William C. Barley

William C. Barley is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research explores the challenges individuals and teams face as they seek to collaborate across knowledge boundaries, and the strategies that interdisciplinary science teams can enact to productively manage their differences. His work conceptualizes teams as embedded within broader organizational contexts that can either help or hinder this collaborative labor. He is program director of the Translational Team Science Initiative at Illinois, whose mission is to expand our empirical foundations to understand how science teams function and to identify which institutional resources and team practices truly strengthen collaboration and research outcomes.

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. Barley's work also explores 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, science of team science, 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 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.