ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what leads to an absence of knowledge sharing—the research status in which researchers encounter difficulty connecting each other’s knowledge. It discusses how people’s cognitions of certain relationships, other people, objects, or processes influence their relationship building. The chapter identifies the cognitive-based reasons for people from various disciplines to share enough information to build their collaboration ties. It argues what kinds of knowledge sharing patterns are employed between disciplines for their Interdisciplinary Collaborations (IC) and how the differences between knowledge, methodology, and epistemology influence the IC patterns in order to share enough information necessary for building IC. The chapter reveals that IC participants can exercise at least two different approaches to their research. It addresses the question of how much knowledge sharing is enough for IC. The chapter investigates how other social connecting factors of social networking, specifically interpersonal relationships, play a role in the mechanics of building collaborative connections.
