My research focuses on how communication processes shape and are shaped by collaboration practices across professional boundaries. More specifically, I study the role of communication in interprofessional collaboration in health care, both in primary and hospital care. I am particularly interested in how collaborators define the care situation and how they collectively navigate the multiple definitions that are often simultaneously at play, given differences in professional epistemology, organizational and institutional status, and relationship with patients. I am also interested in the role of the patient or client within the context of collaborative care.  

My research interests focus on deepening our understanding of how organisational members who do not interact regularly construct the meaning of their work, often in different ways. I am particularly interested in the experiences and organisational and occupational identities of persons who occupy hybrid public-private spaces, such as volunteers or workers who are employed and managed by an organisation yet work with aged persons in home-based care environments. I aim to show how the multiple meanings given to work and organisational experiences more generally can be mobilised as a resource for individuals who occupy a peripheral organisational position.

I also investigate how communicative processes, which create particular types of collective behaviour, can facilitate and constrain organisational participation. In particular, my research examines how discourses about professionalism combine with organisational control and coordination mechanisms to structure relationality in particular ways, often with the aim of increasing collaboration, and frequently minimising or suppressing dissent. To do so, I analyse how organisational members construct communities of practice by negotiating what ways of knowing and doing should be used to resolve organisational problems and what constitutes appropriate forms of interaction.

The general theme of my research is organizational communication, considered as an organizer and component of groups. Since this way of looking at communication itself calls for more detailed explanation, a first part of my research is theoretical in nature. I attempt to clarify the premises and concepts essential for an understanding of the constitutive dimensions of communication that in turn can explain the evolving, plural and hybrid realities that increasingly go into shaping contemporary organizations.

To complement this approach, I am also pursuing a program of empirical research that over the years has led me to many organizational and institutional fields. This second aspect of my research is driven by a growing interest in the communication issues and challenges raised by collaboration between various stakeholders, be it in “pluralist” organizations or in groups attempting to formulate or inform public policy. I am especially interested in the strategies by which the players and the groups, as part of such collaboration, describe and integrate their personal experiences and their frequently implicit local logic and knowledge, in their attempts to give a voice and legitimacy to their always specific relations with reality and their environment.