ABSTRACT

Collaboration, if we can agree on nothing else, is a kind of cooperation or working together towards some end. Sometimes it seems that is all we can agree on. Nearly always imbued with a positive connotation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has momentarily lost meaning as a descriptive term. Perhaps the most noteworthy and useful aspect of the contributions in this volume is that they typically do not treat collaboration as a ‘scientific good’ but offer a healthy, analytical buffer to such views. My own role, less than half jokingly, is to take it in the opposite direction, to return collaboration to its World War II roots as a traitorous relationship with an enemy, the abandoned meaning to which I return in the conclusion. The evaluative connotations are important to bear in mind, since the labelling process is crucial and to call something ‘collaborative’ is typically to call it good. Likewise, the study of collaboration, now something of a problem area in social studies of science and technology, 1 tends to be the study of something good, something beneficial – for instance, a desirable policy outcome. I would stress at the outset that studies of collaboration have much to offer many problem areas within STS, including the origin of international scientific agendas, the structure of intellectual networks, the development of ‘motivational’ and ‘requirements’ discourse, and, particularly, problems of relationships between technoscientific disciplines and specialties.