Calibrating Translational Cancer Research: Collaboration without Consensus in Interdisciplinary Laboratory Meetings

Based on an original ethnographic study of a translational cancer research institute in the United States, we propose calibration as a process that makes interdisciplinary collaboration without consensus possible. Calibration refers to ongoing, day-to-day negotiation and alignment of personal identities, disciplinary commitments, and research group customs that occur during face-to-face group deliberations around everyday research concerns. Calibration provides a mechanism that explains how collaboration without consensus is possible. Crucially, it does not presuppose that interdisciplinary collaboration either indicates or causes the blurring or softening of disciplinary boundaries. We argue that at the microsociological level it may be disciplinary robustness, rather than synthesis, that contributes to interdisciplinary innovation.