Reflective sociocultural psychology: Lost and found in collaboration with funding agencies and ICT experts

Abstract

This paper deals with emerging kinds of collaboration between researchers, funding agencies and ICT ( Information and Communications Technology) experts. The goal of this paper is to analyze the challenges and opportunities for researchers presented by such collaborations. The analysis is based on a sociocultural approach, and leads to the following conclusions: ( a) the main challenges to collaboration arise from the fact that partners' communities have different goals and use different sets of mediation tools, ( b) there are different ways for researchers to cope with more powerful partners such as major funding agencies ( refusing collaboration, pseudo collaboration, asymmetric collaboration, and real partnership), ( c) appropriation of mediation tools developed by partners could be useful for researchers, ( d) collaboration with partners could be a source of new theoretically interesting phenomenon, and ( e) communication with partners who are not familiar with our routine discourses might help us to improve our own understanding.