Collective Action, Trust and Robust Innovation: The Case of a Regional Network of Research-Groups

Cooperation between working groups with heterogeneous disciplinary backgrounds is an important phenomenon for modern sciences. It stems on the one hand from growing complexity in expertise and technology needed to answer fertile research questions, to succeed in scientific competition and on the other hand it is required by many forms of research-funding. The contribution focusses on a special form to deal with both: an enduring network between research-groups, which realizes different lines of research and funded projects in a remarkably successful way. Success hereby not only means that they get funded, they also managed to create highly relevant findings in a robust way (Ferrary/Granovetter 2009).

The case study concentrates on the phenomenon of emerging project-networks to enable flexible and also enduring, reliable collaboration between heterogeneous actors (e.g. Windeler/Sydow 2001) but conceptualizes it as one of the actualization of collective action. Within a practice-theoretical perspective (Giddens 1984), we can describe the latter as collective agency, as differences in praxis done collaboratively in a highly bounded way towards an end collectively framed. The first part of the presentation explores different roles collective action between heterogeneous actors play in the episode of robust innovation in the network during 2005-2013.

The second part focuses on trust as a specific quality of network-relations that makes it possible to actualize these lines of collective action between research-groups. It shows the importance of trust-relations in different sub-populations of the network for the network as a whole and its robust ability to produce relevant findings. In the end, the study can provide a more detailed picture of the emergence of a specific bundle of trust-relations through a cycle of efforts in managing the complexity of the scientific field. Such a view emphasizes the inherent recursive nature and historicity of social capital in organizations and populations of organizational units.