Suchman, L. & Wynn, E. H. (1984). Procedures and Problems in the Office. Office: Technology and People 2, 2 (Jan 1984), 133--154.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....finding ways to manage the problems and trade offs resulting from conflict and coordination (Malone, Crowston, 1994; Schmidt, Simone, 1996) Ackerman Challenge of CSCW 4 Exceptions are normal in work processes. It has been found that much of office work is handling exceptional situations (Suchman, Wynn, 1984). Additionally, roles are often informal and fluid (Strauss, 1993) CSCW approaches to workflow and process engineering primarily try to deal with exceptions and fluidity (e.g. Katzenberg, Pickard, McDermott, 1996) People prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and they use ....

Suchman, L., & Wynn, E. (1984). Procedures and Problems in the Office. Office: Technology and People, 2, 133-154.

....of the coordination problem for many types of collective activity, it has not been the subject of extensive study in CSCW. While there have been empirical studies examining short term coordination in complex real world settings (Heath Luff, 1991, Hughes, Randall Shapiro, 1992, Hutchins, 1990, Suchman Wynn, 1984), that research has largely addressed how teams coordinate complex tasks over periods of minutes or hours. Our goal is different: we look at long term coordination in naturalistic settings over extended periods of time, and the projects we studied here lasted many months. There is much less ....

Suchman, L. & Wynn, E. (1984). Procedures and problems in the office. Office: technology and people, 2, pp 133154.

.... of office procedures vis a vis the actual course of action to a critical analysis and demonstrated that office procedures do not determine action causally; they could thereby show that the design visions of the office automation movement were misguided (Wynn, 1979; Suchman, 1982; Suchman, 1983; Suchman and Wynn, 1984). In doing so, they were highly influential in shaping the agenda of the research program which a few years later became CSCW. Since then, workplace studies have had and continue to have profound impact on the development of CSCW technologies. Not in the form of a direct relationship of ....

Suchman, Lucy A., and Eleanor Wynn: `Procedures and problems in the office,' Office: Technology and People, vol. 2, 1984, pp. 133-154.

....computing and problematic themes when people are taken into account. Large parts of research in the area of systems development, cooperative design, human computer interaction and CSCW have been concerned with the impossibility of formalisation of work. Social studies of work in an office setting (Suchmann Wynn 1984, Suchmann 1986) have been the cornerstone in the critique of Tayloristic office automation. The UTOPIA project (Bdker et al. 1987) showed that formal descriptions did not work in the cooperation with users from the graphical industry. Consequently, techniques such as organisational games, ....

Suchman, L. and E. Wynn (1984) Procedures and Problems in the Office. In Office: Technology and People, vol. 2, 1984, pp. 133-154.

....is that work is not standing still. Rather, work settings are dynamic: routines evolve over time and unusual situations force deviations from the routine. For this reason, purely formal constructs and descriptions of work have proven inadequate when designing effective, real world CSCW systems. Suchman and Wynn (1984) set off the debate about the role of formalism in CSCW, and their empirical studies clearly illustrated that there is more to office work than formalised, or formalizable, procedures. Heath and Luff (1992) continue this in their study of work in line control rooms on the London Underground, ....

Suchman, L. and E. Wynn (1984) Procedures and Problems in the Office. In Office: Technology and People, vol. 2, 1984, pp. 133-154.

.... between the plan and the work is complex, and the plan is often used mainly as a framework within which to interpret the situation (Suchman 1983) People keep track of what they do individually and situated, using routines, artefacts and personal relationships to mediate this organisation of work (Suchman Wynn 1984). For some reason this seems to be in conflict with trends in contemporary management. Workflow systems, as part of business process reengineering approaches, can empower managers to free themselves from existing constraints (Davenport Stoddard 1994) We should not be surprised that ....

Suchman, L. & Wynn, E. (1984). Procedures and problems in the office. In Office: Technology and People, 2, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

....it is a response, as is CSCW itself, to the need for an adequate analysis of the sociality of work and organisation to underpin large scale interactive system design. To date, and in the context of system design broadly conceived, such studies have included photocopier use [29] office work [31], air traffic control [14,13] police work [1] and Underground Control Rooms [16] However, ethnography though holding much promise is still a relatively untried method in system design. It has been, and still is, strong on its critique of other methods, such as Task Analysis [9] but it has yet ....

Suchman, L., and Wynn, E., (1984), Procedures and problems in the office, Office Technology and People,

....The study is relevant to CSCW in a number of ways. First, it adds to our understanding of the cooperative character of work, the interdependencies of work activities and how technology may be incorporated within these. Although the critiques of Office Automation methodology ( 21] 15] 19] [20]) are well taken, these are not arguments against any office automation, even in the small. What such critiques do suggest, and in keeping with one of the main tenets of CSCW, is that automation needs to be seen in the context of socially organised cooperative work activities. Arising from this is ....

Suchman, L., and Wynn, E., (1984), Procedures and problems in the office, Office Technology and People,

....in systems development. The turn to ethnography is a response to the need for an adequate understanding of the nature of work to underpin large scale interactive system development. In the context of system design, ethnographic studies have included photocopier use (Suchman, 1983) office work (Suchman, 1984), air traffic control (Harper, 1991) police work (Ackroyd et al., 1992) and underground control rooms(Heath, 1992) However, ethnography though holding much promise is still an untried method in system design. It has been, and still is, strong on its critique of other methods, such as Task ....

Suchman, L., and Wynn, E., (1984), Procedures and problems in the office, Office Technology and People, 2: 133-154.

.... in different empirical investigations of the use of artifactually embodied protocols for the articulation of cooperative activities in different work domains: standard operating procedures in administrative work (Zimmerman, 1966; Zimmerman, 1969b; Zimmerman, 1969a; Wynn, 1979; Suchman, 1983; Suchman and Wynn, 1984; Wynn, 1991) classification schemes for large repositories (Bowker and Star, 1991; Andersen, 1994; S rensen, 1994c) checklists (Degani and Wiener, 1990) time tables in urban transport (Heath and Luff, 1992) flight progress strips in air traffic control (Harper et al. 1989; Harper and ....

....prefer not to specify certain attributes explicitly or to defer their specification: 3) Partial definitions. While a mechanism of interaction cannot be constructed without explicit conventions and prescribed procedures, mechanisms of interaction are, in principle, under specified (Suchman, 1983; Suchman and Wynn, 1984; Suchman, 1987) Protocols are, to some extent, only specified in the course of the work. Furthermore, a protocol and the whole equipage of ensuing stipulations can be invoked implicitly, without any explicit announcements, for instance by certain actors taking certain actions (Strauss, 1985; ....

Suchman, Lucy A., and Eleanor Wynn: "Procedures and Problems in the Office," Office: Technology and People, vol. 2, 1984, pp. 133-154.

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Suchman, L. & Wynn, E. H. (1984). Procedures and Problems in the Office. Office: Technology and People 2, 2 (Jan 1984), 133--154.

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Suchman, L. & Wynn, E. (1984). Procedures and problems in the office. Office: Technology and People, 2, 113-154.

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L. A. Suchman, and E. Wynn, "Procedures and Problems in the Office," Office, Technology, and People, 2, 1984, pp. 133-154.

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Suchman, L. and Wynn, E. (1984) Procedures and problems in the office. Office: Technology and People. Vol. 2, pp. 133-154.

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Suchman, Lucy A., and Eleanor Wynn: "Procedures and Problems in the Office," Office: Technology and People, vol. 2, 1984, pp. 133-154.

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