A Soft Systems Analysis of Social Cognition In Boundary-Spanning Innovation

The term social cognition is used in the psychology and organizational literatures to denote many different manifestations of the mental representations and processes that underlie social perception, social judgment, and social influence. This paper presents a systemic analysis of social cognition, employing three levels of analysis: (i) socially-situated cognition, involving interpretive, "framing" processes; (ii) socially-shared cognition, required to achieve joint framing of an information system; and (iii) distributed cognition, which views collaborative cognition as a set of overlapping frames, mediated by conceptual boundary objects. This research framework is operationalized through the use of Soft Systems Methodology. Findings from a case study of a boundary-spanning design group are presented, to demonstrate interactions between different levels of knowledge-sharing, social interpretation and consensus-building.