Barriers to research collaboration: are social scientists constrained by their desire for autonomy?

Researchers everywhere are being pushed to collaborate. Individual academics are being urged to join teams, small teams are encouraged to merge with others to become bigger teams, and institution-wide and inter-institutional collaborations are spreading. With potential benefits including increased chances of funding, visibility, and impact, why, asks Jenny M. Lewis, are social scientists not embracing collaboration more? Might it be the value they place on their autonomy, the freedom to pursue their own ideas and choose which topics to work on, that is constraining them? Researcher interviews suggest it may actually be time pressures and managerial constraints that are bounding autonomy, crowding out space to develop collaborations.