Start Date
12-13-2015
Description
This qualitative study was conducted to examine how multi-disciplinary environmental science teams utilize cyber-infrastructure to generate and assess evidence as part of their boundary spanning research. We find that this interdisciplinary research is difficult due to the divergent institutional logics of the team members (represented by the tenets of their communities of practices, dominant epistemological frameworks and dispositions towards data) which force researchers to synthesize incommensurate forms of data and warrants into their scientific arguments. We examine how the affordances enacted in the cyber-infrastructure enabled one environmental science team to ameliorate these challenges. This study contributes to the nascent literature on the new forms of evidence giving within scientific fields by building a theoretical framework to account for how affordances enacted within cyber-infrastructure can assist researchers as they negotiate the conflicting institutional logics associated with diverse fields. We conclude by discussing how these issues impact the effectiveness of interdisciplinary inquiry
Recommended Citation
McElroy, Charles and Lyytinen, Kalle, "IT affordances and reconciling alternative modes of evidence giving in cyberinfrastructure: the case of Climate Change Research" (2015). ICIS 2015 Proceedings. 6.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2015/proceedings/Sustainability/6
IT affordances and reconciling alternative modes of evidence giving in cyberinfrastructure: the case of Climate Change Research
This qualitative study was conducted to examine how multi-disciplinary environmental science teams utilize cyber-infrastructure to generate and assess evidence as part of their boundary spanning research. We find that this interdisciplinary research is difficult due to the divergent institutional logics of the team members (represented by the tenets of their communities of practices, dominant epistemological frameworks and dispositions towards data) which force researchers to synthesize incommensurate forms of data and warrants into their scientific arguments. We examine how the affordances enacted in the cyber-infrastructure enabled one environmental science team to ameliorate these challenges. This study contributes to the nascent literature on the new forms of evidence giving within scientific fields by building a theoretical framework to account for how affordances enacted within cyber-infrastructure can assist researchers as they negotiate the conflicting institutional logics associated with diverse fields. We conclude by discussing how these issues impact the effectiveness of interdisciplinary inquiry