Resumo: Artigo 36065
Changing views of the success of interdisciplinary research (4, 40, 96, 102)
Cecilia Hidalgo, Claudia Eleonor Natenzon, Universidad de Buenos Aires, ArgentinaGuillermo Podestá, Kenny Broad, University of Miami, USA.
Apresentação: Wednesday, May 29, 2008 1:15PM - 3:15PM sala 213 - UNIRIO VII ESOCITE - Sessão 56 - Chair: Dominique Vinck
Abstract.
The paper reports results from a case study of a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research team convened to address a highly complex problem with societal relevance: to understand and model adaptive management of agricultural ecosystems in the Pampas of central-eastern Argentina in response to climate variability and other sources of risk and uncertainty. In identifying factors that foster or impede the production of interdisciplinary knowledge, including the participation of stakeholders, the authors underline the importance of research team group dynamics and shared social goals. Thus, the analysis focuses on the shifting perspectives and metrics of success held by participants at three specific stages of the collaboration process: the project start, an intermediate stage (about two years into a three-year project) and the end. Changing representations of success are related to the performance of individual participants or research units during the development of the project, namely that of (a) researchers that formed highly-productive teams with frequent and intensive interactions, (b) those that organized themselves around the project coordinator, and (c) those who could not deeply engage in collaborative production of knowledge, searching refuge in more comfortable and familiar processes of individual production for disciplinary journals or institutions. Changing views of success may also be related to a tight project schedule, the pressure to obtain useful and tangible results in a short timeframe, unanticipated personal issues among some team members, and the pressure to produce high-impact publications. Standards of integration and effectiveness were higher among those individuals or groups who developed a focused collaboration. Less integrated participants lowered their own initial, self-defined standards for successful interdisciplinary interaction, valuing more abstract outcomes such as the mere establishment and consolidation of channels of mutual learning and communication among groups and researchers.