ABSTRACT
Collaborative working can unfold in a myriad of ways. Take CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which involves half the world’s particle physicists. This cooperative effort gave rise to the World Wide Web and the development of the grid concept of sharing distributed processing. Or take the personal collaborations forged by Paul Erdös, the Hungarian mathematician who wrote 1,500 journal papers with the help of 511 different collaborators. Mathematicians measure their prowess according to whether they have published joint papers with Erdös’s collaborators or with the collaborators of these collaborators, and so on. Then there are alliances between institutions, informal collaborations between colleagues in the same department, degree programmes offered jointly by several institutions, consortium funding arrangements, and old-established bodies such as the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) or the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The scope of collaborative working within higher education is vast, according to the perspectives that we adopted in the previous chapter. How then can we expect to identify any underpinning characteristics? How can we expect to theorize processes of joint decision-making and action in the pursuit of academic goals?
