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100 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

Meetings were spent revisiting the plans and making new plans that were then
never followed.
In terms of more general and informal social integration mechanisms, the ROs were
largely left to ‘make sense’ of their role and their relationships with each other by them-
selves. On the first day of the project they telephoned each other to ‘say hello’ and
subsequently met at a meeting of the whole research network that had been arranged
by the PIs. Thereafter, they were expected to coordinate between themselves.
One of the first problems to emerge among the ROs occurred very quickly and
related to the process of recruitment. Three of the ROs recruited were young (under
30), having just finished, or being in the process of completing, either Master’s or
doctoral degrees. They applied for the particular job because they wanted to pursue
an academic career and were selected through a conventional process where they
had to apply and be interviewed for the job in competition with other applicants.
The fourth RO selected (we shall call him Pat) was older and was appointed without
any competition on the basis of a single PI’s personal opinion. Pat did not have a
conventional academic background and had also failed to complete a postgradu-
ate qualification. However, the PI who recruited him had decided that Pat would be
better able to take over more of the work than would typically be expected of an
RO. This was despite the fact that Pat already had a consultancy business which put
considerable demands on his time. While the other ROs tried to be accommodat-
ing, Pat himself felt uncomfortable with the situation. He was also action-oriented
and frustrated with what he felt was ‘overtheorizing’ by the others. Pat therefore
soon tired of his new post, becoming irritated with the convoluted nature of much
academic debate, together with the emphasis on rigorous process rather than on
the generation of results. Within months he had left, an event which had significant
effects in the context of a three-year project.
After Pat had left the project, no one was recruited to replace him for six months,
so the three remaining ROs worked as a smaller team, dispersed at the three different
universities. The work was divided up between them. Initially, the ROs recognized the
need to coordinate their different tasks and they agreed to meet regularly. However,
over time their meetings became less and less frequent. Thus, from weekly or at least
fortnightly contact among this group, there was a period when they did not meet for
almost six months. The reason for this increased estrangement was that trust did not
develop between two of this group of three. The repeated contact actually led to a dis-
trust based on a belief in the other’s incompetence. Again, as was the case with the PIs,
these two individuals came from very different disciplinary backgrounds and each was
simply not able to respect the other’s contributions to the project. The two individuals
were also quite different in terms of their personalities and interests. Their only com-
mon ground was the research project so that companion trust was difficult to develop
in the absence of competence trust. This situation was uncomfortable for all the ROs,
particularly these two. The outcome was that one of the pair left the project.
Much later, once the two departing ROs had been replaced, meetings between
the new set of four ROs were once again instigated. These meetings were more
successful and would run on into an evening meal and became a valuable integrative
event, at least among the ROs. However, despite this early success the ROs eventually

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