What are institutional boundaries and how can they be overcome? Germany's collaborative research centres as boundary-spanning networks

Social entities create institutional frameworks, i.e. internal systems of rules which govern (but do not control) the actions of their members. Both scientific communities and scientific organisations are social entities whose institutional frameworks include rules promoting internal collaboration. Based upon a diffuse reciprocity, members of the social entities are stimulated to collaborate with other members. The tendency to prefer other members as collaborators is accompanied by a relative exclusion of non-members from collaborations. Thus, in this way institutional frameworks create institutional boundaries hindering collaboration. In order to overcome institutional boundaries both within universities and between scientific communities, in Germany collaborative research centres (CRCs) were established. These are networks of research groups from different departments of one or more universities, i.e. from different organisations and different scientific communities. They contain their own institutional framework, which overlaps with the institutional frameworks of both organisations and scientific communities. Because the network’s institutional framework includes rules promoting collaborations, these necessarily span the original institutional boundaries. A detailed discussion of these rules shows the functional equivalence of the different social entities’ (communities, organisations and networks) institutional frameworks.