Drawing on a fieldwork study, this paper considers different design options for the development of a system for facilitating distributed organisation and distributed working within a sector of the print industry. The relationship between the design of the system and the design of the organisation is also examined. It is concluded that if organisations are to practically benefit from the continued evolution of communication infrastructures, CSCW should attend to the appropriate development of information and work coordination systems. It is also concluded that CSCW should develop measures of the value of proposed systems for organisations and users.

ethnomethodologically informed ethnography in CSCW

One of the organisational concepts which is currently receiving considerable attention is that of the 'virtual organisation' (Dividow and Malone, 1992) and associated notions such as 'virtual teamwork'. Although admittedly replete with conceptual confusions and clearly accompanied by considerable 'hype' such organisational forms, it is claimed, address major transformations in the social, economic and technological environment in which organisations operate. These diagnoses of organisational change need to be subjected to close empirical examination since other views are considerably less sanguine about the organisational consequences of such massive technological change. This paper attempts just such an empirical investigation by reporting on a long term ethnographic study of the implementation of 'virtual teamworking' within a 'High Street' Bank. The implementation of 'virtual teamwork' is not unproblemmatic and the ethnographic research reported here attempts an in-depth understandi...

. This paper asks the question: how might CSCW system design obtain and be informed by an adequate real-world, real-time understanding of work and organisation on any occasion of work-oriented design? The problem is not a new one but foundational within contemporary research and development communities. Building on established, albeit contentious, sociological reasoning within CSCW, this paper proposes that existing approaches may be complemented through a methodological or procedural attention to the relationship between language, work and the local production of organisation. As such, this paper outlines a practical strategy or approach towards producing real-world understandings of work and organisation within the constraints of design. The approach is derived from work and lessons learnt in conducting ethnographic studies in the course of accomplishing the Dragon Project; an interdisciplinary project involved in the development of a production version prototype of a global customer...

Abstract: This paper considers some of the everyday practicalities of delivering an electronic health record project within an NHS Hospital Trust. Using ethnographic, observational, data we document how and in what ways the orderly character of project work is achieved against a background of battles and negotiations to deliver the project within and despite various organisational contingencies and constraints.

features and practicalities of NHS project work

For a number of reasons, systems designers have recently shown considerable interest in ethnography. Principally this has been as a method for the specification of end-user requirements for systems. This paper argues that most of this interest is predicated in a misunderstanding of ethnography's role in social science. Instead of fixing upon its analytic aspects, designers have defined it as a form of data collection. They have done this for very good, design-relevant reasons. But designers do not need ethnography to do what they wish to do. In the central part of the paper, an approach to analytic ethnography in HCI is set out and illustrated. The latter sections take this approach and show how it opens up "the play of possibilities " for design. These are illustrated by counterposing a summary logic of organisational structure such as that associated with the calculus of efficiency and productivity with the "local logics " of daily organisational life. Key words:

The present report documents the research activities undertaken in Task 3.1 of the COMIC project. The objective of the three years of research of Strand 3 is to develop a conceptual foundation for designing computational mechanisms of interaction for CSCW applications that can support the complex task of articulating distributed cooperative activities. The present deliverable presents analyses of a number of realworld mechanisms of interaction. In doing that, the deliverable focuses on the features of these mechanisms that enable them to provide efficient and flexible support of coordination of distributed activities and the way these mechanisms are managed cooperatively. On the other hand, based on these and other studies, the deliverable presents and discusses a conceptual framework for analysis of mechanisms of interaction and derives a set of requirements for a notation for constructing computational mechanisms of interaction Document ID COMIC-D3.2 Status Final Type Deliverable Ver...

One of the organisational concepts which is currently receiving considerable attention is that of the `virtual organisation' (Dividow and Malone, 1992) and associated notions such as `virtual teamwork'. Although admittedly replete with conceptual confusions and clearly accompanied by considerable `hype' such organisational forms, it is claimed, address major transformations in the social, economic and technological environment in which organisations operate. These `virtual' organisational arrangements consist of networks of workers and organisational units, linked by information technology in order to give coordination to their activities, combining their skills and resources to achieve common goals. Such teamworking, "less fettered by the constraints of traditional hierarchies and speres of responsibility, engenders a heightened sense of empowerment, commitment and collective responsibility" (Casey 1995:45). This sort of analysis clearly impacts on the various debates on `skil...

One preoccupation of academic and non-academic interest in contemporary organisations is the attempt to situate and understand organisational change as responses to what are seen as major transformations in the social and economic environment in which organisations operate. Although there are various diagnoses of these changes, (Lash and Urry, 1987; Hammer and Champy, 1993), Information Technology is seen as a key element in these changes, especially I.T systems that can facilitate coordination and communication of decision making, and support skill and knowledge. (Zuboff, 1988) Collaborative work, a central feature of organisations, is increasingly electronically supported,(Grudin, 1990) and distributed computing is widely accepted as an increasingly important feature of work in a variety of domains.(Robins, 1992). Despite this emphasis on IT, both the Labour Process approach and its critics have tended to treat IT relatively unproblematically, (in contrast to ongoing debates on `resi...