Kenneth David

Power and Communication: Solving Power Problems for Collaboration in Globally Distributed Engineering Design Teams

Because outsourcing and offshoring operations entail multi-site operations and inter-organizational alliances, they require effective boundary-spanning partnerships: inter-divisional, inter-organizational, and often, multi-country partnerships. This paper reports a multi-discipline research study—involving engineering, anthropology and telecommunications elements—on dispersed global engineering design teams. A framework involving power, culture, and collaborative activity is introduced. The focus here is on power and communications issues. Co-oriented, collaborative project activity is achieved when power issues are neutralized. When sub-team members perceive inequity, they frequently respond adversely. They may purposely create miscommunications among sub-teams, covertly subvert project goals, or otherwise act in ways that reduce project performance. Outsourcing of engineering design operations is a major challenge for the engineering profession. Outsourcing activity to India and China has increased; educational systems in these countries both improve in quality and augment the quantity of engineers produced. Traditional engineering skills are swiftly becoming a commodity in the global market.Copyright

Chapter 10 – Engagement and Translation: Perspective of a Natural Scientist

Publisher Summary Critics characterize scientific communication with the public as asymmetrical, condescending, communication that is delivered too ate for the public to offer meaningful input. Citizen advocates call for upstream communication that represents an innovation more transparently than is currently being done. This chapter agrees that more effective communication is necessary and proposes suggestions on how to accomplish that objective. Communicating means establishing a relationship between senders and receivers of messages. Adjusting the content of the message (not assuming the audience is ignorant; assuming the audience is not informed) is only one step. Different media (technical reports, business memos, lecture and discussion, visual representations, etc.) and different modes of discourse (analyzed in this essay in three dimensions—paradigmatic, narrative, and WIFM) should also be chosen to establish the relationship. This chapter also explores the timing of communication that is viable and practicable. Translation, whether in natural or in social science, should recognize the limits to communication.

Engagement and translation : perspective of a natural scientist

Publisher Summary Critics characterize scientific communication with the public as asymmetrical, condescending, communication that is delivered too ate for the public to offer meaningful input. Citizen advocates call for upstream communication that represents an innovation more transparently than is currently being done. This chapter agrees that more effective communication is necessary and proposes suggestions on how to accomplish that objective. Communicating means establishing a relationship between senders and receivers of messages. Adjusting the content of the message (not assuming the audience is ignorant; assuming the audience is not informed) is only one step. Different media (technical reports, business memos, lecture and discussion, visual representations, etc.) and different modes of discourse (analyzed in this essay in three dimensions—paradigmatic, narrative, and WIFM) should also be chosen to establish the relationship. This chapter also explores the timing of communication that is viable and practicable. Translation, whether in natural or in social science, should recognize the limits to communication.

Engagement and Translation

Publisher Summary Critics characterize scientific communication with the public as asymmetrical, condescending, communication that is delivered too ate for the public to offer meaningful input. Citizen advocates call for upstream communication that represents an innovation more transparently than is currently being done. This chapter agrees that more effective communication is necessary and proposes suggestions on how to accomplish that objective. Communicating means establishing a relationship between senders and receivers of messages. Adjusting the content of the message (not assuming the audience is ignorant; assuming the audience is not informed) is only one step. Different media (technical reports, business memos, lecture and discussion, visual representations, etc.) and different modes of discourse (analyzed in this essay in three dimensions—paradigmatic, narrative, and WIFM) should also be chosen to establish the relationship. This chapter also explores the timing of communication that is viable and practicable. Translation, whether in natural or in social science, should recognize the limits to communication.

Consulting in Sri Lanka

So you want to be an anthropological business consultant as well as a professional anthropologist? You want to double your salary, travel business class, and work with the movers and shakers, some of whom are first rate intellectuals who would have been professors if academic salaries were higher? You want the challenge of having your students (that is, your clients) mark you instead of the reverse? You want the thrill of seeing your work make a difference in the world instead of being buried in academic journals? You want a counterpoint between insider consulting knowledge which is typically unpublishable because it is the confidential property of the client, and research knowledge which you gather with other companies, following up on leads from your consulting knowledge? Fine. Then work up to it.