William C. Barley is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research explores the processes enabling individuals from different disciplines to work together to achieve goals they would be unable to achieve alone. In modern organizations, it is impossible to fully understand these processes without recognizing the role that technologies play in the production and communication of meaning. To that end, Barley's work also focuses on how individuals in organizations design and use technologies to collaborate across knowledge boundaries. His work draws on the theoretical traditions of symbolic interactionism, social constructivism, and practice perspectives from communication studies, organization studies, and science and technology studies.

Drawing primarily on fieldwork, Barley's research aims to capture collaborative work as it occurs within and across organizations. In various projects, he has examined collaboration among natural scientists, automobile engineers, weather researchers, and physicians and nurses working in children's hospitals. Although he relies heavily on ethnographic methods, he also employs other analytic techniques, both qualitative and quantitative, to uncover themes in his data. In particular, he has built and tested theory using social network analysis, regression models, natural language processing, and agent based simulation modeling.