Actors in Collaboration: Sociotechnical Influence on Practice-Research Collaboration

Abstract: There has long been a concern about the research-practice gap within Library andInformation Science (LIS). Several authors have highlighted the disconnectionbetween the world of professional practice, interested in service and informationsystem development, and the world of the academy, focused on the development oftheory and the progress of the discipline. A virtual organization, such as acollaboratory, might support collaboration between LIS professionals andacademics in research, potentially transforming the way research between thesetwo groups is undertaken.The purpose of this study was to examine how sociotechnical aspects of workorganization influence the initiation, development, and conclusion of collaborationbetween LIS academics and professionals in distributed research projects. Thestudy examined the development of three collaborative projects from the start tocompletion in two countries, Italy and another European country. The data analysisaimed at deriving implications for the further development of theory on remotescientific collaboration, and for the design of a sustainable collaboratory to supportsmall-scale, distributed research projects between LIS academics and professionals.The research design, data collection, and data analysis were informed by Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), in particular by Callon’s model of translation of interests.Qualitative interviews and analysis of literary inscriptions formed the key sources ofdata for the three case studies.The analysis of how and why collaborations between LIS academics andprofessionals initiated and developed revealed that the initial motivation to pursuecollaboration has to do with the lack of economic and organizational resources oneither or both sides, and with a genuine interest in a topic by both academics andprofessionals. The case studies in this study were decentralized and bottom-upprojects in which LIS academics and professionals pursued collaboration becausethey had a genuine interest in a given topic and not because they were mandatedby their employers, or they hoped to be acknowledged and promoted by them on thebasis of their participation in the project. Market conditions and/or institutionalpressures did not exert much influence on the start and development of thesecollaborations, although one project was influenced by political considerations andfunding conditions in healthcare.The patterns emerged from the findings of the three cases underpin thedevelopment of a sociotechnical framework aimed at providing a betterunderstanding of remote collaboration between academics and professionals notonly in LIS but also in other fields affected by the research-practice gap.