Abstract
The concluding chapter offers the editors’ insights into the book chapters’ combined contribution. Using the editors’ Collaborative Integration Paradigm, they examine types of collaborations described, the electronic technologies used, and the kinds of research and theories discussed by contributing authors. They consider commonalities in electronic collaboration across sectors and the significance of interorganizational or intra-organizational structure. The editors recommend future research as well as theory-building needed to advance the field.
TopResearch Methodologies, Methods And Theories
This Handbook of Research draws on diverse methodologies and theories. Here is a brief summary of general theoretical and methodological traditions represented in this book. Many of the studies fall into more than one of the categories listed below, particularly when the studies were interdisciplinary.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Cross-Disciplinary: Coordinated effort involving two or more disciplines.
Strategic Collaborations: Take place when the solution to a specific issue requires particular disciplines, perspectives or representation.
Multi-Disciplinary: Relating to, or making use of several disciplines at once.
Sponsored Collaborations: Take place when a regulator, funder, or other stakeholder desires or requires the involvement of multiple perspectives and participants.
Interweave: At this level collaboration the problem involves integrating parts of disciplines or elements to create a new solution to the problem. This could be described as “intellectual pluralism;” borrowing tools, methods, concepts, models or paradigms from other fields.
Interdisciplinary: Process of combining two or more disciplines, fields of study or professions.
Emergent Collaborations: Arise when parties with a common interest bring their varied expertise together to frame an issue or explore a new direction.
Interchange: A level of collaboration that involves interaction of disciplines, using different lenses to view a problem where each offers that discipline’s knowledge and processes. Interchange often occurs at the personal level—building relationships.
Innovate: Co-creation of new knowledge, new approaches or disciplines. This level of collaboration results in new thinking that typically means radical change and new frames of reference.
Collaborative Integration Paradigm: The Collaborative Integration Paradigm describes the relationships among purposes for collaboration, types of partners, and degrees of integration from diverse individual, organizational or disciplinary partners into the processes and outcomes of the collaboration.