“Matter Battles:” Boundary Objects and the Failure of Collaboration in Two Smart Cities

In this paper, I present a longitudinal, ethnographic study of two “smart city” projects that brought together groups of experts from diverse knowledge domains. Both projects structured collaboration around the development of tangible objects that could integrate the actors’ expertise and work. Often, deliverables like these can serve as boundary objects, or triggers for integration that allow actors to surface their differences and develop shared ideas. In both projects, however, the objects sparked conflicts that exacerbated rather than attenuated differences. I propose a process model exploring how and why the development of boundary objects can manifest as divisive conflict that derails collaboration. In both projects, extreme novelty gave rise to concept ambiguity, a lack of shared ideas about what smart cities were, and process ambiguity, a lack of shared ideas about how smart cities should be developed. Ambiguity led actors from diverse domains to form divergent cognitive representations about each...