International collaboration as construction of knowledge and its constraints

In this paper I draw on Piaget and Habermas to underline the importance of the theoretical distinction between social relations of constraint and social relations of cooperation for reflecting upon inter-institutional projects. I argue that the socio-cultural approach to collaboration has some important limitations that restrict ideological critic and emancipatory research. The limitations of this approach can be located in its epistemological assumptions, a homogenized notion of culture and a weakness in articulating the intrapersonal, inter-personal, inter-group/positional and social representational/ideological levels of analysis. As an empirical example of this I discuss the Sloan centres for family research.