Transdisciplinarity and Shifting Network Boundaries: The Challenges of Studying an Evolving Stakeholder Network in Participatory Settings

Participatory research engages a transdisciplinary team of stakeholders in all aspects of the research process. Such engagement can lead to shifts in the research design, as well as who is considered a participant. We detail our experiences of studying an evolving stakeholder network in the context of a 2.5-year transdisciplinary, participatory project. We show how participation leads to shifts in the network boundary overtime and how a transdisciplinary effort was needed to retrospectively redefine the network boundary. Through tacking back and forth between ethnographic insights, research aims, and modeling assumptions, the team eventually reached agreement on what determined network membership and how to code network members according to their timing and level of participation. Our account advances literature on boundary and modeling approaches to shifting, evolving networks by demonstrating how participatory transdisciplinarity can be both a driver of, and solution to, capturing the complexity of evolving networks.

Penalty Model of Work Schedule Delay of Program under Contracted Environment Based on Sub-Network

Through the sub-network construction and the application of critical path method, this paper analyzes the impact of work schedule delay on the schedule of contracted project itself, the success or contracted projects, other follow-up contracted projects, and the program on the basis of double-code network and related lemmas. Based on this, a penalty model of work schedule delay is constructed and a case study is carried out. The research results show that the penalty model of work schedule delay can effectively deal with the impact of work schedule delay on the whole program under the condition of multiple stakeholders. The research results of this paper are conducive to the real-time control of the schedule of various kinds of work, contracted projects, and the program, and lay a foundation for the improvement of FIDIC penalty conditions (8.7) of contract, the definition of responsibility division within and among contractors, and the analytic processing of claims for contracted projects.