Concept Of Boundary Work Research Articles

Science for transformative change: the IPCC, boundary work and the making of useable knowledge

While there has been much discussion about what kind of expertise the IPCC needs to develop to (better) guide climate policy, little has been said about how the experts themselves assess the challenges of making science policy-relevant. The paper aims to address this gap by exploring how leading IPCC experts reflect on and evaluate their work. The empirical material consists of an interview study with experts currently or recently involved in the IPCC. The selection strategy aimed to achieve a broad range of experience among those with key roles in the assessment work, including experts from all three working groups, from different regions, and of different genders. Data from the interviews was analyzed thematically using NVivo. The concept of boundary work was used to analyze the distinctions and boundaries in this work; how the IPCC experts draw boundaries between science and policy, between policy-relevance and policy-prescriptiveness, and between certain and uncertain knowledge. By analyzing the experts’ own experiences and ideas about what makes science relevant to policy-making, the paper contributes to the discussion about current and future challenges for the IPCC.

Boundary work: a conceptual frame for workplace ethnographies in collaborative settings

PurposeInterprofessional collaboration and coordination are critical to developing solutions to complex problems, and many workplaces engage in coordination and collaboration across organizational boundaries. This development changes work conditions and workplaces for many people. The ethnographic study of workplaces needs to re-configure the toolbox to adjust to such changes. The purpose of this study was to explore how the ethnographic study of dispersed workplaces can benefit from the analytical concept of boundary work.Design/methodology/approachA multi-sited ethnographic study was conducted in two health promotion programs, introducing new collaborative relations across sectors and professions. The concept of boundary work was applied as the conceptual frame and introduced the diagnosis of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) as a boundary object.FindingsProfessional boundaries are key to understanding interorganizational and interprofessional collaborations. The ethnographic study of complex, multi-sited settings using boundary work as a conceptual framework can enrich workplace ethnographies by demonstrating how professions position themselves through framing. Such framing strategies are used to construct, defend or contest boundaries. Boundary objects may potentially bridge devices connecting people across boundaries.Originality/valueThe traditional ethnographic notion of “following” an object or a subject is difficult in a workplace environment dispersed across multiple sites and involving many different actors. This suggests that workplace ethnographies studying interorganizational workplaces would benefit from a shift in focus from place-based or group-based ethnography to a field-level ethnography of relations using boundary work as an analytical frame.

Experimental Spaces As Temporary Entrepreneurial Work Environments For Incubating Wildcard Ideas

Companies often establish structured innovation programs such as innovation labs and corporate accelerators to harness employee creativity and enable them to experiment with new ideas to challenge established practices, actions or business models. What is yet to be understood is how individuals lacking such structured innovation programs in organizations pursue their ideas. This study explores inductively how individuals initiate and develop novel ideas outside the core corporate structures through the lens of experimental spaces. Experimental spaces as temporary entrepreneurial work settings provide distinct means for individuals to interact and experiment with new ideas and approaches. Using the concept of boundary work and drawing on an embedded multiple case study of six wildcard ventures that originate outside the core corporate structures, this paper unpacks the individual entrepreneurial efforts and their connections to supportive actors contributing to the emergence of experimental spaces. The findings reveal two distinct entrepreneurial venture paths, internal networked ventures and peripheral entrepreneurial ventures, that emerge through the establishment of supportive conditions along the venturing process, including different iterative product development, market engagement, and working style and methods.

Xenophobic Mob Violence against Free Labour Migrants in the Age of the Nation State: How Can the Atlantic Experience Help to Find Global Patterns?

AbstractThis article asks under what historical conditions people who consider themselves as belonging to the ingroup resort to collective violence against free labour migrants. Based on cases in the North Atlantic, and largely limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers a starting point for a more global approach. By using the concept of boundary work, I conclude that once ethnic boundaries are in place they need maintenance, through discourse, legislation, and surveillance. Migrants defined as outsiders, who did not accept their inferior role and thus became direct competitors for such key resources as jobs and houses, were bound to evoke irritation, protest, and, in extreme cases, mob violence. The latter occurred a number of times in early modern England, but such incidents occurred especially in the period 1860–1880 (US and Australia), 1880–1900 (Western Europe), and on both sides of the Atlantic around World War I. In all these cases, boundary-making (through heightened nationalism, imperialism, and embedded racial hierarchies) was prominent, while, at the same time, the state was unable or unwilling to protect its citizens against competition on the labour market and to provide a welfare safety net. This lack of actual boundary maintenance could lead to mob violence, especially when authorities were unwilling or unable to intervene. Moreover, it is striking that violence was directed especially against outsiders who were considered racially or culturally inferior. These included the Chinese and African-American internal migrants in the United States and colonial migrants in the United Kingdom.

Ethical boundary work in citizen science

The concept of boundary work (Gieryn 1983, 1999) has been developed to capture theways in which scientists collectively defend and demarcate their intellectual territories.This article applies the concept of boundary work to the ethical realm and investigates theethical boundary work performed by researchers in the field of citizen science (CS) througha literature review and by analysing accounts of ethics presented in CS literature.Results show that ethical boundary work in the CS literature is, to a large extent, a matterof managing ambiguities and paradoxes without any clear boundaries drawn between theunethical and ethical. Scientists are negotiating ethical positions, which might, occasionally,enhance the ethical authority of ‘non-science’ and non-scientists, as well as maintainalready established research ethics. The main ethical boundary work in CS displaysvariations towards perceived insufficiencies of conventional research ethics to accommodate“outsiders”, addressing issues of distribution, relevance, and expulsion as science includevolunteer contributors in the scientific process.

A Boundary Tool for Multi-stakeholder Sustainable Business Model Innovation

Sustainable business model innovation cannot reach its full sustainability potential if it neglects the importance of multi-stakeholder alignment. Several studies emphasize the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration to enable sustainable business model innovation, but few studies offer guidance to companies for engaging in such a collaborative process. Based on the concept of boundary work, this study presents a tested process tool that helps companies engage with multiple stakeholders to innovate sustainable business models. The tool was developed in three iterative phases, including testing and evaluation with 74 participants in six sustainable business model innovation cases. The final process tool consists of five steps to facilitate multi-stakeholder alignment for sustainable business model innovation: (1) defining a collective ambition, (2) mapping and negotiating the changing organizational boundaries, (3) exploring opportunities and tensions for aligning stakeholders, (4) defining first interventions and (5) developing a collaboration pitch. We found that the tool enables discussions and negotiations on sensitive topics, such as power reconfigurations and mutual responsibilities to help stakeholders align. For companies, the boundary tool enriches sustainable business model innovation by offering guidance in the process of redesigning their multi-stakeholder system, assessing their own organizational boundaries, exploring, negotiating and prioritizing strategic actions based on organizational boundary changes and kick-starting new partnerships.

More scientific, more ethical: The ADHD controversy and boundary-work in Taiwan.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most controversial childhood psychiatric condition. With the globalisation of its diagnosis and treatment, Taiwan has followed other medically advanced countries in meeting the challenge of medicalising children's problematic behaviours and encountering the resistance discourses on ADHD. To contribute to the extant literature, this study employs the social worlds framework to decipher the relational dynamics amongst these competing discourses on ADHD, namely the mainstream psychiatry, the critiques of overdiagnosis and the antipsychiatric protest, and to suggest the links between these domestic advocacies and the relevant debates abroad. In addition, the concept of boundary-work is used to analyse the strategies through which these collective actors pursue legitimacy for their respective claims. Based on the existing research of scientific and ethical boundary-work, this study argues that when it comes to clinical practices fraught with uncertainties, these two seemingly distinct forms of boundary-work may become mutually supportive in order to act as arbiters of disputes. Despite the disparity of power amongst these social worlds in this case study with seemingly predictable outcomes of the dispute, representing their heterogeneous narratives and the process of discursive struggle helps to destabilise the seemingly naturalised conceptualisation of biomedical ADHD.

It is like taking a ball for a walk: on boundary work in software development

In this paper, we explore how the choices of boundary work in software development influence the team autonomy enacted by team members. Boundary work is when people protect their professional individual autonomy, when they downplay that autonomy to collaborate over professional boundaries, and when they create new boundaries. Team autonomy is here defined as a team using their autonomy to collaborate in deciding their own output. We use an action research design, with varied methodologies carried out through three action cycles. Our findings show that when collective, collaborative boundary work is not performed, a sort of individualized zone occurs where individuals either try to do collaborative boundary work by themselves or seek individual autonomy. We propose that individual autonomy can be divided into professional individual autonomy and situationally dependent individual autonomy. This research contributes theoretically by showing how the absence of collaborative boundary work can lead to an individualized zone. Practically, it can improve team autonomy by enhancing the understanding of why teams should perform collaborative boundary work. The value of the concept of boundary work used in this setting involves studying the intentions for collaboration, not whether collaboration actually takes place.

Shifting articulations of space and security: boundary work in European space policy making

ABSTRACT European space policy is currently at a watershed. In 2021, there will be two institutions responsible for European space activities: The EU Space Agency (EU SPA) and the civilian European Space Agency (ESA) founded in 1975. This article investigates how new objectives and governance scheme(s) of European space activities reflect the increasing securitisation of space in Europe. Linking work in critical security studies to the concept of boundary work from science and technology studies (STS) I outline three phases of boundary work – expansion, expulsion and protection of autonomy – that all show how the dividing lines between peaceful and militarised space activities have become increasingly blurred. The conclusion argues that we currently witness a shift in the visions of European integration in space, with ESA remaining outside the EU framework and open to non-EU members while the EU SPA is accessible to EU members only and explicitly dedicated to the use of space for security. As the strategic potential of outer space is likely to grow, the paper offers a critical empirical investigation of the ongoing transformation in European space policy that has significant consequences for how we envision a “united Europe in space”.

On the Mainstream/Alternative Continuum: Mainstream Media Reactions to Right-Wing Alternative News Media

Using the mainstream media as a starting point, this article argues that the ongoing changes in the mainstream/alternative continuum are not just dependent on how right-wing alternative news media relate to certain journalistic practices but also on mainstream media reactions to their emergence. The following questions are thus asked: Are right-wing alternative news media accepted or rejected as journalistic actors, and are their ideological orientation deemed legitimate or deviant? this article combines insights into how the boundaries between mainstream and alternative media have become increasingly blurred in the digital context and uses the concepts of boundary work, interloper media and Hallin’s three-sphere model to examine these questions in a Scandinavian context. Based on a quantitative content analysis of 430 online mainstream news articles, this study demonstrates striking differences between the Scandinavian countries. While there are few or no reactions from the Danish mainstream media, the Swedish mainstream media largely reject right-wing alternative media as journalistic actors and position their ideological orientation as deviant. The Norwegian case is found in between. The results contribute to developing the scholarly understanding of the mainstream/alternative continuum and, thus, right-wing alternative news media’s position in the wider digital media landscape from a mainstream media perspective.

Expanding Boundaries in Indigenous News: Guardian Australia, 2018–2020

ABSTRACT Guardian Australia has made a strong commitment to covering Indigenous affairs, offering an alternative approach to other mainstream Australian news media since its establishment in 2013. In this article, the concepts of boundary work and boundary-drawing power provide a framework for analysing how Guardian Australia negotiates, extends, and concedes its professional journalistic ground in ways that support more diversity in news-making in the space of Indigenous affairs. In doing so, the article looks beyond Guardian Australia’s award-winning journalism to its “everyday” coverage of Indigenous affairs. Through a content analysis of 1048 items published between March 2018 and February 2020, it identifies and discusses who contributes or produces the content, the types of content and the range of stories that are covered, and how Guardian Australia itself categorises these stories. Our analysis finds that Guardian Australia’s Indigenous affairs coverage presents more sustained and diverse reporting than previous studies of legacy media have found, and its content expands journalistic boundaries by embracing the affordances of digital networked media and the contributions of diverse First Nations writers.

The Role of Simulators in Interdisciplinary Medical Work

This article reports from a project introducing a virtual reality simulator with patient-specific input for endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) into a surgical environment at a university hospital in Norway during 2016–2019. The project includes acquisition of the simulator, training of personnel, and a mapping of the effects. We followed the process, adopting ethnographic methods including participation in the operating room, simulated patient-specific rehearsals, preparations of the rehearsals, meetings with the simulator company, scientific meetings and scientific work related to the clinical trials (the second author led the clinical trial), in addition to open-ended interviews with vascular surgeons and interventional radiologists. We used the concepts of boundary work and sensework as conceptual lenses through which we studied the introduction of the simulator and how it influenced the nature of work and the professional relationship between the vascular surgeons and the interventional radiologists. We found that the simulator facilitated professional integration, at the same time as it served as a material resource for professional identity development. This study is the first to our knowledge that investigates the role of simulators for professional identity and relationship among surgeons and radiologists. Further studies of simulators in similar and different social contexts may contribute to deeper and more generic understanding of the way simulators influence our working life.

Between Boundary-Work and Cosmopolitan Aspirations

This article presents a historical genealogy of EASA and European anthropology. Performing a heuristic exercise ofethnographic epoché, it critically examines European anthropologists’ writings on European anthropology and EASA as they appear in different statements and accounts, especially in the Association’s newsletters and reports of its conferences, understanding these documents as praxeologically embedded in anthropologists’ everyday production of knowledge. Drawing on the sociology of critique and the concept of boundarywork, it argues that EASA created its own ‘space of critique’, funnelling previous discussions on European anthropology, and becoming a platform for its production and its contestation as a site for the production of ‘hierarchies of knowledge’. Those contestations reflect an original and longstanding tension between EASA’s inclusive cosmopolitan aspiration and the exclusionary practice of boundary-work.

When Boundary Organisations Fail: Identifying Scientists and Civil Servants in L’Aquila Earthquake Trial

ABSTRACT Notwithstanding the alleged crisis of expertise, scientists increasingly act as expert advisors to governments, while organisations at the boundary between science and policy multiply. Experts in such contexts are often subject to contradictory injunctions, associated with the role of either scientist or public official. Role conflict is particularly intense when decisions informed by scientific advice have negative consequences. In these situations, boundary-work is ubiquitous, as scientists deny responsibility by dissociating themselves from policymaking and victims contest such claims. A better understanding of these dynamics requires that the concept of boundary-work be refined. A central distinction between two types of boundary-work is often neglected: on the one hand, people draw boundaries between cultural categories by defining their abstract features (‘Science is X’); on the other, people draw boundaries by identifying concrete things as instances of those categories (‘X is science’). Accordingly, when boundaries are unsettled, disputes over the cultural meaning of science can be definitional or identificational. An example illustrating the importance of this distinction is provided by the L’Aquila earthquake trial, a controversy that has been alternatively portrayed as a trial of science and as a trial of bad risk management.

Biohacking Phenomenon in the Context of Essentialist and Constructivist Conceptions of Science

The problem of demarcation of science from non-science presupposes the existence of two principal approaches: essentialism and constructivism. Not exhausting all the variety of analytical concepts, they set the basic framework for the study of this issue for social theory. The Central principle of essentialism is the assertion of the existence of a substantial "core", which sets the unique features of science. The General position of constructivism in solving the problem of demarcation can be recognized as a denial of the existence of an invariable basis of scientific activity, science is determined by a variety of "external" factors and claimed as contingent to a variety of social phenomenas. The fundamental principle of constructivism assumes the "emptiness of science" – pure space waiting for limitation and filling. The basic intuition of constructivism in relation to science is very fruitful for social theory, directing the attention of the researcher on practices associated with the reproduction of the boundaries of science / non-science, what Thomas F. Gieryn summarized in the concept of boundary-work. Depending on the cultural, economic or political context, the demarcation line is constantly redrawn. The last major clashes on the science / non-science frontier include the radical transformations of biology. It is impossible to imagine the development of biology in the second half of the twentieth century without the active use of mathematical methods and information technology. The use of open data and computer methods of working with information, coupled with open access and democratic principles of dissemination of information led not only to a change in disciplinary boundaries, but also served as an impetus for the formation of independent groups of "researchers", science enthusiasts – biohackers. Their activities, reproducing the formal principles of science, but carried out independently of the "official" science – another example of "boundary work". At the same time, neither essentialist nor constructivist theories are able to understand biohacking within their theoretical frameworks. Social research of biohackers allows to see better the basic principles of practice of building of boundary between science and nonscience and to understand the restrictions connected with application of the concept "boundary-work".

Genre Uptake as Boundary-Work: Reasoning About Uptake in Wikipedia Articles

The circulation of scientific and technical genres in online publics can shape both public opinion and policy deliberation about issues such as global warming. While rhetoric and professional writing scholarship has documented the myriad ways that genres are transformed as they circulate across discursive boundaries, few examine how argument shapes those transformation and circulations. Drawing on Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, this article analyzes arguments in the discussion pages of Wikipedia articles about global warming to document how editors argue about genre as they deliberate over what counts as reliable sources of global warming knowledge. This analysis demonstrates how argument mediates genre uptake and circulation. In doing so, it helps account for how technical and scientific genres circulate in contemporary online publics.

Sustainable business model innovation: The role of boundary work for multi-stakeholder alignment

This study focuses on the boundary-spanning nature of sustainable business model innovation, studying multi-stakeholder engagement and alignment. Drawing on the concept of boundary work, we explore the different types of organizational boundary changes between focal companies and their external stakeholders, investigating specifically the process of exploring, negotiating, disrupting and realigning organizational boundaries. Based on an exploratory study of nine different sustainable business model initiatives from for-profit and non-profit organizations, our analysis shows how actors involved need to find alignment at normative, instrumental and strategic dimensions in order to achieve sustainable value creation. However, complexity for alignment emerges through different understandings of value, diverging interests, division of risks and responsibilities, and existing processes and activities that limits actors’ openness to align. Mutual boundary changes are thus necessary in the process of multi-stakeholder engagement in order to enhance organizations’ understanding of value and to capture the envisioned value. This paper functions as an agenda-setting paper, presenting first insights on how the boundary work lens can advance our understanding of alignment processes between focal organizations and their external stakeholders, required for sustainable business model innovation.

Press Credentials and Hybrid Boundary Zones: The Case of WorldNetDaily and the Standing Committee of Correspondents

ABSTRACT Press credentialing practices are a vital, yet understudied site of scholarly research on journalistic norms and practices. Press credentialing not only structures internal professional hierarchies, but they also signify the boundaries of the journalistic field itself. This paper explores the legal and theoretical implications of press credentialing to cover the United States Congress, drawing on the concepts of boundary work and journalistic authority to demonstrate the material impact of the space between fields on professional legitimation in journalism. Using WorldNetDaily (WND) as a case study, I argue that the Standing Committee of Correspondents (SCC) occupies a hybrid boundary zone between the journalistic and political fields, generating a unique tension in First Amendment jurisprudence that places journalists in a paradoxical role as both the professional embodiments of free speech and its constitutional steward. The resulting jurisdictional conflict between the SCC and WND extends the relational model of journalistic authority by articulating how journalist-state relations can fundamentally augment the process of legitimation at its fuzzy boundaries. The relevance and implications for press credentialing practices in the digital age are discussed.

Challenging care work: General practitioners' perspectives on caring for young adults with complex psychosocial problems.

The international literature shows that primary care is well placed to address mental health problems in young people, but that primary care professionals experience a range of challenges in this regard. In Denmark, young adults who have complex psychosocial problems, and who are not in education or work, cause political and academic concern. They are also in regular contact with their general practitioners, the Danish municipalities and psychiatric services. However, little is known about general practitioners' perspectives on caring for this vulnerable group of patients. In this article, we investigate how general practitioners' care work is shaped by the bureaucratic management of care in a complex infrastructure network comprising the general practitioners, psychiatry, the municipalities and the young adults. The analysis is based on interviews and focus groups with general practitioners, psychiatric nurses and social workers. We employ Tronto's concept of care and the concept of boundary work as a theoretical framework. We argue that general practitioners strive to provide care, but they are challenged by the following: contested diagnostic interpretations and the bureaucratic significance of diagnoses for the provision of care from psychiatry and the municipalities, systemic issues with handling intertwined social and mental health problems, and the young adults' difficulties with accessing and receiving available care.

The professional boundaries of journalists in Hong Kong: Strategies of accepting and dismissing citizen journalists

This study investigates the impact of public participation on the journalistic field in Hong Kong and the response of legacy and digital-only newsrooms to this process. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and on Thomas Gieryn’s concept of boundary work, this article examines the strategies used by journalists to patrol and maintain the boundaries of their field. In-depth interviews collected from 24 journalists working for both legacy and digital-only media show that journalists do not fully dismiss the work of public participation. Instead, they do their best to incorporate such practices into their daily work, while aiming to keep their professional standards high. Nevertheless, there are differences between legacy and digital-only journalists when it comes to their use of user-generated content. Legacy journalists tend to avoid using newsworthy content they find online in isolation. They try to use UGC as a starting point, to provide context, and to verify the source of the material. On the other hand, digital-only journalists tend to rush publishing their stories and only add context at a later stage.