Agencies and ICT Experts. Integr. psych. behav. 41, 169–177 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9018-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-007-9018-7