Dr. William Barley

Biography

William C. Barley is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research explores processes that enable individuals from different disciplines to work together to achieve goals they cannot achieve alone. In modern organizations, it is impossible to fully understand these processes without recognizing the role that technologies play in the production of communication and meaning. Barley's work focuses on how individuals and organizations design and use technologies to collaborate across knowledge boundaries. Drawing primarily from fieldwork, his research captures collaborative work as it occurs in organizations, examining the collaboration of natural scientists, automobile engineers, weather researchers, and healthcare providers including physicians and nurses. He relies heavily on ethnographic methods and employs both qualitative and quantitative analytic techniques to uncover themes in the data. Notably, he has built and tested theories using social network analysis, regression models, natural language processing, and agent-based simulation modeling.

Research Interests