Studying the Practice of Cooperation and Collaboration Within an International Research Project on the Everyday Lives of Families

The aim of this paper is to analyse the sociocultural dynamics underlying collaborative research. The article is based on an international collaborative project on the everyday lives of working families in Italy, Sweden and the USA. The aim of this paper is to show that collaborative research does not necessarily produce collaboration: this is possible only with very strong rules between partners. It proposes a distinction between collaboration and cooperation, and uses this distinction to examine intergroup and intragroup joint activity. Through the analysis of the communicative exchanges occurring between researchers, the paper highlights conditions in which cooperation can become fruitful collaboration.

Francesco ArcidiaconoEmail:

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Francesco Arcidiacono   is the Laboratory Director of the Italian Center on Everyday Lives of Families at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” (Italy). He teaches “Psychology of discursive interaction” and “Qualitative Methodologies” at the University of Neuchatel (Switzerland). His main theoretical interest concerns the processes of socialization in the family context and argumentation in discursive interactions between people. He has published books on these theoretical and empirical works entitled “Ricerca osservativa e analisi qualitativa dell’interazione verbale” (Kappa, Rome, 2005), “Famiglie all’italiana” with C. Pontecorvo, (Cortina, Milan, 2007), and “Conflitti e interazione in famiglia” (Carocci, Rome, 2007).