This article concerns an action research with the technical, medical and social people of a medical equipment rental company (ADL) company. The study is about the knowledge involved in health and social collaboration. ADL’s mission implies for interprofessional cooperation beyond the medical and technical processing. The company has chosen to extend its field of action with a patient’s social treatment. To better understand the nature of the link between social and other areas of work, the subject of (...) action research is to know under what conditions the employees report of patients in social service. Beyond the challenge for the patient and for the company, the reflections on a non-compliance by the patient, causes shifts in the positions of professionals. (shrink)

As development of research ethics competencies is in the focus in higher education institutions, it is crucial to understand how to support the learning process during such training. While there is plenty of research on how to scaffold children’s learning of cognitive skills, there is limited knowledge on how to enhance collaborative case-based learning of research ethics competencies in HE contexts. Our aim was to identify whether, how and when scaffolding is needed with various expertise levels to support development (...) of ethics competencies. To identify and evaluate scaffolding during collaborative case-based ethics training we synthesised a scaffolding framework consisting of three levels: techniques, mechanisms and process. We organised 5 training sessions where 46 participants were involved. Data was collected as part of action research from group-work recordings and transcribed verbatim. Deductive qualitative analysis was implemented on transcripts based on the scaffolding framework. Our analysis revealed that structural scaffolding alone is not always efficient with bachelor level students, they also require oral scaffolding when the need becomes apparent. Master’s level students benefited most from wording the issues they needed to focus on. Doctoral students and senior academics needed scaffolding to maintain goal orientation. We end our article with some recommendations for facilitators of ethics education, and encourage using the scaffolding framework also in complex problem-solving beyond ethics training. (shrink)

While research ethics and developing respective competencies is gaining prominence in higher education institutions, there is limited knowledge about the learning process and scaffolding during such training. The global health crisis has made the need for facilitator-independent training materials with sufficient support even more pronounced. To understand how knowledge building takes place and how computer-supported collaborative learning supports research ethics learning, we analysed: 1) how the participants’ understanding was displayed during the collaborative learning process utilising the developed ethics (...) resource; and 2) whether the scaffolding provided by the resource supported the learning process. Epistemic evidence was collected during design-based research involving 36 PhD students and researchers with supervisory experience divided into 11 groups. Data was analysed qualitatively utilising the SOLO taxonomy. The results revealed that: 1) participants displayed high levels of understanding and the need for the facilitator support decreased with the use of the online ethics resource; 2) the learners were able to evaluate their learning outcomes with satisfactory accuracy; 3) when used linearly, the online ethics resource helped learners to achieve high levels of understanding even when the scaffolding gradually faded. Based on the lessons learnt, design principles were extracted to develop research ethics competencies in higher education, and also recommendations for research ethics training were outlined. (shrink)

To help consider why some groups solve problems successfully but others do not, this article introduces a framework for analyzing sequences of group members' actions. The dimensions of evaluation of the previous action , knowledge content , and invitational form organize twenty-seven individual actions, each with specific functions and conditions of use. Evaluations, repetitions and invitational forms link actions together to create coherent social interactions, and thereby serve as possible quantitative measures of collaboration quality. Specific individual action (...) also helps constitute specific social interactions. Six types of social interactions that occur during group problem-solving are organized by problem knowledge distribution and degree of cooperation . This framework's mutually exclusive categories and multi-function individual actions allow statistical analyses of many group interactions both in their entirety and infine detail. (shrink)

In this article, we expand the analytical and theoretical foundations of the study of knowledge commons in the context of more classical agrarian commons, such as seed commons. We show that it is possible to overcome a number of criticisms of earlier work by Ostrom on natural commons and its excludability/rivalry matrix in addressing the inclusive social practices of “commoning”, defined as a way of living and acting for the preservation of the commons. Our empirical analysis emphasizes, using the (...) most recent advances in the IAD/ses framework, the distributed and collaborative knowledge governance in a French peasant seed network as a key driver for reintroducing cultivated agrobiodiversity and on-farm seed conservation of ancient and landrace varieties. These inclusive peasant seed groups developed alternative peer-to-peer models of collaborative peasant-led community-based breeding and grassroots innovations in the search for more resilient population varieties. Our results highlight the various models of collective action within the network and discuss the organizational tradeoffs of opting out of peasant seed activities and recreating a shared collective knowledge base on the benefits of restoring cultivated agrobiodiversity. It helps us better understand how modern peasant seed groups function as epistemic communities which contributes to envisioning alternative agricultural systems. (shrink)

The paper uses the Offenders' Social Reintegration Project, run between 1988 and 1998 by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, to discuss the characteristics of new forms of action research and to reflect on the main debates within action research literature. Firstly, new forms of action research dealing with community issues tend to take place within complex systems, aiming to bring potential partners together and to facilitate the development of networks of organisations. Networking presupposes a more open-ended (...) mode of research and opens the question of participation of the social groups concerned. The varying and changing degrees of participation within the Project are described with reference to the role of the researchers and the discrepancy between formal and informal partnerships. Secondly, the relation between research and action is dealt with via a discussion of the different types of knowledge produced in the course of the Project and their appropriateness for informing and evaluating practice. The implications of these arguments for the scientific status of action research and the paradigm within which it can be located are also addressed. Thirdly, the paper discusses the role of the various institutional contexts in shaping and constraining possible types of research and action. Finally, the type of change pursued by action research projects is considered with reference to the ongoing debate within action research literature on the role of politics, leading to the acknowledgement of the inevitable implication of political negotiations and power in any initiative towards social change. (shrink)

Quite shortly after the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was formed, Michel Foucault delivered a public announcement in which he called for a generalized practice of “active intolerance” against a wide range of disciplinary institutions. Due to three consistent scholarly reductions of the GIP’s legacy, the sense of “active intolerance” remains nebulous at best. Cast, by turns, as merely the offshoot of Foucauldian theory, a point of prison data collection, or a short-lived social movement (forgetting its lengthy successor: the Prisoners (...) class='Hi'>Action Committee), the GIP has been regularly interpreted as a relatively circumscribed intellectual enterprise. Against these three reductions, we develop an account of the GIP as an inherently collaborative abolitionist effort that was trained on subjugated knowledges. And this, in fact, is the work of active intolerance. (shrink)

Background Retraction is a mechanism for alerting readers to unreliable material and other problems in the published scientific and scholarly record. Retracted publications generally remain visible and searchable, but the intention of retraction is to mark them as “removed” from the citable record of scholarship. However, in practice, some retracted articles continue to be treated by researchers and the public as valid content as they are often unaware of the retraction. Research over the past decade has identified a number of (...) factors contributing to the unintentional spread of retracted research. The goal of the Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: Shaping a Research and Implementation Agenda (RISRS) project was to develop an actionable agenda for reducing the inadvertent spread of retracted science. This included identifying how retraction status could be more thoroughly disseminated, and determining what actions are feasible and relevant for particular stakeholders who play a role in the distribution of knowledge. -/- Methods These recommendations were developed as part of a year-long process that included a scoping review of empirical literature and successive rounds of stakeholder consultation, culminating in a three-part online workshop that brought together a diverse body of 65 stakeholders in October–November 2020 to engage in collaborative problem solving and dialogue. Stakeholders held roles such as publishers, editors, researchers, librarians, standards developers, funding program officers, and technologists and worked for institutions such as universities, governmental agencies, funding organizations, publishing houses, libraries, standards organizations, and technology providers. Workshop discussions were seeded by materials derived from stakeholder interviews (N = 47) and short original discussion pieces contributed by stakeholders. The online workshop resulted in a set of recommendations to address the complexities of retracted research throughout the scholarly communications ecosystem. -/- Results The RISRS recommendations are: (1) Develop a systematic cross-industry approach to ensure the public availability of consistent, standardized, interoperable, and timely information about retractions; (2) Recommend a taxonomy of retraction categories/classifications and corresponding retraction metadata that can be adopted by all stakeholders; (3) Develop best practices for coordinating the retraction process to enable timely, fair, unbiased outcomes; and (4) Educate stakeholders about pre- and post-publication stewardship, including retraction and correction of the scholarly record. -/- Conclusions Our stakeholder engagement study led to 4 recommendations to address inadvertent citation of retracted research, and formation of a working group to develop the Communication of Retractions, Removals, and Expressions of Concern (CORREC) Recommended Practice. Further work will be needed to determine how well retractions are currently documented, how retraction of code and datasets impacts related publications, and to identify if retraction metadata (fails to) propagate. Outcomes of all this work should lead to ensuring retracted papers are never cited without awareness of the retraction, and that, in public fora outside of science, retracted papers are not treated as valid scientific outputs. (shrink)

Through a comparative, longitudinal analysis of the wine industry in two Argentine provinces, this article finds that different political approaches to reform and not simply socioeconomic endowments determine the ability of societies to build new institutions for economic upgrading. A “depoliticization” approach emphasizes the imposition of arm’s-length incentives by a powerful, insulated government but exacerbates social fragmentation and impedes upgrading. A “participatory restructuring” approach promotes the creation and maintenance of new public-private institutions for upgrading via rules of inclusive membership and (...) multiparty, deliberative governance. This latter approach can facilitate collaboration and knowledge creation among the government and previously isolated, even antagonistic, stakeholder groups. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems (...) will need to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Quadruple Helix Collaborations (QHCs) is a cooperation model in which industry, government, academia, and the public interact to innovate. This paper analyses the impact of a training intervention to provide specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes to deal with barriers commonly found in the progress of QHCs. We designed, implemented, and evaluated three training programs in Austrian, Colombian, Danish, and Spanish institutions. We analysed trainees’ (n = 66) and trainers’ (n = 9) perceptions to identify the competencies acquired with the (...) intervention and the approach’s limitations. We used online questionnaires (35 trainees; 9 trainers), semi-structured interviews (10 trainees), and a focus group (6 trainers). Trainees answered positively regarding their self-perception about the impact of the course and highlighted the acquisition of inspiration for their practice (score 4.1 out of 5.0) and knowledge (3.7). In contrast, they perceived that a deeper interaction with other participants (2.7) was challenging. After the courses, 74% of respondents indicated that they know more about how QHCs work in practice, and 86% about collaboration or engagement methods. Moreover, participants plan to be more sensitive towards setting common goals (71%) and power imbalances (63%). Trainers’ perceptions align with those expressed by participants, except that they considered that the interaction amongst participants during the course was higher. Qualitative analysis of interviews with participants and the focus group with trainers provides more detail about the strengths and weaknesses of the intervention. Our study shows that the collaborative design and implementation of training impact the participant’s learning competencies, with potential implications in their medium- to long-term practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic ExcellenceAdam Stock (bio)As an academic field, there is in some important ways nothing special about utopian studies. Granted, our object of inquiry may look beyond the present toward what Ruth Levitas terms the Imaginary Reconstruction of Society, but we are still workers in what Darren Webb calls the “corporate-imperial” university.1 Webb argues that within the university we can at best (...) protect “bolt holes, breathing spaces, and places of refuge” that can function as “fleeting, transitory, small-scale experiences of utopian possibility.” As academics, our greater value to utopian politics therefore involves using our “knowledge and resources... in the service of a collaborative process of memory- and story-making, pulling together disparate inchoate dreams and yearnings in order to generate a utopian vision that can help inform, guide, and mobilize long-term collective action for systemic change.”2 Such work uses resources and the products of labor within the academy in the service of ends beyond and at times against it. In other words, utopianism within the academy is necessarily complicit in the academy’s constitutive material relations, but it can also be oppositional in intellectual and—more importantly—activist senses to the academy’s ideological form. In other words, whether or not a given [End Page 517] project in the field of utopian studies is politically utopian does not depend on its material basis (i.e., how it is funded) so much as its content, in the senses of both the work that it does and the ways in which it captures and mobilizes available resources. Hence it is possible to imagine both regressive and emancipatory research projects in our field that capture or co-opt additional resources, including both internal and external funding. It is, however, a mark of emancipatory projects that they will use these resources to the ends Webb describes.Implicit in Webb’s argument is an acceptance that politically useful utopian work should be socially engaged beyond the confines of the university campus. However, engaging in utopian politics from within inegalitarian university structures (via what is institutionally termed “outreach” and “engagement” work) should be pursued with caution. Even researchers and educators acting in good faith can easily end up exploiting or causing damage to social movements, support groups and activists. Good allyship and effective support cannot be reduced to institutional mechanisms like ethics committee compliance or equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) initiatives, even when these go beyond “lip service” to become meaningful acts.3 For projects involving external collaborators with a connection to the sort of “long-term, collective action” Webb describes, research design must walk a tightrope between being supportive of utopian politics beyond the university and responding to instrumental pressures within it.Here I suggest as an academic field utopian studies is at least a little special as it mediates dialectically between theory and practice at one level while developing a conceptual framework of the dialectic between theory and practice at another. Within what Richter et al term “the paradox of universities as colonizing and liberatory spaces for community engagement and activism” the utopian method is well placed to ask questions about how we engage with the given conditions of the academy, including competitive research funding grants.4 I begin below with a discussion of the relationship of theory and academic work to the social with reference to utopian theory and then apply this to questions about our wider complicity within a discursive regime I term “academic excellence.” I argue this regime is central to the “prestige economy” upon which some of the structural inequalities of our sector are based. I conclude by suggesting that working within the constraints of the given while remaining orientated toward utopian politics in an ethical manner requires close attention to how we navigate the relationship between utopian theory and political practice. [End Page 518]Theory, Praxis, PracticeIn the final chapter of his recent monograph Becoming Utopian, Tom Moylan forms a cogent argument about the praxis of utopian-oriented politics with reference to Saul Alinsky’s community organizing and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed.5 The writings of both figures are grounded in... (shrink)

Multi-stakeholder initiatives for biodiversity conservation on working landscapes often necessitate strategies to facilitate learning in order to foster successful collaboration. To investigate the learning processes that both undergird and result from collaborative efforts, this case study employs the concept of boundary work as a lens to examine learning between rice growers and conservation professionals in California’s Central Valley, who were engaged in a collaborative research project focused on migratory bird conservation. Through analysis of workshop observations, project documents, and interviews with (...) rice growers and conservation professionals, we identified five distinct factors of the collaborative research process that influenced learning amongst these two groups: having mutually beneficial goals, sharing ownership of the collaborative research process, building trust, integrating knowledge, and institutional alignment. We also examined and identified learning outcomes for both rice growers and conservation professionals, which included new knowledge of the social-ecological system, new practices around farming and collaboration, and shifting identities. Our findings suggest that applying these factors and outcomes for learning when structuring collaborative research, and other multi-stakeholder initiatives, can foster learning amongst diverse stakeholder groups to support new approaches for balancing resource use and adaptive management. (shrink)

Realism in Action is a selection of essays written by leading representatives in the fields of action theory and philosophy of mind, philosophy of the social sciences and especially the nature of social action, and of epistemology and philosophy of science. Practical reason, reasons and causes in action theory, intending and trying, and folk-psychological explanation are some of the topics discussed by these leading participants. A particular emphasis is laid on trust, commitments and social institutions, on (...) the possibility of grounding social notions in individual social attitudes, on the nature of social groups, institutions and collective intentionality, and on common belief and common knowledge. Applications to the social sciences include, e.g., a look at the Erklären-Verstehen controversy in economics, and at constructivist and realist views on archeological reconstructions of the past. (shrink)

Philosophical understanding of experimental scientific practice is impeded by disciplinary differences, notably that between philosophy and sociology of science. Severing the two limits the stock of philosophical case studies to narrowly circumscribed experimental episodes, centered on individual scientists or technologies. The complex relations between scientists and society that permeate experimental research are left unexamined. In consequence, experimental fields rich in social interactions have received only patchy attention from philosophers of science. This paper sketches a remedy for both the symptom and (...) its root cause. An empirical study of social interactions in an established field of biomedicine grounds a robust account of success in experimental practice. The core idea is the concept of collaboration, of participants working together on a common project toward a shared goal. The interactive social integument of experimental research is both examined and enacted in a study integrating socio-historical research and philosophical investigation. The two approaches are used in concert to explicate the concept of scientific objectivity. Their joint explication of this contested epistemic ideal demonstrates that philosophical and sociological approaches can work together toward a social epistemology of scientific practice. The explication is in three stages. First, a minimal framework for investigating collaborative activities is established. Social action is understood and evaluated in terms of the connection between shared goals that participants hope to accomplish together, and the coordinated means by which they try to do so. This connection is explicated as participation, a relation mediating between a group and its members, which includes minimal constraints of instrumental rationality. Second, this framework is fleshed out via empirical study of scientific practices. The focal case examines the intersection of immunology and stem cell research in mid-20th century biomedicine, tracing the key social interactions within and among laboratory groups, as the field of blood stem cell research emerged in the 1960s and advanced throughout the next four decades. The study yields a robust empirical result. Participants consistently recognize two aspects of scientific success: construction of improved models of blood cell development, and formation of new boundaries among scientific groups. In the third and final stage, this result is generalized to other experimental episodes and shown to fit with recent accounts of models in scientific practice. The generalized result approximates a familiar normative view of scientific knowledge. An epistemic ideal of scientific objectivity in practice is then derived from this robust general result, using the minimal constraints on rational participation. The derivation is analogous to specification of ends in moral philosophy; given the means taken and assuming some hope of success, what must the goal of scientific inquiry be like? The aim of science so conceived corresponds to a classic conception of scientific objectivity: knowledge independent of epistemic criteria specific to particular persons or groups. This result weaves together sociological and philosophical accounts of science, explicating the epistemic ideal of objectivity in relation to social aspects of scientific practice. This undercuts the entrenched dualism between normative, vs. descriptive approaches to scientific knowledge. Socio-historical study of science does not deflate, but vindicates, scientific objectivity. Philosophy and sociology are recast as collaborating participants in articulating social epistemology of science. (shrink)

BackgroundAs moral case deliberations (MCDs) have increasingly been implemented in health care institutions as a form of ethics support, it is relevant to know whether and how MCDs actually contribute to positive changes in care. Insight is needed on what actually happens in daily care practice following MCD sessions. This study aimed at investigating the impact of MCD and exploring how ‘impact of MCD’ should be conceptualized for future research.MethodsA multiple-case study was conducted in a care organization for people with (...) intellectual disabilities and/or acquired brain injury, by observing MCD sessions as ‘cases’, followed by interviews with health care professionals concerning the follow-up to these cases, and a focus group with involved MCD facilitators. A conceptual scheme concerning the possible impact formed the basis for analysis: (1) individual moral awareness; (2) the actions of health care professionals; (3) collaboration among health care professionals; (4) the concrete situation of the client; (5) the client’s quality of care and life; (6) the organizational and policy level.ResultsAccording to interviewees, their moral awareness and their collaboration, both among colleagues and with clients’ relatives, improved after MCD. Perceived impact on client situation, quality of care/life and the organizational level varied among interviewees or was difficult to define or link to MCD. Three aspects were added to the conceptual scheme concerning the impact of MCD: (a) preparations and expectations prior to the MCD session; (b) a translational step between the conclusions of the MCD session and practical events in the following period, and (c) collaboration with clients’ relatives. A negative impact of MCD was also found on misunderstandings among participants and disappointment about lack of follow-up.ConclusionsConcretizing and conceptualizing the ‘impact’ of MCD is complicated as many factors play a role either before or during the transition from MCD to practice. It is important to consider ‘impact’ in a broad sense and to relate it to the goals and context of the MCD in question. Future studies in this field should pay additional attention to the preparations, content and process involved in ethics support, including clients’ and relatives’ experiences. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in improving the teaching–learning process at all levels of education, including higher education. In recent years, university institutions have been taking action to renew and modernize the way in which they teach and learn, making the process more dynamic and closer to the current social reality. Competencies such as the ability to work in a team have become essential for the successful implementation of innovative methodologies in which student participation is particularly relevant. Student acceptance (...) is key to the success of any teaching methodology; however, the influence of group work skills on satisfaction with innovative methodologies such as project-based learning has not yet been tested among university students. Thus, the objective of this study is to explore the association between group work competencies and satisfaction with PBL. A total sample of 359 students from two Spanish universities participated in the research. Our results reveal that there is a significant and positive relationship between competencies related to group work and satisfaction with PBL. In addition, a multiple regression analysis shows that the competencies “Conception of group work,” “Usefulness of group work,” “Planning of group work by teachers,” and “Group norms” increase satisfaction with the use of the PBL methodology. This work expands our knowledge about the role in increasing students’ satisfaction that is played by the ability of college students to work as a team. These findings could also guide teachers interested in new teaching methodologies. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic is altering dynamics in academia, and people juggling remote work and domestic demands – including childcare – have felt impacts on their productivity. Female authors have faced a decrease in paper submission rates since the beginning of the pandemic period. The reasons for this decline in women’s productivity need to be further investigated. Here, we analyzed the influence of gender, parenthood and race on academic productivity during the pandemic period based on a survey answered by (...) 3,345 Brazilian academics from various knowledge areas and research institutions. Productivity was assessed by the ability to submit papers as planned and to meet deadlines during the initial period of social isolation in Brazil. The findings revealed that male academics – especially those without children – are the least affected group, whereas Black women and mothers are the most impacted groups. These impacts are likely a consequence of the well-known unequal division of domestic labor between men and women, which has been exacerbated during the pandemic. Additionally, our results highlight that racism strongly persists in academia, especially against Black women. The pandemic will have long-term effects on the career progression of the most affected groups. The results presented here are crucial for the development of actions and policies that aim to avoid further deepening the gender gap in academia. (shrink)

We analyse the tensions in a hybrid collaboration and how these are mitigated using boundary-spanning community impact, leading to compatibility between distinctive institutional logics. Our qualitative longitudinal study undertaken during 2011–2016 involved reviewing literature and archival data, key informant interviews, workshop and focus groups. We analysed common themes within the data, relating to our two research questions concerning how and why hybrids collaborate, and how resulting tensions are mitigated. The findings suggest a viable model of service delivery termed hybridized collaboration (...) in which the inherent tensions from different institutional logics do not prevent success. Paradoxically, multiple logics are a basis for the partnership’s existence, but the ability to achieve different and occasionally conflicting aims simultaneously can be difficult, resulting in tensions. We offer two novel insights. First, we highlight how social enterprise hybrids collaborate locally and in multi-organizational relationships. We found that the initial opportunity to collaborate was catalysed by the existence of shared objectives. Pre-existing relationships between organizations, and the existence of synergistic capabilities also influence the choice of partners. Secondly, we identify how tensions arise, and are mitigated via several factors including the pre-existing relationships, allowing for regular “spaces of negotiation” between collaborators, the shared social mission, community social impact, the resulting public relations, and shared resources and knowledge. (shrink)

Lecture was the most prevalent teaching style in the colleges and universities we attended. Hired as a lecturer by a local university, the lead author choose to approach teaching based on two principles: first to teach the way she preferred to learn, which is in groups, and second to be both a teacher and a fellow learner.Ten adult practitioners were enrolled in the graduate course Iisted as “The Trainer/Manager as Coach.” This article includes their experiences along with those of the (...) instructor / facilitator.Critical thinking and critical self-reflection are ways to help participants explore assumptions about coaching and particularly about their roles as coaches in the workplace. Critical thinking is a means of examining assumptions by identifying patterns in ourselves and in others-patterns that influence our thinking and subsequent actions. Critical self-reflection is “challenging the vaIidity of presuppositions in prior learning” (Mezirow, 1990, p. 14). Our purpose together was to develop critical thinking skills and practice critical self-reflection as they related to coaching within our practices.Participants used time between class sessions for integration of learning and self-reflection on their own assumptive worlds. Students participated in electronic dialogue and in action research. The online dialogue provided opportunities to share experiences from our places of work. It further served as a collaborative means for building a knowledge base from onIine discussion of coaching literature.Action research is a means of studying one’s practice for the purpose of improvement. Students applied an action research model to a workplace problem that involved them in the role of coach.The results were transformational for all co-Iearners. Changes took pIace in our approaches to coaching. Changes in the focus of coaching, from focusing on the coach to focusing on the learner, are prevalent. (shrink)

Organizational learning, at the broadest levels, as it has come to be understood within the organization theory and management literatures, concerns the experientially driven changes in knowledge processes, structures, and resources that enable organizations to perform skillfully in their task environments (Argote and Miron–Spektor, 2011). In this chapter, we examine routines and capabilities as an important micro–foundation for organizational learning. Adopting a micro–foundational approach in line with Barney and Felin (2013), we propose a new model for explaining how routines (...) and capabilities play a causal role in transforming experience into repertoires of (actual or potential) organization–level behavior. More specifically, we argue that routines and capabilities are built out of capacities for shared – both joint and collective – intentionality (Tomasello, 1999, 2014; Bratman, 1999a, 2014) that enable individuals to engage in complex forms of collaboration in conjunction with multiple layers of scaffolds that encompass material and symbolic resources, social processes, and cultural norms and practices (Weick, 1995; Hutchins, 1995; Clark, 1997, 2008; Orlikowski, 2007). In short, we outline what we call the ‘scaffolded joint action’ model and suggest its potential as a micro–foundation of organizational learning. (shrink)

When is an indirect report of what a speaker meant correct? The question arises in the law. The Contract Law case of Spaulding v. Morse is a good example. Following their 1932 divorce, George Morse and Ruth Morse entered into a trust agreement in 1937 for the support of their minor son Richard. In that agreement, George promised to “pay to [Spaulding as] trustee in trust for his said minor son Richard the sum of twelve hundred dollars per year, payable (...) in equal monthly installments on the first day of each month until the entrance of Richard D. Morse into some college, university or higher institution of learning beyond the completion of the high school grades, and thereupon, instead of said payments, amounting to twelve hundred dollars yearly, he shall and will then pay to the trustee payments in the sum of twenty-two hundred dollars per year for a period of said higher education but not more than four years.” Richard graduated from high school on February 5, 1946 and, in the post-WWII continuation of the draft, was inducted into the army the following day. The question in the case is whether George, by the words of the trust agreement, meant that he would pay $1,200 per year for Richard’s support while he was in the army. Is that a correct indirect report of what George meant?The explanation I offer assumes Gricean analysis of speaker meaning, and it emphasizes the role of speaker meaning typically plays in solving coordination problems. A coordination problem is a situation “in which each person wants to participate in a group action but only if others also participate.” A classic example is a political protest: “each person might want to take part in an antigovernment protest but only if there are enough total protesters to make arrests and police repression unlikely.” Coordination problems arise in more mundane settings as well – in Spaulding v. Morse, for example. Ruth and George want to mutually agree on Richard’s support: Ruth wants to commit to an arrangement only if George does, and vice versa for George. In 1937, George and Ruth solved the problem through speaker meaning. By signing the trust agreement, George, with Ruth as his audience, meant that he obligated himself to a particular support agreement. When Ruth signed, she, with George as her audience, meant that she accepted the agreement. In general, parties often solve coordination problems through speaker meaning. If, for example, enough people can communicate their commitment to participate in the protest to enough people, the protest will take place.The account assigns a central role to the fact that speaker meaning facilitates coordination by creating relevant common knowledge. Common knowledge is “the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum.” Common knowledge facilitates coordination: “Actors coordinate when they have evidence for common knowledge, and refrain from coordinating when they do not.”. (shrink)

A rise of academic capitalism over the past four decades has been well documented within many research-intensive universities. Largely missing, however, are in-depth studies of how particularly situated academic groups manage the uncertainties that come with intermittent and fickle commercial funding streams in their daily research practice and problem choice. To capture the strategies scientists adopt under these conditions, this article provides an ethnographically detailed (and true) story about how a single project in Artificial Intelligence grew over several years from (...) a peripheral idea to the very center of an academic lab’s commercial portfolio. The analysis theorizes an epistemic form—nimble knowledge production—and documents three of its lab-level features: 1) rapid prototyping to keep sunk costs low, 2) shared search for “real world problems” rather than “theoretical” ones, and 3) nimble commitment to research problem choice. While similar forms of academic knowledge transfer have been lauded as “mode 2,” “innovative,” or “hybrid” for initiating cross-institutional collaboration and pushing science beyond disciplinary silos, this case suggests it can rely on fleeting attention to problems resistant to a quick fix. (shrink)

This study challenges the conventional boundaries of philosophy by asserting that organizations can function as legitimate subjects within philosophical discourse. Western philosophy, epitomized by Descartes, has long assumed that individual human beings are the fundamental units of thought and moral agency. However, in a significant oversight, this belief overlooks the idea that organizations can think independently, leading to both virtuous and malevolent results. Epistemology lacks a clear prioritization of morally sound knowledge over potentially harmful knowledge. The advent of (...) artificial intelligence (AI) has also transformed the landscape of cognition from a primarily individual human endeavor into a joint undertaking where humans collaborate with AI entities in collective thinking and decision-making. Nevertheless, AI lacks the innate ability to discern between ethical and unethical actions. This symbiosis creates organizations as fundamental philosophical subjects, marking a significant shift in philosophical emphasis where the organization takes the center stage. Accordingly, within this emerging field, we advance four propositions as the core subjects of organization philosophy: organizations can think, organizations can create knowledge, AI can be part of an organization, and humans in the organization control moral discipline. These propositions guide the ethical coexistence of AI and human agents in organizations, emphasizing the importance of ethical deliberation in knowledge use. Moreover, the malicious use of profound knowledge hinders human progress, as illustrated in this study by an ethical examination of military institutions within organization philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women and Health Research:A Report from the Institute of MedicineAnna C. Mastroianni (bio), Ruth Faden (bio), and Daniel Federman (bio)In recent years, claims have been made by segments of the research community and by women's health advocacy groups that clinical research practices and policies have not benefitted women's health to the same extent as men's health. Central to these claims has been an assertion that women have been inadequately (...) represented as subjects of clinical studies and that as a result neither health conditions unique to women—e.g., menopause—nor women's manifestations of health problems affecting both sexes—e.g., heart disease—have been investigated sufficiently.The scientific community, including federal agencies that sponsor and regulate clinical studies, is increasingly responsive to these claims and is taking steps to raise the level of women's participation in clinical studies. Controversy and concern have surrounded these actions, however. Two of the claims that have been made are: (1) that women are more difficult to study than men because of their cyclical hormonal changes; and (2) that conducting gender-specific subgroup analyses would increase the size of study populations, raise the cost of studies, and thereby reduce the number of studies that could be performed with the limited resources available. In addition, controversy over the inclusion of women of childbearing potential and pregnant women has been particularly salient. Concerns have been expressed about avoiding potential harm to existing or potential fetuses and about the possible legal and financial ramifications of such harm. A further concern involves the perceived difficulties in enrolling women in studies and retaining them for the duration of the studies.Against this backdrop, the Office of Research on Women's Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in October 1992 to establish the Committee on the Ethical and Legal Issues Relating to the Inclusion of Women in Clinical Studies. The Committee's charge was to: (1) consider the ethical and legal implications of including women, particularly pregnant women and women of childbearing potential, in clinical studies; (2) examine known instances of litigation regarding injuries to research subjects [End Page 55] and describe existing legal liabilities and protections; and (3) provide practical advice on these issues for consideration by NIH, institutional review boards (IRBs), and clinical investigators.The 16 Committee members came from diverse backgrounds: bioethics, law, epidemiology and biostatistics, public health policy, obstetrics and gynecology, clinical research, pharmaceutical development, social and behavioral sciences, and clinical evaluative sciences.1 Chaired by two of the authors of this article, Ruth Faden and Daniel Federman, and coordinated by the third, IOM Study Director Anna Mastroianni, the Committee met five times over a fourteen-month period, convened a one-and-one-half day invitational workshop, and commissioned several background papers. The Committee's deliberations were complicated by the announcement of new federal policies late in its term. Specifically, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidelines (FDA 1993) to replace its 1977 guidelines, which prohibited the inclusion of women of childbearing potential in early phases of most clinical drug trials. In addition, Congress passed the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993 (P.L. 103-43), which contains provisions mandating the inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in NIH-sponsored clinical research. In February 1994, the IOM Committee publicly issued its final report and recommendations, Women and Health Research: Ethical and Legal Issues of Including Women in Clinical Studies, publishing the workshop presentations and commissioned papers in a separate volume.Deliberations of the CommitteeA number of issues arose at the outset as the Committee considered its charge. A few members initially believed that verification of the underrepresentation of women relative to men in clinical studies as a whole was a prerequisite to providing policy recommendations. Others believed that such an examination would be an important contribution to the knowledge base, but that it was not necessary for addressing the Committee's charge. As summarized in the Committee's report, the Committee's research indicated that firm conclusions about the relative underrepresentation of women could not be drawn from the available data because of the lack of systematic information... (shrink)

A philosopher once asked me: “Paul, how do you collaborate?” He was puzzled about how I came to have more than two dozen co-authors over the past 20 years. His puzzlement was natural for a philosopher, because co-authored articles and books are still rare in philosophy and the humanities, in contrast to science where most current research is collaborative. Unlike most philosophers, scientists know how to collaborate; this paper is about the nature of such procedural knowledge. I begin by (...) discussing three related distinctions found in philosophy and cognitive science: knowledge how vs. knowledge that, procedural vs. declarative knowledge, and explicit vs. implicit knowledge. I then document the prevalence of collaboration in the sciences and its scarcity in philosophy. In order to characterize the sorts of procedural knowledge that make collaborative research possible and fruitful, I discuss how scientists collaborate, how they learn to collaborate, and why they collaborate. Contrary to some recent suggestions by philosophers, I will argue that knowledge how often does not always reduce to knowledge that, and that collaboration has many purposes besides the pursuit of power and resources. The relative scarcity of philosophical collaborations might be explained by the nature of philosophy, if the field is viewed as inherently personal or a priori. But I argue against this view in favor of a more naturalistic one, December 2, 2005 with the implication that the main reason why philosophers do not collaborate more is that they do not know how. My account of collaboration is based on my own experience, published advice by practicing scientists, and interviews with a group of highly successful scientific collaborators who are members of the Social Psychology area of the University of Waterloo Psychology Department. For the past two decades, Waterloo’s social psychology program has flourished, both in collaborative publication and in graduate training: their former Ph.D.. (shrink)

Self-, collective, and participative efficacy are strong predictors of sustainability action. Yet, few studies have investigated the dynamics and variability of efficacy beliefs. In this transdisciplinary study, we tested such factors in the context of a peer-to-peer coaching program for sustainability volunteers, embedded in a structured-educational context. Over weekends, 2 qualified coaches trained 36 German bottom-up, student-led sustainability initiatives. These coaches instructed students in team building, envisioning, project planning, and on-campus sustainability practice. While 317 participants completed our pre-questionnaire, N (...) = 165 completed both the pre- and post-questionnaire. As hypothesized, after having participated in the coaching weekend, action skills, collaboration skills, group identification, and self-, collective, and participative efficacy all increased. The latter of these increased, to our knowledge, for the first time in environmental psychology research. Group identification and having a vision emerged as important efficacy predictors, and participative efficacy beliefs in turn predicted volunteering. Moreover, we took initial steps in investigating the interaction of psychological and structural factors from a multilevel perspective. Our analyses revealed that efficacy beliefs on the individual level were higher when the university had a green office and when the student initiative was at a small university. We conclude by proposing an empowerment model for sustainability volunteers and by discussing the practical implications of our findings. (shrink)

This book investigates how collaborative scientific practice yields scientific knowledge. At a time when most of today’s scientific knowledge is created in research groups, the author reconsiders the social character of science to address the question of whether collaboratively created knowledge should be considered as collective achievement, and if so, in which sense. Combining philosophical analysis with qualitative empirical inquiry, this book provides a comparative case study of mono- and interdisciplinary research groups, offering insight into the day-to-day (...) practice of scientists. The book includes field observations and interviews with scientists to present an empirically-grounded perspective on much-debated questions concerning research groups’ division of labor, relations of epistemic dependence and trust. (shrink)

In this paper we apply social epistemology to mathematical proofs and their role in mathematical knowledge. The most famous modern collaborative mathematical proof effort is the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. The history and sociology of this proof have been well-documented by Alma Steingart (2012), who highlights a number of surprising and unusual features of this collaborative endeavour that set it apart from smaller-scale pieces of mathematics. These features raise a number of interesting philosophical issues, but have received very (...) little attention. In this paper, we will consider the philosophical tensions that Steingart uncovers, and use them to argue that the best account of the epistemic status of the Classification Theorem will be essentially and ineliminably social. This forms part of the broader argument that in order to understand mathematical proofs, we must appreciate their social aspects. (shrink)

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule content had clear effects on perceptions of violations and relevance of cases (...) for explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs. Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered in a fuller the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action by Rhiannon FirthJohn-Erik HanssonRhiannon Firth. Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. London: Pluto Press, 2022. Paperback, 243 pp. ISBN 9780745340463The COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding climate crisis, with the multiplication of unprecedented weather events, have shown how urgent it is to reflect on our responses to disaster. Following up on themes she first broached in Coronavirus, Class, and (...) Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom, Rhiannon Firth throws a fresh, anarchist, and utopian light on disaster relief in Disaster Anarchy.1 In this work, Firth seeks to “consider how [anarchist] social movements’ impressive efforts in mutual aid might contribute to a radical and revolutionary reconceptualisation of disasters and the processes of relief and recovery efforts” (19). To do so, she begins by surveying the dominant approaches to disaster relief (chapters 2 and 3) before offering a comprehensive anarchist theoretical critique of these perspectives (chapter 4). Firth then fleshes out her anarchist theory of disaster and community response through two empirical case studies of grassroots relief efforts. In chapter 5 she looks into the Occupy Sandy movement, a New York area community-based response to the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy’s passage in October 2012 in the United States. The final chapter is then dedicated to the COVID-19 Mutual Aid Groups that emerged in the United Kingdom during the pandemic.In building her argument, Firth mobilizes anarchist (and more broadly radical) theory and interviews with participants in both movements. She engages with how activists motivated and understood their participation in mutual aid groups, perceived disaster and relief organizing, sought to solve practical and political problems, and reflected on their experiences. The empirical sections of Disaster Anarchy are thus reminiscent of investigations into the anarchist connections and orientations of contemporary social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street.2 However, Firth’s is a work [End Page 606] of political theory. Her interviews were not conducted simply to describe and analyze the anarchist components of disaster relief social movements. Echoing Uri Gordon, she proposes to take the “worldviews of activists seriously as sources of theoretical knowledge,” leading us to rethink both anarchism and the politics of disaster as a whole (16).3 There lies a key part of the originality of Firth’s contribution to both anarchist theory and to the study of disaster relief. The utopian core of Disaster Anarchy also shines through this movement-based theoretical elaboration of an anarchist challenge to the dominant theories and practices of disaster relief. By examining mutual aid groups in critical dialogue with anarchist theory, Firth raises the possibility of more egalitarian and democratic “utopian alternatives to the status quo,” though, as she reminds us, they always run the risk of being co-opted (20).To set the scene for the desirability of anarchist approaches to disaster relief, Disaster Anarchy opens with Firth’s dissatisfaction with what she identifies as the two main sets of approaches to disaster studies. The first represents “the dominant neoliberal paradigm of disaster politics” and falls under the umbrella of “Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)” (21). Firth contends that, despite some internal variety, all DRR approaches share the three same basic assumptions. First, DRR considers disasters to be “ruptures in the normal functioning of society.” They become a “management problem” that must be dealt with using the tools of political governance to restore order and ensure “systemic stability” (39–40). This can be done both directly through state institutions, and through civil society-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that cooperate with state institutions. DRR then evaluates responses using the categories of “efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” leaving aside “the affects and human impacts of disasters” (40). Second, DRR tends to flatten out differences between disasters, and in the ways in which individuals and groups respond to them. Disaster becomes abstract, and authorities can design sets of responses taken to be effective regardless of local contexts and demands. DRR approaches are therefore particularly congenial to the growth of large governmental “specialised agencies like DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]” that produce knowledge and practices linked to the vertical “management of disaster” (41). Finally... (shrink)

Background: Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups have a high need for organ transplantation but deceased donation is low. This restricts the availability of well-matched organs and results in relatively long waiting times for transplantation, with increased mortality risks. Objective: To identify barriers to organ donor registration and family consent among the BAME population, and to develop and evaluate a training intervention to enhance communication with ethnic minority families and identify impacts on family consent. Methods: Three-phase programme comprising community-based research (...) involving two systematic reviews examining attitudes and barriers to organ donation and effective interventions followed by 22 focus groups with minority ethnic groups; hospital-based research examining staff practices and influences on family consent through ethics discussion groups with staff, a study on intensive care units and interviews with bereaved ethnic minority families; and development and evaluation of a training package to enhance cultural competence among ICU staff. Setting: Community focus group study in eight London boroughs with high prevalence of ethnic minority populations. Hospital studies at five NHS hospital trusts. Participants: Community studies: 228 focus group participants; hospital studies: 35 nurses, 28 clinicians, 19 hospital chaplains, 25 members of local Organ Donation Committees, 17 bereaved family members; and evaluation: 66 health professionals. Data sources: Focus groups with community residents, systematic reviews, qualitative interviews and observation in ICUs, EDGs with ICU staff, bereaved family interviews and questionnaires for trial evaluation. Review methods: Systematic review and narrative synthesis. Results: Community studies: Organ Donor Register – different ethnic/faith and age groups were at varying points on the ‘pathway’ to organ donor registration, with large numbers lacking knowledge and remaining at a pre-contemplation stage. Key attitudinal barriers were uncertainties regarding religious permissibility, bodily concerns, lack of trust in health professionals and little priority given to registration, with the varying significance of these factors varying by ethnicity/faith and age. National campaigns focusing on ethnic minorities have had limited impact, whereas characteristics of effective educational interventions are being conducted in a familiar environment; addressing the groups’ particular concerns; delivery by trained members of the lay community; and providing immediate access to registration. Interventions are also required to target those at specific stages of the donation pathway. Hospital studies: family consent to donation – many ICU staff, especially junior nurses, described a lack of confidence in communication and supporting ethnic minority families, often reflecting differences in emotional expression, faith and cultural beliefs, and language difficulties. The continuing high proportion of family donation discussions that take place without the collaboration of a specialist nurse for organ donation reflected consultants’ views of their own role in family consent to donation, a lack of trust in SNODs and uncertainties surrounding controlled donations after circulatory death. Hospital chaplains differed in their involvement in ICUs, reflecting their availability/employment status, personal interests and the practices of ICU staff. Evaluation: professional development package – a digital versatile disk-based training package was developed to promote confidence and skills in cross-cultural communication. Initial evaluation produced positive feedback and significant affirmative attitudinal change but no significant difference in consent rate over the short follow-up period with requirements for longer-term evaluation. Limitations: Participants in the focus group study were mainly first-generation migrants of manual socioeconomic groups. It was not permitted to identify non-consenting families for interview with data regarding the consent process were therefore limited to consenting families. Conclusions: The research presents guidance for the effective targeting of donation campaigns focusing on minority ethnic groups and provides the first training package in cultural competence in the NHS. Future work: Greater evaluation is required of community interventions in the UK to enhance knowledge of effective practice and analysis of the experiences of non-consenting ethnic minority families. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Programme Grants for Applied Research programme. (shrink)

In February 1997, following the announcement that the Roslin Institute in Scotland had successfully cloned a sheep by means of cell-nuclear transfer, US President Clinton requested the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to review legal and ethical issues of cloning and to recommend federal actions to prevent abuse. In the meantime he directed the heads of executive departments and agencies not to allocate federal funds for ‘cloning human beings’. The Commission consulted with members of relevant academic disciplines and other professions, representatives (...) of interest groups and members of the general public, and received written submissions. Unsurprisingly, given the prospect of human cloning and the sensational announcement in January 1998 by the American physicist-cum-embryologist Richard Seed that he would aim to clone himself, public debate in the US has been fairly voluble. (shrink)

The purpose of the text is to engage in a well thought critique of the Enlightenment project carried out by Nicholas Maxwell and to reflect upon the proposal of its reconstruction. Maxwell’s intellectual position is not at all obvious: he is neither a radical rationalist, nor a defender of scientific rationality, nor a postmodern and social constructivist. Postmodernists and social constructivists opposed the very idea of reason and rational inquiry, and have been thoroughly critical of what knowledge-inquiry represents. Indeed, (...) such criticisms could not be further from Maxwell’s position. According to Maxwell, what is wrong with knowledge-inquiry is not its embodiment of reason but, to the contrary, its gross and damaging irrationality. From Maxwell’s point of view we suffer not that much from the excess of rationality, but its deficit. Maxwell does not share open criticism of anti-Enlightenment thinkers from Nietzsche to Foucault, but more so he escapes the beliefs of a scientifically focused group of philosophers who see the main force of emancipation of humanity in a narrowly understood science followed by physics, the methodology of verification, and naturalism as a basic ideology. The author of the text thus poses the question: what can save our culture if it is neither sciencenor the rejection of science? Does the replacement of the category of knowledgeinquiry with wisdom-inquiry—which Maxwell converts us to—bring us any closer to a solution in our consideration of knowledge and life, science and politics, facts and values, nature and society? In Western culture wisdom has always been an object of desire, and it was so, inter alia, because unlike knowledge it has never been precisely defined and further specified. Philosophers developed a warm feeling towards wisdom and sought for wisdom, but had they lived by wisdom? Finally, the author challenges the most difficult question: can we rationally excuse our hopes for wisdom and hope that it may one day be embodied in the work of institutions and the actions of individuals? (shrink)

Rapid advances in the domain of science and technology are having an unprecedented effect upon the provision of higher education in universities throughout the world, the pace of change often being so fast as to make planning for the development of the “classroom of the future” an extremely difficult task. The Mobile Multimedia University (MMU) project, a collaborative action between four leading UK based research facilities, has been established to investigate these issues. Included amongst its aims is the use (...) of novel research methodologies to determine the factors which will influence the shape and form of future education provision, and thus the distribution of knowledge to society, such as mobility, telecommunications and multimedia services. This paper describes the use of a Delphi survey in predicting the technological trends and innovations which will affect university education in the near future. It describes the theory underpinning the Delphi method, illustrating this with examples of how such a technique has been successfully used in the past. It then details the specific application of the Delphi approach within the current MMU research project, detailing the preliminary results and discussing the implications of these findings for the future of universities and other institutes of higher education. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states, arguing that it can be understood exhaustively in terms of the agency of individuals and concepts constructed out of materials that are already at play in our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. The book provides a new account of the logical form of grammatically singular group action sentences (e.g. 'Company laid (...) off 10,000 workers'), and features new analyses of the concepts of a constitutive rule, status function, status role, collective acceptance, and proxy agency. He also provides an analysis of the structure of corporate action, including the status of corporations as legal persons, and of the nature of state action in relation to its citizens. This is the companion volume to From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016), extending the multiple-agents account of collective action set out in the earlier volume. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states. He argues that it can be fully understood in terms of the agency of individuals, and concepts derived from our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism.

In addressing social issues, organizations have a responsibility to promote diverse participation, yet often struggle to harness the benefits of racial and gender diversity. Using a community-based participatory research design, with data collected over an 18 month field study, we examined how a social change organization, FoodLab, facilitated diverse collaboration. FoodLab aimed to grow a good food economy in Detroit, Michigan, through working with their members, local food entrepreneurs. We found that recurrent episodes of practicing dialogue catalyzed collaborative action (...) around multiple issues, including shared kitchens, licensing, and membership. Practicing dialogue included intentional convening, participatory devices, and collective language. While leaders set up the initial procedures and rules, leaders and members, together, enacted these structures. Through high quality interactions, participants developed additional resources, knowledge, motivation, and relationships. Across episodes of practicing dialogue, traces of high quality interactions supported sustained effort around social issues. Our findings demonstrate the dynamic aspects of organizational structure and individual action in working towards diverse collaborative action. (shrink)

This monograph investigates the collaborative creation of scientific knowledge in research groups. To do so, I combine philosophical analysis with a first-hand comparative case study of two research groups in experimental science. Qualitative data are gained through observation and interviews, and I combine empirical insights with existing approaches to knowledge creation in philosophy of science and social epistemology. -/- On the basis of my empirically-grounded analysis I make several conceptual contributions. I study scientific collaboration as the interaction of (...) scientists within research groups. Thereby, I argue that research groups and their role in scientific practice deserve more philosophical attention than they have hitherto received. In contemporary natural science, research groups are key to the formulation and corroboration of scientific knowledge claims prior to their publication. Specifically, I suggest epistemic difference and the porosity of social structure as two conceptual leitmotifs in the study of group collaboration. With epistemic difference, I emphasize the value of socio-cognitive heterogeneity in group collaboration. With porosity, I underline the fact that a research group as social structure does not entirely contain the inter-individual efforts necessary to formulate and corroborate knowledge claims. -/- In my analysis of research groups, I focus on the division of epistemic labor among group members. Through their complementary collaborative efforts single scientists engage in relations of mutual epistemic dependence. To deepen philosophy’s understanding of scientific practice in its diversity, a distinction should be made between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. While opaque epistemic dependence involves asymmetries in expertise, translucent epistemic dependence does not. As epistemic dependence is facilitated by trust, I investigate the dynamics of epistemic trust in group collaboration. Trust among collaborating scientists is inherently incomplete, and I show that scientists make use of diverse strategies to increase and to supplement personal trust. Based on my reflections on trust and dependence, I give an account of the relation between individual knowing and collaboratively created knowledge in research groups. Together these investigations contribute to the discussion of philosophical methodology in the study of scientific practice and promote the use of empirical methods. (shrink)

Discussions of group knowledge typically focus on whether a group’s knowledge that p reduces to group members’ knowledge that p. Drawing on the cumulative reading of collective knowledge ascriptions and considerations about the importance of the division of epistemic labour, I argue what I call the Fragmented Knowledge account, which allows for more complex relations between individual and collective knowledge. According to this account, a group can know an answer to a question in virtue (...) of members of the group knowing parts of that answer, when the whole answer is available to group-level action. I argue that this account explains a swathe of central cases of group knowledge, as well as explaining some central features of group knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues for an action-oriented conception of learning in higher education: one which marries higher order learning with apprenticeship in knowledge work. It introduces epistemic tasks, forms and fluency as constructs that are useful in giving a more precise meaning to ideas about collaboration in knowledge construction. Discussion is seen as central to collaborative knowledge work and we examine the role of discussion in supporting weaker and stronger interpretations of collaborative knowledge construction.

In the traditional scientific research and production activities, due to the lack of sufficient communication and communication between researchers, the phenomenon of waste of scientific research resources occurs from time to time, which hinders the efficiency of scientific research output. Based on the design principle of the semantic knowledge framework, this paper puts forward the definition of ontology and semantic relationship of the collaborative system of scientific researchers. In this paper, a framework of collaborative semantic knowledge among researchers (...) is established through decentralized semantic information exchange architecture. In this article, the simulation is verified by experiments and compared with other exchange architectures. The results of the experiment confirmed the semantic information exchange architecture based on semantic knowledge proposed in this paper is 10.39% faster than the traditional centralized method in terms of data volume; the construction speed under the data node perspective is 12.84% higher than that of the traditional centralized construction method; the subject query speed is 36.84% higher than that of the traditional centralization method; the predicate query speed is 31.58% higher than that of the traditional centralization method. The experimental results confirm that the semantic information exchange architecture based on the semantic knowledge framework is feasible, and it has excellent performance in terms of construction speed and query speed. Under the background that researchers rely more and more on collaborative technology to interact with other members, this paper has a certain reference value and exploration value and proposes a new idea of group collaboration system under the framework of semantic knowledge. (shrink)

Objects are reminiscent of actions often performed with them: knife and apple remind us on peeling the apple or cutting it. Mnemonic representations of object-related actions (action codes) evoked by the sight of an object may constrain and hence facilitate recognition of unrolling actions. The present fMRI study investigated if and how action codes influence brain activation during action observation. The average number of action codes (NAC) of 51 sets of objects was rated by a group (...) of n = 24 participants. In an fMRI study, different volunteers were asked to recognize actions performed with the same objects presented in short videos. To disentangle areas reflecting the storage of action codes from those exploiting them, we showed object-compatible and object-incompatible (pantomime) actions. Areas storing action codes were considered to positively co-vary with NAC in both object-compatible and object-incompatible action; due to its role in tool-related tasks, we here hypothesized left anterior inferior parietal cortex (aIPL). In contrast, areas exploiting action codes were expected to show this correlation only in object-compatible but not incompatible action, as only object-compatible actions match one of the active action codes. For this interaction, we hypothesized ventrolateral premotor cortex (PMv) to join aIPL due to its role in biasing competition in IPL. We found left anterior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) to co-vary with NAC. In addition to these areas, action codes increased activity in object-compatible action in bilateral PMv, right IPS, and lateral occipital cortex (LO). Findings suggest that during action observation, the brain derives possible actions from perceived objects, and uses this information to shape action recognition. In particular, the number of expectable actions quantifies the activity level at PMv, IPL, and pMTG, but only PMv reflects their biased competition while observed action unfolds. (shrink)

Current scientific research almost always requires collaboration among several (if not several hundred) specialized researchers. When scientists co-author a journal article, who deserves credit for discoveries or blame for errors? How should scientific institutions promote fruitful collaborations among scientists? In this book, leading philosophers of science address these critical questions.

Skilled cooperative action means being able to understand the communicative situation and know how and when to respond appropriately for the purpose at hand. This skill is of the performance of knowledge in co-action and is a form of social intelligence for sustainable interaction. Social intelligence, here, denotes the ability of actors and agents to manage their relationships with each other. Within an environment we have people, tools, artefacts and technologies that we engage with. Let us consider (...) all of these as dynamic representations of knowledge. When this knowledge becomes enacted, i.e., when we understand how to use it to communicate effectively, such that it becomes invisible to us, it becomes knowledge in co-action. A challenge of social intelligence design is to create mediating interfaces that can become invisible to us, i.e., as an extension of ourselves. In this paper, we present a study of the way people use surfaces that afford graphical interaction, in collaborative design tasks, in order to inform the design of intelligent user interfaces. This is a descriptive study rather than a usability study, to explore how size, orientation and horizontal and vertical positioning, influences the functionality of the surface in a collaborative setting. (shrink)

We extend Smaldino’s approach to collaboration and social organization in cultural evolution to include cognition. By showing how recent work on emergent group-level cognition can be incorporated within Smaldino’s framework, we extend that framework’s scope to encompass collaborative memory, decision-making, and intelligent action. We argue that beneficial effects arise only in certain forms of cognitive interdependence, in surprisingly fragile conditions.

We often praise and blame groups of people like companies or governments, just like we praise and blame individual persons. This makes sense. Because some of the most important problems in our society, like climate change or mass surveillance, are not caused by individual people, but by groups. Philosophers have argued that there exists such a thing as group responsibility, which does not boil down to individual responsibility. This type of responsibility can only exist in groups that are organized with (...) joint knowledge, actions and intentions. However, often disorganized groups without joint knowledge, actions and intentions are precisely the kinds of groups that cause problems. Therefore, in such cases, it becomes difficult, according to traditional accounts of collective responsibility to attribute responsibility to such groups. This has problematic implications. Therefore, I propose a new way of seeing collective responsibility, which is able to attribute the vice of irresponsibility to such disorganized groups. This involves seeing responsibility not as a relationship between the group and some action, but rather, as a virtue. In cases where it is difficult to establish whether a group is responsible for something, we should ask ‘is this group responsible, or irresponsible?’ This line of questioning is likely to be a more productive and philosophically legitimate way of holding groups morally responsible in such cases. (shrink)

Human Biological Materials (HBMs) are an invaluable resource in biomedical research.ObjectiveTo determine if researchers and a Research Ethics Committee (REC) at a South African institution addressed ethical issues pertaining to HBMs in collaborative research with developed countries.Study DesignEthically approved retrospective cross‐sectional descriptive audit.ResultsOf the 1305 protocols audited, 151 (11.57%) fulfilled the study's inclusion criteria. Compared to other developed countries, a majority of sponsors (90) were from the USA (p = 0.0001). The principle investigators (PIs) in all 151 protocols informed the (...) REC of their intent to store HBMs. Only 132 protocols informed research participants (P < 0.0001). In 148 protocols informed consent (IC) was obtained from research participants, 116 protocols (76.8%) solicited broad consent compared to specific consent (32; 21.2%) [p < 0.0001]. In 105 cases a code was used to maintain confidentiality. HBMs were anonymised in 14 protocols [p < 0.0001]. More protocols informed the REC (90) than the research participants (67) that HBMs would be exported (p = 0.011). Export permits (EPs) and Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs) were not available in 109 and 143 protocols, respectively.ConclusionsResearchers and the REC did not adequately address the inter‐related ethical and regulatory issues pertaining to HBMs. There was a lack of congruence between the ethical guidelines of developed countries and their actions which are central to the access to HBMs in collaborative research. HBMs may be leaving South Africa without EPs and MTAs during the process of international collaborative research. (shrink)