A CASE STUDY OF THE FAILURE OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION TO CROSS KNOWLEDGE BOUNDARIES IN VIRTUAL CONSTRUCTION

Abstract

When can digital artefacts serve to bridge knowledge barriers across epistemic communities? There have been many studies of the roles new information and communication technologies play within organizations. In our study, we compare digital and non-digital methods of inter-organizational collaboration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on three construction projects and interviews with 65 architects, engineers, and builders across the USA, we find that IT tools designed to increase collaboration in this setting instead solidify and make explicit organizational and cultural differences between project participants. Our study suggests that deeply embedded disciplinary thinking is not easily overcome by digital representations of knowledge and that collaboration may be hindered through the exposure of previously implicit distinctions among the team members’ skills and organizational status. The tool that we study, building information modelling, reflects and amplifies disciplinary representations of the building by architects, engineers, and builders instead of supporting increased collaboration among them. We argue that people sometimes have a difficult time overcoming the lack of interpretive flexibility in digital coordinating tools, even when those tools are built to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration.

Keywords:

• collaboration
• qualitative methods
• building information modelling
• teams

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0823338, the University of Washington's Royalty Research Foundation, the Dean's Development Award in the College of Built Environments, and the Department of Communication. Research assistance from Naila Crawford, Kristin Gustafson, Christopher Harihar, Hoda Homayouni, and Helen Juan is gratefully acknowledged. A very heartfelt thank you goes to the participants in the three case studies and our interview respondents. We wish to thank Steve Barley, Pablo Boczkowski, Chandra Mukerji, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Philip Howard for their insightful comments. This paper was improved by comments following presentations at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and as part of CITASA sessions at the 2009 American Sociological Association meetings.