Discourses of 'Community' in Collaborative Work: The Case of Clean Technology

The aim of this study is to understand how the metaphor of ‘community’ is mobilised in collaborative work across professional boundaries. Specifically, the aim is to explore the evocation of environmental ethics in the constitution of Clean Technology as a (professional, political) project, and evaluate how ‘community’ is a means by which collaboration in this project is rendered discursively. The study hopes to answer the following questions: How is collaborative work constituted symbolically as a ‘community’, and how does environmentally ethical collaborative work differ from ‘collaborative communities’ in extant research? Focusing on a single CleanTech project in the UK, the research will use a discourse-analytic framework to problematise and evaluate ‘community’ as an aspect of collaborative work, with the intention of capturing the purposes, rules and presuppositions that render it possible, intelligible, stable or vulnerable as a social practice. The study will use an Extended Case methodology to structure disparate accounts into recognisable ‘logics’ of the object of study.