The Challenge of Doing Corporatized Research An Ethnography of ICT Use

Two team members from a four-person research project chronicle the power relations of their experiences during a 6-year study of information and communication technologies (ICTs), showing that employing bargaining techniques and framing the corporate support as a grant rather than as a contract can help one resist and even "manage upward" the corporate influence on research. The authors also detail the micro strategies and politics of team membership over the life of the project and show how membership dynamics change as a result of diverse interests, changing competencies, and, most important, the health issues that affected team members.