Computer-supported Cooperative Work

Stephen A R. Scrivener

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138616271
• eBook ISBN: 9780429869181
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Entreprise Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Published in 1994, this work supplies an up-to-date view of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and its role in empowering groups to achieve better solutions faster. The enabling technology and group organizational and behavioural aspects of CSCW should be of interest to a wide audience.

Part One

Introducing CSCW and CSCW Systems

1 Introducing CSCW - What It Is and Why We Need It

Paul Wilson

CSC Europe

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Evidence of the changing business world is all around us. As consumers we expect constantly updated products - so companies must develop, market and distribute new products faster. Newspapers report a steady stream of collaboration agreements, cross licensing arrangements and takeovers - each instance involving two or more large teams of people coming together, developing a common understanding and working together. Extensive hierarchical bureaucracies in large organisations are giving way to flatter, more responsive structures with devolved responsibility and authority. Employees across multiple sites in multiple worldwide locations are finding they need to communicate and interwork ever more frequently. And the once highly centralised, mainframe-based data processing operation is beginning to accommodate systems under local control and run on smaller, cheaper machines.

These highly significant changes reflect an urgent need in organisations to make best use of their people and other resources to achieve nimbleness in the market place and to stay competitive. Efficiency in resource utilisation is a well understood and widely applied concept (though there is nearly always room for improvement). Efficiency in people utilisation, on the other hand, is a rather less tangible technique, with much depending on the ‘people’ skills of individual managers and the constraints placed upon them by the existing organisational structure and culture. Creating new structures and cultures in large organisations is notoriously difficult, time consuming and expensive. Yet this is what is required if significant improvements in the use of people resources are to be achieved.

be achieved without particular reference to computers, as exemplified by the extraordinary report (entitled ‘Managing without managers’) on the Brazilian company Semco [1]. However, today’s western economies cannot survive without computer support, so inevitably improvements in the way we organise people must be cognisant of the computers they are working with. And the wide availability of computers and computing skills enables specific computer support to be provided to augment the people organisation and team working processes.

Making the best use of people will become an increasingly compelling business objective throughout the 1990s and beyond. Enter the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

1.2 THE EMERGENCE OF CSCW

The name Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) first emerged as a response to increasing research and development activity associated with the augmentation of group work by computers. A whole variety of different scientific disciplines were doing such work in the early 1980s including Sociologists, Anthropologists, Psychologists, Computer Scientists, Office Automation Specialists, Human Factors Specialists, Management Scientists and Organisation Designers. The level of activity had been steadily increasing since the late 1960s, but significantly increased in the 1980’s when personal computers started to appear on office desks. The subsequent networking of these machines provided a further stimulus to the work, in addition to providing a new ‘networked work group’ market for application developers.

Recognising the links between these various facets, Irene Greif (then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Paul Cashman (of Digital Equipment Corporation) organised a workshop in 1984. In trying to come up with a name for the event they hit upon the term Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). They intended no special meaning to the individual words - they simply wanted a shorthand way of referring to a set of concerns about supporting multiple individuals working together with computer systems [2].

Although the workshop was only a small affair, it convinced Cashman and Greif that the topic was worth pursuing and they initiated the first international CSCW conference in Austin, Texas in 1986 [3]. The conference was an undoubted success. The 300 delegates were inspired by the range of disciplines and perspectives, and by the potential for supporting group work that the papers so obviously indicated [4]. Since then a substantial CSCW research community has been established [5], and subsequent conferences have been held in 1988 in Portland, Oregon [6], in Gatwick, London, UK in 1989 [7] and in Los Angeles in 1990 [8]. By agreement between North American and European researchers, subsequent conferenceswere to be held in alternate years in the USA and Europe. Hence, in 1991 a European conference was held in September in Amsterdam [9], in 1992 the North American event took place in Toronto [10] and in 1993 another European event was planned for Milan.

In the meantime, computer software providers have been quick to see the potential of a new market in specialised software (as demonstrated by the emergence of commercial expositions/conferences such as Groupware’92 in the San Jose Convention Center, California, August 3rd - 5th 1992); network providers have become interested in the connectivity and high bandwidth demanded by CSCW; and user organisations are becoming increasingly interested because in a changing world so much depends on effective teamwork.

These combined forces are now focused on the provision of computer support for groups. The results, already starting to emerge, will flood out in the latter half of the 1990s.

1.3 CSCW SCOPE AND DEFINITION

CSCW, as yet, has no agreed definition or objectives. However, these issues are debated, and attempts have been made to try and scope the field. Such work usually takes one of two quite different approaches. One approach is to explore what is already known about ‘cooperative work’. And the other is to look at the work and people involved in CSCW to deduce what is actually going on in the subject.

1.3.1 Our current understanding of ‘Cooperative Work’

A considerable body of knowledge already exists on the subject of ‘Cooperative Work’. Bannon and Schmidt [2] note that various authors, especially those addressing the sociology of work, have written about the subject, and that Marx, in 1867, formally defined cooperative work as “multiple individuals working together in a planned way in the same production process or in different but connected production processes.”

Schmidt’s “Analysis of Cooperative Work” [11] is a detailed exploration of the topic in which various generic functions of cooperative work are identified, including:

• augmentation of capacity (eg. several people lifting a large stone together)

• differentiation and combination of techniques (eg. many people each performing different parts of an overall task)

• integration of heuristics - approaches, strategies, stop rules etc. (eg. a group of repair engineers listening to each others experiences and adding some of what they hear to their own store of heuristics)

• integration of perspectives - conceptualisations or models of a particular domain (eg. the architect discussing a building design with the customer are both trying to reach a shared understanding of what is required).

After discussing each of these in turn, Schmidt addresses the issue of work organisation and asserts that “an organisation is a stable pattern of cooperative relations.” From this perspective, “formal organisation is conceived of as a superimposed structure safeguarding the interests of the owner and regulatory bodies”.

Schmidt’s analysis indicates that cooperative work is inextricably entwined with the individuals that perform it and the organisation that marshals and constrains it.

Holand & Danielson [12], however, provide a different view of cooperation. They identify three ‘perspectives of cooperation’:

• the strategy perspective (participants stating their positions, with differences in views being seen as conflicts to be resolved)

• the coordination perspective (participants sharing responsibility for achieving a particular goal)

• the reflections and creativity perspective (participants discussing a subject, making their contributions as appropriate and reflecting on the contributions of others).

Each of these perspectives is then discussed in a historical context, in a societal context and in a research context.

‘Coordination’ and ‘Collaboration’ are also high level concepts, equated in some way or or other to ‘Cooperation’, which are addressed under the CSCW banner. Coordination is defined by Malone as “a body of principles about how activities can be coordinated, that is, about how actors can work together harmoniously” [13]. In the same paper, Malone identifies the following four components of coordination: goals, activities, actors and interdependencies.

Collaboration is described by Goodman and Abel as involving ‘people sharing information of some form and, thus, effecting changes in the thinking and actions of the people involved in the process [14]. Extrapolating from this definition they envisage that collaboration requires support for more than just the exchange and maintenance of information relevant to the activity; it is also necessary to encourage the establishment and maintenance of a common perspective or context via both formal and informal channels such that the participant’s relationships are enhanced, and, consequently, the efficiency and enjoyability of the collaboration are increased.

All these various works give an indication of the many perspectives from which CSCW can be viewed, and of CSCW’s broad applicability to work, and the organisation of work, in its widest sense. It is clear, though, that a coherent view of CSCW is unlikely to be reached until the many interrelationships between the various perspectives have been thoroughly explored.

1.3.2 CSCW activities and people

An alternative view of CSCW can be obtained by considering the topics that CSCW researchers are working on and writing about, and the types of people attending CSCW conferences. For example, Wilson categorised the papers delivered at the CSCW’86 conference as follows [4]:

• Messaging (electronic mail and computer conferencing) (4 papers)

• Office automation procedures (support for work undertaken as a series of small tasks by several people in turn) (2 papers)

• Organisational impact (systems and issues relating to the overall structure and functioning of organisations) (4 papers)

• Speech Act Theory (the linguistics theory based upon the insight that to say something (eg. ‘you’re fired’) is an action in its own right) (2 papers)

• Meetings augmentation (the support of real-time, face-to-face or dispersed meetings with computer hardware and software) (7 papers)

• Collaboration research (investigations of the way people collaborate with each other) (6 papers)

• Hypertext (database technology which stores chunks of (multimedia) information and enables links to other chunks to be embedded within the content) (4 papers).

Grudin [15] provides a similar analysis of the papers at CSCW’88:

…the thirty papers included four centred on video and three studies of work practices involving little or no computer use. Six papers drew from the Scandinavian participatory or collaborative development tradition; the collaborations that were described did not focus on computer support and only three of the six papers described the development of computer systems, those three being systems supporting organisations, not groupware.

However, analysis of conference papers and discussions with CSCW specialists reveals a distinction at a much broader level; those concerned primarily with technology and those concerned primarily with human behaviour. In principle, of course, CSCW is a stimulating mix of the two. In practice it also creates some tension within the CSCW community.

Another distinction worth noting is the difference between USA and European CSCW perspectives. Europe seems more concerned with the theoretical aspects of CSCW and its social and organisational impact, while the USA seems to concentrate more on exploring the capabilities of technology. This is partially borne out by Grudin’s analysis of CSCW delegates at the USA and European CSCW conferences [15]. His figures show that approximately 45% of delegates at CSCW’86 and CSCW’88 were product developers and 30% at CSCW’90; whilst under 15% of delegates at two European conferences (EC-CSCW’89 and the IFIP WG8.4 conference on multi-user interfaces and applications, Heraklion, 1990) were product developers - and two thirds of these were from large American companies.

1.3.3 Terms and definitions

CSCW is not the only term...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Introducing CSCW and CSCW Systems
• Part Two: Desktop Multimedia Teleconferencing: Technology, Experience and Human Issues
• Part Three: Beyond Desktop Multimedia Teleconferencing
• Part Four: CSCW Requirements and Concepts