About this issue

THE PAPER by Holland deals with a subject of current high interest in our Program of Research on the Management of Research and Development at Northwestern University. This is the special role played by certain members of research, development, and engineering (RD&E) groups in finding, acquiring, and transmitting technical information. There is a growing literature on this subject in several research fields — information systems, interorganizational relations, and small-group communication, among others. Some of the theoretical (and also quite practical) issues being addressed are: the identification of these people, their special attributes (interests, backgrounds, and abilities), their motivation for performing the “filtering” and “funneling” that they do, the way they are perceived and rewarded by colleagues and the managements of their organizations, their information search strategies and styles, their career patterns (are they promotable and promoted?), and their effects on group and organization productivity.