Working at the boundary: Making space for innovation in a NASA megaproject

Archival documents

To reconstruct the history of the project and contextualize boundary actions, I used archival analysis to examine the primary documents (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2013; Ventresca and Mohr, 2002). I collected primary and secondary materials, including meeting minutes, presentation materials, academic journal articles, white papers, diaries and newspaper clippings. Data from the Science Working Group (which met 48 times from 1984–2003) includes presentation materials that ran from 50–500 pages, plus the meeting minutes that were prepared by several participants shortly after each meeting. During site visits to the NASA centers where Spitzer was managed, I also obtained diaries of the lead project scientist [1] (2000–2003), and the Infrared Branch Chief at Headquarters [7] (1988–1996). Lastly, I obtained numerous journal articles on Spitzer and infrared astronomy, white papers on Spitzer’s mission, feasibility studies of the technical design, press clippings, data on NASA budgets, and organization charts.

Interviews

To ensure an accurate understanding of the archival materials, I conducted interviews using oral history protocols (Yow, 2005). I interviewed 27 people involved in Spitzer’s development, including executives from NASA Headquarters who set policy and oversee the project portfolio, scientists from the Science Working Group who set the performance requirements, managers at the NASA Centers responsible for day-to-day project management, and contractors and external advisors who oversaw construction. Each interview was audio recorded, transcribed, fact-checked by an independent editor, and verified by the interviewee, resulting in 850 pages of transcripts (~60 hours). Triangulating these accounts with the diaries and meeting minutes helped me to counter retrospective bias in the interviews.

Analytical procedure

A narrative of the sequence (or pattern) of events is a recommended starting point for analysis (Langley, 1999; Pentland, 1999). After writing the book, I established a timeline of 173 events involving resource flows. My empirical focus is on events, which allow for within-case comparisons and improve the validity and reliability of the single-case method (Yin, 2008). I conducted a within-case analysis of the actions surrounding each resource event and followed the longitudinal, qualitative data method developed by Saldaña (2009) that breaks the history into blocks of time and compares the changes between each period. Finally, based on a grounded and systematic understanding of the case, I shifted my analyses to uncover the mechanisms by which boundaries are reworked. I entered all data documents into Atlas.ti and coded for instances of boundary activities to affect resource flows. Then, I developed initial clusters of boundary actions at individual, project, and institutional levels, and iteratively refined these concepts during secondary coding following grounded theory methods (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). Given the complexity of Spitzer, a timeline is provided in Table 1, showing the most crucial events in Spitzer’s history in bold.

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Table 1.

Timeline of Spitzer project (major events are bolded).

Date	Event
1800	First discovery of infrared (near-infrared, as part of solar spectrum) by W. Herschel
1946	First infrared vacuum-tube detector developed
1958	First infrared semiconductor detectors developed (by military, classified for missiles)
1958	NASA established, also Space Science Board (National Academies of Science)
1961	First infrared bolometer developed (Texas Instr., F. Low)
1961	First repeatable infrared observations from ground (U Arizona, H. Johnson)
1962	NAS/SSB recommends against infrared from space
1961-2	NASA begins funding balloon-, rocket-, and airborne-based infrared telescope projects
1963	First infrared data of Venus (ground-based); observations of Mars (balloon-based)
1965	SSB now recommends infrared from space in long-term plans (but not in near term)
1967	Becklin-Neugebauer find infrared nebulae using ground-based observations (first evidence of objects that are visible only in the infrared spectrum)
1968	Hubble telescope formally proposed by NASA
1968	NASA funds first infrared space instrument (2 micron sky survey)
1970	NASA budget cuts; $2M/yr for infrared programs (none for space observations)
1971	Spitzer first proposed (pre-Phase A) at NASA Ames, infrared branch formed
1971	Decadal survey (Greenstein report) rejects need for infrared space telescope
1974	Hubble cancelled, but 50% of funding reinstated after intense lobbying by scientists
1975	First Spitzer engineering designs developed (still pre-Phase A)
1977	Hubble authorized FY78 [Great Observatory #1]
1979	Ground-based infrared facility operational (Mauna Kea )
1980	Ames lacks support for mega (>billion) projects; last megaproject is Pioneer in 1978
1980	First Shuttle launch
1980	Spitzer Study Group formed (Ames, F. Witteborn and L. Young)
1983	IRAS sky survey (Jan-Nov) - demonstrated infrared data from space
1983	Spitzer Phase A begins (Announcement of Opportunity, Nov)
1984	First meeting of the Spitzer Science Working Group (SWG)
1986	Challenger Shuttle explosion, 7 die, Congressional inquiry, NASA’s reputation tarnished
1987	AXAF authorized for FY88 [Great Observatory #2]
1987	NASA HQ infrared division formed
1989	Spitzer at #14 on Ames priority list; Spitzer transferred to JPL in September
1990	Hubble launched (April); mirror aberration problem discovered
1990	Spitzer RFP for Phase B issued (June); on hold per Congressional request (Dec)
1990	NASA budget flat at $9billion, same as in 1962 (adj for inflation); 10% of this goes to OSSA, but Hubble eats 1/4 of it at $100M/yr
1991	Spitzer cancelled (Jan); just minimal ‘Detector Development Program’ at JPL
1989-93	Spitzer has different project manager at JPL nearly every year; L.S. leads from 1993-2000
1991	Decadal survey (Bahcall report) recommends Spitzer
1993	NASA’s Mars Observer lost (Aug); Hubble fixed (Dec), Goldin caps projects at $500M
1994	JPL endorses new design concept for Spitzer (Apr)
1994	Congress swings from Democratic majority to Republican majority (Nov)
1995	Congress agrees to put Spitzer in Federal budget for first time in FY96 for $10M (Sept)
1996	Spitzer enters Phase B (Nov)
1997	Spitzer authorized for FY98, [Great Observatory #4, last in spectrum]
2003	Spitzer launches (Aug); first light (Dec)

Splicing boundaries

Individuals extended their own roles by integrating another occupational domain with their own. A project manager [20] said: ‘The role of scientists on Spitzer was different from anything I did before and anything I’ve done since. We used scientists like engineers. We gave them difficult, sometimes very difficult, technical problems.’ Ordinarily, in a technically complex project, the necessary expertise will be spread across dozens of engineering and scientific specializations. On Spitzer, the scientists repeatedly took on parts of other roles, entwining different disciplines in their project work. According to a NASA scientist [1], ‘[t]he Science Working Group [was] involved at a very detailed level in what might have been thought of as engineering parts of the project. When teams were set up to address particular aspects of the mission, people from every part of the project would work on it together. It didn’t matter whose problem it was.’

To illustrate splicing, the following example is about an academic scientist [4], who was building infrared sensors. He had fashioned a workshop in the basement of the astronomy building at his university. The incoming Spitzer project manager [19] visited the professor and said:

The scientist [4] showed me his lab, and he’s got these guys who have been building these detectors for five, six, or seven years, and said, ‘It’s going to be really tough getting this work transitioned to industry.’ I said, ‘Why are we transitioning it to industry?’ He said, ‘Well, we’re not going to be allowed to build flight hardware here at the university.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘NASA won’t let us.’ I said, ‘I’m NASA, and I’ll let you.’ He didn’t believe me.

This example of an academic scientist building flight-ready hardware illustrates the splicing of occupations, for it is unusual that a scientist should be doing engineering work at all, and particularly on a component that would be flown in space. The scientist’s skepticism was reasonable, as engineering and science are typically not done by the same individual, according to a long-time executive of NASA [8]:

Flight projects are a whole different deal … just antithetical to research. Researchers … are going to do the best of everything, and they’re not going to use processes …. Flight projects have very rigorous processes for testing. … It’s not unusual for a space system to spend eighteen months in test before it launches.

However, Spitzer was an innovation that necessitated interdependencies. A NASA scientist [1] noted that, ‘A car can be built with interchangeable people as well as interchangeable parts. But Spitzer couldn’t be, and the very first prototype car probably couldn’t be, either … [so] we made the best use of the talents and abilities of the people we had ….’ As the detector-building professor [4] said, ‘It’s outside the envelope that the scientists involved would be the ones who had a large amount of technical expertise, so they could get into the trenches with the engineers when there was a problem and genuinely help solve the problem, rather than just being in the way.’ Indeed, the very use of the term ‘envelope’ refers to a boundary – a physical boundary that test pilots challenge when they ‘push the envelope’ to check the performance limits of an aircraft.

The data show that individuals regularly overcame occupational boundaries by blending roles. Partly, this blending was out of necessity, because of the demands of innovation. The science that could be done with the telescope would depend on its construction, and the construction depended on what science needed to be done. Too much was unknown, and expertise was limited as infrared space-based astronomy was still so new. Therefore, while occupational boundaries were clearly understood, team members set them aside and willfully combined domains.

Softening boundaries

Given such strong norms and rationales, how did the occupational boundaries get remade in Spitzer? I argue that managers support role splicing by diminishing formal role boundaries. As the examples will show, this occurred not just between engineers and scientists, but between academics and contractors, and was actively encouraged by project managers, whether they were employed by NASA or a contractor.

A few details on the project management context are useful. JPL, the NASA Center where Spitzer was managed from 1989 onward, is a matrix organization in which employees report both to their immediate line (department) manager, as well as a project manager, whose authority cuts horizontally across relevant departments. The line managers are responsible for developing and delivering the project and oversee functional areas such as electronics or materials. Typically, the project manager oversees the budget and interacts with the customer (in the case of Spitzer, the customer is NASA Headquarters and the telescope user community). The project office determines the customer’s needs, develops the technical specifications for the various project components, and contracts with line managers to obtain those component work products. Although this matrix structure is intended to foster cross-organizational teaming, it often has the opposite effect, due to conflicts over project scope, schedule and responsibility (Baroff, 2006). How this played out at JPL is described by a project manager [19]:

The tension that exists is whether the people who are core to the project reside in the project organization or in the line organization …. The project [office] would say, ‘We want you to build us a set of control electronics.’ The [line manager for that division] would say, ‘Well, where are the specifications?’ It was almost like dealing with a contractor …. In a perfect world, the project manager could get half a dozen divisions to give him their stuff and then sit back and wait for the product to be delivered. But the reality is that the divisions have to interact with each other, and the connection for that is the project.

Within JPL, project managers had to work around the boundaries set by the matrix structure. For example, JPL staff members insisted that their roles on Spitzer be defined. They wrote job descriptions, but the project manager deliberately ignored these documents and ultimately, so did the staff. The project manager [19] describes what happened:

[My team] said, ‘We need role statements.’ I said, ‘Well, our job is to get Spitzer built.’ … At the time at JPL, you’d write a role statement, they’d sign it, I’d sign it, we’d put it in a book, and then somehow it would become part of the history of the project. Then when you went to give them raises and stuff, you’d drag out the role statements and say, ‘This guy is responsible for this and this, and therefore he should get a big raise’, or whatever. But I didn’t do that. I just said, ‘OK, you want a role statement, write a role statement.’ They wrote it, and I put them in a drawer and never got them out again. They never brought it up again, either.

For another example of softening, we return to the detectors built by a professor [4]. By allowing sensors of academic origins to be used in the final construction of the telescope, the project manager [19] softened the boundaries between NASA and the university. In doing so, he overcame traditional boundaries that dictate who is allowed to do what type of work (scientist vs. engineer, academic vs. contractor). Moreover, by accepting the work product, the manager ensured that the scientist’s role splicing would hold. The manager not only had to convince the scientist that this work would be accepted, but he interceded so that other project members would accept these sensors despite their academic origins.

This softening of role boundaries extended across the project. Managers at the partner organizations, for example, fostered this attitude so that all team members – whether NASA employees, contractors or university scientists – did not allow perceived roles and reporting structures to constrain individuals in ways that limited the project. The active softening of boundaries by non-NASA managers involved in Spitzer allowed occupational boundaries to be perforated. This willingness to ignore hard boundaries was unusual, as multiple participants noted. For example, contractors also actively loosened the boundaries, as a university scientist [10] recalls:

We [scientists] all took on responsibility for working with the contractors to make sure that everything worked. My job was to work with Ball Aerospace on every aspect of the optical system. So I was actually in the test chamber in a bunny-suit [a clean room coverall], with the Ball guys, helping them test … and put stuff together. That’s highly unusual. One of my friends … who works at [another contractor], says they would never let the scientists be working hand in hand with a contractor, just because of fear of the legal repercussions if something didn’t work out.

Like other managers, the NASA project manager [19] regularly interceded on behalf of the project members to change the boundaries that stood in their way. He said that ‘much of the structure was perception rather than real’, and described his management philosophy:

Think about each of us standing in a cardboard box. If we are all in one box, we can move around, we can help each other. If you fall down, I can pick you up. But if we’re all in separate boxes and the line between your box and mine is well-defined, then I can’t help you very much …. That’s what structure can do, if you’re not careful. [19]

In sum, the team members and team leaders in Spitzer actively reworked the boundaries that circumscribed their professional activities. Roles, chains of command, and routines are typically all well-defined and are set by precedent. What I find is that personal initiative was necessary to splice roles, but managerial intercession was needed to allow those splices to hold. Splicing is a relational reconfiguration, while softening is a structural reconfiguration of occupations.

Fitting boundaries

The leaders sought to create new connections among the employees of different organizations who were helping to build Spitzer. An opportunity to rework the boundaries arose in 1993, when the project was transferred from NASA-Ames to NASA-JPL, where Spitzer was assigned a new project manager [19]. By this point the scientists had been together for over a decade, trying to develop a specification that met their scientific objectives. At the same time, the project moved from the specification to design study phase, the stage at which multiple contractors are selected to develop a design. Out of this set, the best design is selected and that contractor is awarded a contract to build the instrument. The Spitzer project manager [19] set out to change how the whole team would relate to each other and the project:

Once we had Ball and Lockheed as part of the team, the very first thing I did is, I had a three-day retreat and invited each of the companies to send three or four people. … They thought I was a screwball, because I said, ‘We’re not going to get anything out of this meeting except to find out who each other are.’ I put a lot of effort into forcing the team to function as a team. … I’m experimenting here …. [They] got to know each other well enough that [people] were working on Spitzer, instead of working for their company. [19]

Rather than developing competing designs, one of the contractors [15] said, ‘we spent six months working together elbow-to-elbow as a team, on how to [design Spitzer].’ The contractors interacted with each other and Spitzer managers in a way that was uncommonly integrated. For each major subsystem, Spitzer brought in just one contractor earlier in the design phase and retained them. One of them [14] said, ‘Usually they pick a couple of contractors to do a [design] study and then pick a winner to do the development and operations part of it. And they didn’t do that this time. … I thought it was incredibly creative and effective.’ Another contractor [15] said, ‘it’s different from the way they do it now; Spitzer was relatively unique.’ This eliminated much of the normal competition among contractors for the more lucrative construction contracts. For example, two of these erstwhile competitors went to dinner to change how they would relate to one another:

We agreed that while we could be great competitors normally, that we were going to be brothers-in-arms, he and I, on this job for the duration. It was for the good of our respective companies. We also agreed not to poach on each other’s scope, which is important. We did that over food, which was very important. It was a very bonding sort of a relation …. I think he was surprised that a [competitor] would actually have this conversation. [15]

Another way that the project worked to create connections across organizational boundaries was to have management meetings (uncommon in science projects) and rotate the location. Every month, about 15–25 people would meet at the home office of one of the project leads, whether it was at NASA-JPL, NASA-Goddard, a university or a contractor. A JPL engineer [21] said, ‘That created a human connection among all these people, which was built not just formally but at dinners and parties on occasion.’

In sum, fitting is a mechanism for getting the commitment of the various project managers at JPL and the contractors to create a team, reduce the competitive tendencies, and create new opportunities for connections. This reworked the way the organizational members related to one another. To prevent these new connections from coming undone, other mechanisms were developed to supplement and structurally reinforce the relational fit among the organizations.

Fusing boundaries

To stabilize the interorganizational connections, the project fused the organizations together around the project by restructuring the interaction process. In Spitzer, this entailed changing the formal ways that the different organizations typically interacted, such as the contractor selection process, and the incentives provided in the contracts. The next section provides details on how these structural changes fused the organizations together.

In addition to changing how contractors, academics and NASA staff related to one another, a project manager [19] also changed how contractors were selected and rewarded. These structural changes further tightened the bonds between participants and made their success conditional on the success of everyone else on the project. For example, it wasn’t enough to get the most technically capable contractors involved, but to get those who were great collaborators that met their schedules and budgets. However, the process at JPL was an obstacle. According to the project manager [19], this is because when selecting contractors at JPL:

We weren’t allowed to consider past performance. … But the rest of the NASA centers had started using that as an evaluation factor. The NASA guys said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ and the JPL guys said, ‘We’ve never done that before.’ I had to go all the way to the [top] to get approval to evaluate past performance. And he thought it was a good idea, when we finally got to him, but there was so much bureaucracy along the way saying, ‘We always do it this way.’ We broke the paradigm [by changing this process].

In addition to the selection process, the incentive system was reworked so that success was rewarded as a mutual accomplishment. Most significantly, the contracts departed from the typical way that NASA compensates work done by individual organizations. As a NASA scientist [5] said:

The incentive fee had a [novel] component that depended on the overall success of the mission. That means that Lockheed’s fee depended on Ball’s performance. Ball’s and Lockheed’s performance depended on the instruments [built by others] working, and so on. The advantage of that is that you’ve removed the incentive for people to solve their own problems at the expense of somebody else – or to not help solving somebody else’s problem… the incentive is you work together, you got the best overall product. You don’t maximize your little piece of it.

Given the tight budgets at NASA, cost pressures were high, and funding cuts were frequent. And given the inherent uncertainty of developing Spitzer, each area of the project might be expected to pad their budget (and did, initially). However, if everyone pads their budget, then it is difficult to put the slack to good use on the most essential areas. To reduce such moves, the Spitzer project increased transparency by instituting another novel feature: open-book finance, in which all participants had the same information. A NASA scientist [1] said that whether they worked for NASA or a university or a contractor,

everybody always knew how much money everybody else was getting … . [O]ne of the things that was always on the [monthly management meeting] agenda was potential allocations of our project reserve. So even though [the project manager] reserved the prerogative to make the final decision, everybody could feel that they’d been consulted and had a say in how these reserve funds were allocated.

Thus, despite their many differences and diverse motivations, the Spitzer team was one of the more united at NASA – a view expressed by NASA executives, managers, scientists and contractors. I find that this happened after participants reworked the organizational boundaries.

It might appear that these fusing actions were primarily driven by one particular project manager [e.g., 19]. Indeed, in that role, he had the most direct control over structuring the team processes. But his bosses also enabled him to make changes. According to one of the participants [8], the director of JPL had told the project manager [19]: ‘We’re having too many overruns [at JPL], too many difficulties. I want you to invent a new paradigm for managing Spitzer.’ Thus, the project manager had the charter to try new things. Just as importantly, the rest of the Spitzer team had to enact these changes and alter the ways they had been working together, some who had been on the team for a decade or more. These relational changes among the team were cemented by the structural changes due to the contracts, open books, and team meetings. In this way, the team was ultimately not just fitted together, but fused to a common goal. The Lockheed manager [14] noted that ‘Once you get into the mission, people don’t pay attention to what badge you’re wearing. You’re part of a team. When people work on projects, they tend to identify more strongly with the project than they do with their home organization.’

Channeling boundaries

As soon as the Apollo program developed launch capabilities, astronomers set their sights on a space telescope. Between 1968 and 1977, dozens of projects were proposed in all the major wavelengths by scientists across the country. And while there were now more funding sources for astronomy (e.g., NASA, DoD, NSF), the cost of instrumentation had also increased, and this intensified the rivalry between the various sub-communities. These battles played out at Headquarters, where a NASA executive [7] said ‘Managing this whole business is – well, there is an air of competition and cooperation at the same time. And you have to somehow figure out how to walk that fine line. The different wavelengths – optical, infrared, X-ray, gamma ray – they battled each other. The different communities – astronomy and planetary science and space science, ionospheric physics – they battled each other just tooth and nail all the time.’

To resolve this tension, a NASA Astrophysics executive [8] yoked the projects together. Four space telescope projects, each supported by a different scientific community, were brought together under the banner of ‘The Great Observatories’. One manager [17] explained that this particular NASA executive [8] ‘was a master at selling missions – his idea was that if he could sell these as a large package of observatories across the entire energy spectrum, then he could get the astronomy community to stop bickering at each other about getting their wavelength represented and everybody would have their turn’. It also made it easier for NASA to obtain funds from Congress for the package of projects, rather than individually (Harwit, 2009). By linking the projects, a more compelling story could be told – the executive [8] prepared marketing material for Congress (NASA, 1985) about the science that could be done only if astronomers had telescopes across the spectrum. The Great Observatories was an effective conduit to bring Congress, NASA and the various astronomy communities into contact and agreement, despite their disparate interests. Thus, after a gauntlet of delays and budget cuts, all four telescope projects (including Spitzer) were launched between 1990 and 2003. ³

This accomplishment overcame political opposition after the Challenger Shuttle and the Hubble mirror debacles. Congress was so frustrated with NASA that it put all of the agency’s funding on hold in 1990, and officially cancelled Spitzer in 1991. This was a shock to the project team, as the 1990 Decadal Survey had just proclaimed Spitzer to be the highest scientific priority. One of the scientists [2] recalled his epiphany upon realizing that lobbying would be necessary:

I didn’t have the good sense to realize that what we were trying to do was [so challenging] – I knew the hardware, I knew how it would work, I knew where the soft spots were, and if Spitzer flew, it would be fantastic – beyond that, let somebody else worry about it. We had on some pretty tight blinders. [Our mindset shifted] when the money didn’t come.

Another scientist [10] noted that ‘the pressure to get [funding] for the project led us to do things like lobby intensely at Congress …. We knew we had to go and speak up on behalf of ourselves.’

In 1990, another university-based astrophysicist [11] was brought in to focus on getting Congress to appropriate funds for Spitzer. She ‘kind of volunteered and learned how to do it’ [10]. Indeed, lobbying did not come naturally to any of the scientists, as she said of her new role:

The people at NASA … don’t know much about the nuts and bolts [of lobbying], because they’re prohibited from doing it themselves. I didn’t even know people did such things. I learned a lot from [people in universities and aerospace] about how to interact with people on Capitol Hill, what style of information to present, how to scale the pitch. [11]

Scientists who were not directly employed by NASA regularly visited their representatives on Capitol Hill. One scientist [11] set up meetings and prepared briefing materials for the Spitzer Working Group members to use. After several years of lobbying, the awareness of Spitzer was widespread. An executive [9] noted that because the scientists were doing this ‘spade work on Capitol Hill … the congressional staffers, as soon as they heard the word Spitzer, they said, ‘Oh yes, you are the fourth and final element of the Great Observatories program. Yes, we’ll get you going.’ So it was a brilliant packaging maneuver by [the NASA executive [8]].’

In 1994, NASA tested the waters and requested $10 million from Congress to reinstate Spitzer. The project was finally a line item in the Congressional budget. However, before the budget could be approved by the President, control of Congress swung to the Republicans for the first time in 50 years. With the Democrats suddenly out of power, Spitzer was again at risk – the House zeroed out the project’s funding. Scrambling to restore the funding, a scientist [11] went to meet with a Senate staffer, recalling how the scientists’ years of spade work paid off:

I had disregarded some of the advice my mentors had given me [to not] bother with the out-of-power side. It doesn’t take much extra time to go visit them, so I’d been visiting the minority [Republican] Senate appropriations staffer and he’d gotten to know me during the preceding years. Then suddenly, after the 1994 mid-term elections, he was the man in charge.

The lobbying efforts had opened up channels to both political parties. Finally, in 1995 (and 24 years after it had first been proposed), Spitzer officially appeared in NASA’s budget as a major project. Fundamental to this accomplishment were The Great Observatories concept and marketing materials (NASA, 1985), which illustrate how opening a channel can enable new connections for transferring information and resources. While this was based on the actions of people at NASA Headquarters, another channeling example that takes place at the level of the project team is lobbying. Here again we see the splicing of roles as the scientists learned to lobby, but in the service of working across institutions. In this instance, it is the creation of new channels between the scientific team and Congress that enabled the flow of resources, a lobbying channel that NASA Headquarters was prohibited from developing.

Corralling boundaries

In addition to channeling, the project team also put in place more permanent structures for ensuring new flows of information and resources. These changes benefitted Spitzer, but also effectively corralled stakeholders by reworking the very institutions that structured their interactions. Corralling is illustrated by project members altering the ways in which the astronomy community engaged with a government agency, as well as conducted research with telescope datasets.

NASA’s space science budget requests are oriented around programmatic (rather than strictly scientific) goals, such as solar, lunar, planetary, astrophysical, microgravity, and life sciences. Astrophysics projects were dominated by the interests of optical astronomers, who, as the oldest and most powerful astronomer community, helped set NASA’s priorities, such as through the decadal surveys. ‘There were no direct advocates for Spitzer at NASA Headquarters’, one of the academic scientists [6] said. ‘There was incredible advocacy for Hubble … [and the X-ray telescope, including] the head of the high-energy branch. …We had to start having advocates at NASA Headquarters to get this mission.’

To overcome a lack of influence, the scientists engaged in institutional groundwork to establish an infrared office within the Astrophysics directorate at Headquarters. Some of the pioneering infrared scientists from Ames were the first to join. Among them was a manager [7] who said that ‘In 1988, I was asked to go to Headquarters by the people at Ames to help get [several infrared projects] going. … I was at Headquarters for almost ten years. I started the Infrared, Submillimeter, and Radio Astrophysics branch. We had all of the projects and the research funding in that range of the light spectrum [including far- and mid-infrared].’ However, when Spitzer transferred from Ames to JPL in 1989, the scientists wanted their own (non-Ames) advocate at Headquarters. An academic participant in Spitzer [6] took a two-year leave of absence from his university position: ‘I went to Headquarters … to try to start guaranteeing that we had advocacy for Spitzer.’ Thus, two academic scientists [4 and 7] spent 2 and 6 years respectively at NASA Headquarters helping to develop the fledgling infrared branch.

Once at Headquarters, this group of infrared scientists focused on the whole portfolio of infrared projects, not just their pet projects. Their shared goal was to establish a point of focus for infrared science that would continue beyond their tenure. In 1994, the infrared science office was formally established, thereby securing a portion of NASA’s annual budget. This ensured that resources would be directed towards infrared projects, including those in the pipeline such as Spitzer, as well as securing a base of power for future infrared projects.

Another way in which the Spitzer participants altered the landscape was to engage in institutional groundwork with the scientific community. Spitzer was expected to have to have full capabilities for 2–3 years, depending on when the liquid helium coolant ran out. Because of the limited lifetime of the cryogen, this had major implications for science observations. One of the NASA executives [9] said, ‘keep in mind that in the 90’s, infrared astronomy was the youngest of the astronomical disciplines, so you were literally improving your capability by orders of magnitude [with Spitzer] … in some cases, a million-fold improvement over anything that had flown before.’ This meant that discoveries of entirely new phenomena were guaranteed to happen, but sufficient time for follow up observations was not. The executive [9] continued, ‘You bang yourself on the forehead and say, “Oh my God, we didn’t get to what we really wanted to do.” … The bottom line is that the time from when you wrote your proposal to the point where you submitted a peer-reviewed paper could easily be equivalent to the Spitzer lifetime.’

Under the typical scheme, most scientists would only get one chance to collect data, thereby limiting their discoveries. Because of Spitzer’s short lifetime, ⁴ astronomers would need to change how they did research. The executive [9] explained that, ‘Driven primarily by what we thought would be a 2.5-year lifetime, I and others led an effort to reexamine the way we do astronomy – I call it ‘the sociology of science’ – to break out of the paradigm.’ To enable simultaneous, widespread data collection, the project team set up the Legacy Science Program.

The Legacy Program changed many elements that astronomers were used to. First, the data collection proposals were different. Instead of requesting 10–20 hours of telescope time, as is usual, scientists could only propose 500–1000 hour programs during the first 6 months of Spitzer’s science operations. This allowed for massive datasets to be constructed as quickly as possible. Second, these data immediately entered the public domain. ‘We had no proprietary period on the data, which was revolutionary at the time’, the executive [9] said. Instead, scientists only had priority over the specific research question they had proposed. The data were made available to all astronomers, who could use them to answer different questions or build on them by submitting a follow-on proposal for additional observing time. The academic in charge of the data archive [12] said, ‘The community is both the astronomers not in the project and the scientists in the project – [we developed] a fair and balanced approach to enable each of these constituencies to have their opportunity to do the science they wanted to do.’ Initially astronomers resisted, but eventually came to realize that the Legacy program could increase the scientific results from Spitzer and for the wider scientific community. This has borne out: More than 2,000 peer-reviewed publications have resulted from the legacy data alone.

These examples show that even seemingly intractable institutional boundaries – the established norms and structures that guide social interactions – can be changed. In Spitzer, this includes deliberately altering the path through which financial resources flowed at NASA by establishing a new infrared program office at Headquarters, and changing the way that science was done by restructuring how the researchers obtained access to the telescope and its data.

Boundary multiplexity

By taking a multilevel view, this study reveals that boundaries are both relational and structural. Relationally, individual project participants encounter boundary challenges that they respond to by (1) splicing roles across a task, (2) fitting organizations around a goal and (3) channeling institutions to redirect flows of information and resources. Structurally, participants address boundary problems by (4) softening role expectations and procedures, (5) fusing project partners through trust and shared incentives and (6) corralling diverse institutions through new systems that change their operations. Taken together, these relational and structural mechanisms provide an empirical and practical toolkit for considering how innovation proceeds in established and complex settings.

This study builds upon a literature that has examined how users of new technology react to boundary challenges (e.g., Barley, 1986; Levina and Vaast, 2005; Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018; Murray, 2010; O’Mahony and Bechky, 2008). However, in a large-scale innovation project, we readily find the presence and co-mingling of sense-making artifacts, individual champions, and organizing structures. I extend this work by focusing on a more complex intra-organizational context, where boundary challenges are richer, as well as at multiple levels where boundary solutions are broader. From my analysis of the NASA data, I develop a suite of mechanisms for addressing boundary problems – splicing and softening, fitting and fusing, channeling and corralling – that provide both relational and structural tools to rework the context for innovation. The Spitzer case highlights how boundaries are enacted through the way people relate to one another, as well as the structures that shape their interactions.

Boundary dynamics

The organizational literature has mostly taken boundaries as given, as something to be maintained and, when necessary, spanned. In contrast, the STS literature treats boundaries as fluid, but infrequently examines how fluidity and change comes about. I bring attention to boundary change as an endogenous process and identify six mechanisms for changing boundaries along professional, organizational and institutional lines: Boundaries are targets of strategic action. Elements can be brought together either temporarily as in splicing, or somewhat more permanently through corralling. In these actions, there is a role for individual agency in boundary work in megaprojects. Managerial intercession, through such strategies as softening and fusing, can support individual efforts. Old configurations of boundaries, such as those of scientific and congressional institutions, can be retained while redirecting resource flows through channeling, or creating new configurations of established players through fitting and corralling. Future research might examine how boundaries are experienced and targeted, depending on one’s role or position.

Boundaries are dynamic, but there may be different types of boundaries that change at different rates, or in a different order. I found no temporal patterns, as the six mechanisms were present throughout the Spitzer project; however, this may be because the project lasted so many years and dealt with so many boundaries. In a project of shorter duration or lesser complexity, distinct patterns may be more evident. However, it is equally possible that there is no order. Boundaries may turn out to be co-constituted at occupational, organizational, and institutional levels. This raises another question for further study: What do we miss by looking at the boundary issues at each level in isolation? Although I find that boundaries were malleable (and at multiple levels), the time horizon of the Spitzer project may not reflect typical processes. Future research that examines the reciprocal nature of innovation and institutions ought to closely attend to the temporal dimension, as there may be other ways to change boundaries in the short term. And finally, additional research is needed to explore how boundaries may be experienced differently by project members, and why do some choose to act to change the boundaries?

In sum, this study indicates that a more dynamic view of boundaries is warranted. Thus, rather than just studying boundary organizations, we should also be thinking about boundary organizing. Instead of spanning boundaries in which we taken their construction as given, we might theorize instead about reconfiguring and reworking those boundaries. I show that in the course of an innovation project at NASA, team members regularly worked to alter the boundaries in which they labored. This study opens up a new path for research on the dynamics of changing boundaries.