Reflexive deliberation in international research collaboration: minimising risk and maximising opportunity

Abstract

International research collaboration raises questions about how groups from different national and institutional contexts can work together for common ends. This paper uses issues that have arisen in carrying out the first stage of an international research project to discuss a framework designed to map different kinds of multi-national research collaboration in terms of increasing complexity and increasing time to research outputs. The paper explores factors that enable and that constrain progress in carrying out collaborative research.\ud The paper highlights the complex interplay within research practice of factors that derive from institutional structures and those that appertain to individuals as agents. It uses the personal and collective reflexive deliberations of the authors, to demonstrate that as the complexity of the research interface increases, and as the time to research outputs increases, so structural risk increasingly develops into agentic risk, and that structural risk becomes increasingly required to be managed through agentic action

Collaborating with Management Academics in a New Economy: Benefits and Challenges

“…The ideological orientations [19] of the two sides, the influence of contextual/local knowledge [14] on the part of CMAs, the two parties' training backgrounds and previous research experience, aims of research, target journals, and understandings of the expectations of the target journals, may all contribute to the rise of such challenges. Previous research (e.g., [21]) suggests that these challenges can be managed through the collaborating parties' personal and collective deliberations.…”

“…The study revealed, at a more micro-level, some social dynamics of international collaboration, which have not been the focus of previous macro-level, bibliometric research on international collaboration. By examining international collaboration in a social science discipline, our study generates insights that complement the current discussions of the internationalization of social sciences [7,21]. Our focus on the discipline of management in an emerging economy would appeal to those interested in looking into comparable or different economic contexts, to examine the ecology of international collaboration and its implications.…”

“…When compared with the natural sciences, some of these challenges (i.e., disagreements in ideology, ontology, and epistemology) would be more manifest in research collaboration in the social sciences, which "are more connected to and imbedded in (and thus affected by) the social and political system to which they are oriented" [20] (p. 594) and [21]. The same reason may have also reinforced "a very strong core-periphery pattern" and "a highly asymmetrical structure of exchange" in international collaboration in the social sciences [7] (p. 144), with North America and Western Europe continuing to dominate the dynamics of knowledge production.…”

Another Approach to Evaluating Scientific Collaboration

“…Measuring collaboration is now con-sidered an indicator of research performance, as the Weighted Fractional Count (WFC) of Nature Index is widely applied, and can be used to identify the rising stars performers in the research world. [9,10] Lee and Bozeman, [4] Bozeman et al [11] Brew et al, [12] and Katz and Martin. [3] Have all reported positive effects of collaboration on scientific productivity.…”

Constructing and rolling out the new South African Sign Language (SASL) curriculum – Reflexive critique

“…We decided to write this paper in order to reflect on what we did, the decisions we took individually and collaboratively and to assess why in our view the process broke down due to structural limitations (Archer, 2007;Brew et al, 2013). The curriculum was produced as a result of a landmark court case that we discuss below.…”