Learning Outcomes:
Understand:
- Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an evolving area with many applications that takes much of its theoretical basis from sociology.
Remember: (not for Quiz)
- sociotechnical systems
- fundamental attribution errors
- collaborative work practices
- articulation work
Apply:
- use ethnographic principles to document collaborative work practices
Overview
Every single piece of technology is part of a socio-technical system: it is designed for and by people who operate in social contexts. Even if you play solitaire alone in your room, this app was probably coded by a team of developers who had lots of people like you in mind, who want to relax in peace on their own.
Sociology has developed many tools and theories for describing and analysing the social contexts in which people act and interact. The concepts that sociology uses sometimes have names that are familiar (e.g., team), but have very specific meaning relative to a certain theory, or names that are unfamiliar (e.g., habitus), but that are clear within the context of a theory.
Attribution theory looks at the subtle ways in which we make ourselves look good in our own eyes. For the purpose of CSCW, I’d like to draw your attention to the concept of fundamental attribution error – people tend to underestimate the influence of the environment and overestimate the influence of the individual. This is why it’s so important to study the social context in which technology is used. This helps correct your own biases to some extent.
CSCW focuses on documenting and understanding collaborative practices, i.e., the ways in which people put abstract plans, goals, or procedures into action. Using the term “practice” helps us highlight that there is often quite a difference between what people originally set out to do, and what people actually do to implement their aim.
Imagine for example that you are performing group work for a course. Ideally, everybody should be contributing equally, and the group should be smarter than the individual. How often does that work for you? What ends up actually happening?
In order to understand and document practice, CSCW mostly turns to methods from ethnography, which provide both techniques for conducting systematic, principled observations and for analysing those observations in a way that forces researchers to be aware of their individual bias and subjectivity.
When a group collaborates, they usually need to be aware of what the other people are doing (or failing to do), and they will also divide the overall work to be done among themselves. This process of dividing labour is also called articulation work. The term “articulation” is used here in the sense of joining and relating two pieces of work to make a whole (Definition 2a, Merriam-Webster). It also emphasises that the work that’s been partitioned out must come back together again to form a whole. You can’t have a complete skeleton without thigh bones that link the bones of the lower leg to the hip and the rest of the skeleton. You also can’t have an app that provides real-time analytics to an end-user without an interface that reads in relevant data in real time from the system that provides it.
In your activities for Week 7, you have looked at some aspects of implementing Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.
- choice of platform: While cooperative work often forces people onto one particular platform (e.g., Piazza, LEARN discussion boards), in practice, collaboration happens on platforms where people already spend a lot of their time (e.g., Facebook)
- adapting to task and digital literacy: When coordinating with friends and family, many of you use different platforms and methods for different types of information, and some of you are even the Digital Czar who collects and prints out all the information provided online
- Your internal collaboration methods are very similar to those that I use with colleagues. We have a problem, though – we are technically not allowed to interact with students or hold student data on Google services, even though they are very convenient, because Google’s free services don’t guarantee that data will be held on servers located in the European Union. Microsoft offers such a functionality, which is why student accounts and almost all staff accounts (except for a few Schools such as Informatics) are locked into the Microsoft ecosystem. Regulating access to data is a perennial problem in CSCW.
Core Reading
Chapter 8 in the Ritter/Baxter/Churchill textbook will give you a good grounding in some of the relevant theory.
For an overview of recent developments in CSCW, see this summary by Schmidt and Bannon: Schmidt, K. & Bannon, L.: Constructing CSCW: The First Quarter Century. Comput Supported Coop Work (2013) 22: 345. doi:10.1007/s10606-013-9193-7
Design Informatics students might be interested in this classic article by Anselm Strauss on articulation work: Strauss, A. (1985), Work and the Division of Labor. Sociological Quarterly, 26: 1–19. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1985.tb00212.x