Ragna Zeiss

Engaging Boundary Objects in OMS and STS? Exploring the Subtleties of Layered Engagement

This paper considers STS aspirations to engage with the field of Organization and Management Studies (OMS). It does so by investigating the employability of the concept of boundary object in OMS. Through an extensive literature review, the paper shows that rather than a simple engagement between STS and OMS the relation between the two consists of multi-layered (non-)engagements. The paper shows that the `successful uptake of and the active engagement with the concept of boundary object in OMS cannot simply be regarded as a (successful) engagement of STS with OMS. The situated and contingent character of what counts as successful engagement explains the tensions that arise when a concept is taken up in a new field.

Dissolving decision making? : Models and their roles in decision-making processes and policy at large

This article studies the roles three science-based models play in Dutch policy and decision making processes. Key is the interaction between model construction and environment. Their political and scientific environments form contexts that shape the roles of models in policy decision making. Attention is paid to three aspects of the wider context of the models: a) the history of the construction process; b) (changes in) the political and scientific environments; and c) the use in policy processes over longer periods of time. Models are more successfully used when they are constructed in a stable political and scientific environment. Stability and certainty within a scientific field seems to be a key predictor for the usefulness of models for policy making. The economic model is more disputed than the ecology-based model and the model that has its theoretical foundation in physics and chemistry. The roles models play in policy processes are too complex to be considered as straightforward technocratic powers.

Situating Standards in Practices: Multi Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment in India

Public health care needs to cope with a basic dilemma between providing standardized care within public programmes across entire and at times resource-constrained countries and adapting this care locally when responding to individual needs. This tension between standardization and local adaptation becomes particularly obvious for the prolonged and complicated treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Situated standardization, as introduced by Zuiderent-Jerak [2007a, 2007b] offers a way out of this dilemma. It helps to focus on how standards need to be situated in practice rather than viewing standardization and local adaptation as mutually exclusive practices. How do actors relate standardization and individual care in their practices of treating MDR-TB? Results from qualitative fieldwork at the first MDR-TB treatment sites of the Indian TB programme show that actors situate standards in a particular way. They assess the role of guidelines in a particular situation and on that basis recognize the core recommendations of guidelines or go beyond the guidelines. This allows actors to negotiate how standards should be situated and reconciles the dilemma between local adaptation and standardization. Having guidelines internalized, as is common for Indian TB control, bears both promises and pitfalls for engaging in standardization processes in a situated manner. The results contribute to science and technology study scholarship on guideline development. They highlight how actors coordinate the situating of standards and how this depends upon cultures of control. This illustrates the potential of qualitative studies on local adaptation for guideline developers by revealing existing practices of relating and negotiating local adaptation and standardization.

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences: Changing Research Contexts

Academic research and knowledge construction is increasingly organised in collaboration with nonacademic partners and geared towards solving societal challenges. This chapter asks what such a context and explicit collaboration with a nonacademic societal partner means for research in the bachelor’s phase. It discusses 5 years of a MaRBLe project developed in close collaboration with external partners along the lines of a number of continuums identified in education literature (student, staff, or external partner initiated; academic relevance versus relevance for the external partner; product versus process centred; curriculum based or not; larger or smaller groups). The chapter states that such research-based bachelor’s projects provide both opportunities and challenges and involve trade-offs. Students engaged in such projects learn academic and professional skills that are less prominent in non-collaborative academic projects. The collaboration with an external partner is likely to lead to an emphasis on knowledge utilisation (by the students and the external partner) in addition to – and sometimes perhaps in tension with – academic relevance. In terms of continuums, it turns out that the collaboration itself, the intensity of the collaboration, and the duration of the collaboration matter more to the content and setup of a project than which actor initiated the research. To what extent research-based bachelor’s projects in collaboration with a nonacademic partner are feasible, preferable, or acceptable depends on what one wants students to learn and to what extent knowledge utilisation should be part of undergraduate research.