Trading Zones and Interactional Expertise ─ Creating New Kinds of Collaboration

Cross-disciplinary collaboration increasingly characterizes today's science andengineering research. The problems and opportunities facing society do not come neatly sorted bydiscipline. Difficulties arise when researchers from disciplines as different as engineering and thehumanities work together and find that they speak largely different languages. This book explores anew framework for fostering collaborations among existing disciplines and expertise communities. Theframework unites two ideas to emerge from recent work in STS: trading zones, in which scientificsubcultures, each with its own language, develop the equivalents of pidgin and creole; andinteractional expertise, in which experts learn to use the language of another research community inways that are indistinguishable from expert practitioners of that community. A trading zone cangradually become a new area of expertise, facilitated by interactional expertise and involvingnegotiations over boundary objects (objects represented in different ways by differentparticipants). The volume describes applications of the framework to service science, businessstrategy, environmental management, education, and practical ethics. One detailed case study focuseson attempts to create trading zones that would help prevent marine bycatch; another investigatestrading zones formed to market the female condom to women in Africa; another describes how humanistsembedded in a nanotechnology laboratory gained interactional expertise, resulting in improvedresearch results for both humanists andnanoscientists.

Contributors: Brad Allenby, Donna T. Chen,Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Erik Fisher, Peter Galison, Michael E. Gorman, Lynn Isabella, LekeliaD. Jenkins, Mary Ann Leeper, Roop L. Mahajan, Matthew M. Mehalik, Ann E. Mills, Bolko von Oetinger,Elizabeth Powell, Mary V. Rorty, Jeff Shrager, Jim Spohrer, Patricia H. Werhane

The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.

Michael E. Gorman is Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Simulating Science and Transforming Nature.