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102 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

The team did continue to have fairly regular face-to-face meetings where those
working on the now independent projects came together to share experiences and
analyses. However, these were never as frequent as originally intended because of
the difficulties of actually finding dates when all the PIs could attend. There were,
in the event, few meetings where all the PIs were present. This fluctuating mem-
bership was a problem because a lot of time had to be spent in bringing those
absent from meetings up to date. More problematical still was the lack of follow-
through and building on what was agreed at these meetings. One PI described it
as ‘the syndrome of hitting reset at the end of the meeting’. They tried to resolve
this problem by having one of the PIs summarize the key points from the meetings
and then circulate this to the others using e-mail. However, there were frequently
problems in this process as individuals had interpreted the same meeting very
differently.
Between meetings the team relied on e-mail communication to share experi-
ences across the three federated projects. This created problems because some of
those involved were lax in responding to their e-mails. Moreover, this mode of
communication was found to be ineffective where conceptual and methodological
issues needed to be resolved. The team then moved to using telephone conferenc-
ing to try and resolve differences between the various subgroups. Observing these
conferences at any particular institution revealed how those at one site would ridi-
cule those taking part from other sites. Mocking gestures and written comments,
invisible to those on the other end of the telephone line, were clearly well-practised
by the local group. This disdain towards team members from other departments
was similarly seen in the distinction between e-mails circulated around a university
group and those disseminated throughout the whole team.
The main formal outputs from this project were publications. The first publica-
tion from the project caused considerable conflict because one of the PIs decided
to publish some of the research outputs without consulting, or crediting, team
members from the other departments. The other PIs argued that they should all
be jointly involved in publications, since this would provide the opportunity to
synthesize across the different disciplines. Following this first publication, there-
fore, there was a standing item on the agenda of every project team meeting so
that they could discuss this as a group. Thus, at every meeting they talked about
writing papers jointly, albeit the ROs were typically excluded from this discussion.
However, the reality was that virtually all output was written by team members
from only one of the universities, in other words by individuals from the same
disciplinary background. The only real output that was jointly produced was the
final report that was written for the sponsoring Research Council. This had to be
written jointly and present an integrated conceptual framework and analysis, in
line with the initial project proposal. However, those involved were relatively dis-
satisfied with this output, feeling that it did not do justice to the richness of the
independent parts of the research conducted at the separate university depart-
ments. While it is difficult to clearly evaluate the creativeness of such research, the
grading of this final report, given by independent peer reviewers, did not rate this
research project highly.

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