William C. Barley

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University’s School of Communication.

My main research interests concern how individuals and groups use technology to support processes of organizing; particularly to share and develop knowledge across technical and occupational boundaries. Rather than viewing collaboration as the pure integration of group members’ knowledge and expertise, I am interested in how individuals express their political and pragmatic motives when choosing to represent (or not represent) information to one another, and the effects these choices have upon higher level group activity. I have primarily used ethnographic methods to examine these phenomena in a number of contexts including: applied atmospheric science, automobile engineering work, children’s hospitals, car enthusiast communities, service organizations, and couples driving together.

I have several research projects underway:

• Working in Cross-Boundary Collaboration: My dissertation project is an ethnographic study of collaborative relationships between weather researchers and industry and government organizations as they build state of the art numerical weather prediction models for use in applied contexts. Over a year spent in the field, I captured a detailed account of researchers’ communication with outside collaborators, and with each other as they performed their daily work. Through my analyses of these data, I am particularly interested in unveiling how engaging in applied collaborative relationships shapes the scientific process and the technologies it produces.
• Policy Implications of New Simulation Technologies: Paul Leonardi and I are collecting data from three different occupations (automobile engineers, atmospheric scientists, and urban planners) to examine how the increasing adoption of computer simulation technology is affecting organizational decision-making and policy development.
• Rapidly Coordinating Knowledge on Distributed Teams: Paul Leonardi, Jeff Treem, and I are involved in an ongoing project looking at the communicative and technological mechanisms through which a network of hospitals organizes to rapidly provide care to urgently ill children.
• Collectively Appropriating New Technology: Alan Clark, Paul Leonardi, and I are working to develop theory about how individual, communicative, and material mechanisms affect the way that new technologies come to be used in particular ways. We have explored this phenomena conceptually and through agent-based modeling. We are now seeking to develop our theory further through empirical study.

During my time at Northwestern, I have been lucky to be surrounded by a community of great intellectuals. I have worked on projects with several faculty including my advisor, Paul Leonardi, as well as Noshir Contractor, Pablo Boczkowski, and William Ocasio. I have also collaborated closely with other graduate students including Jeffrey Treem and Alan Clark.

Prior to Northwestern I spent two years studying car culture as an associate researcher at General Motors Research & Design. I hold a B.S. in Cognitive Science from University of California, San Diego.