AcaWiki - User contributions [en]

Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies

2020-04-02T01:27:57Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies |authors=Larry M Bartels |summary=This article is a brief overview of a larger research project to assess the rel..."

{{Summary
|title=Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies
|authors=Larry M Bartels
|summary=This article is a brief overview of a larger research project to assess the relationship between policy preferences and governmental outcomes, stratified by income. The key question to be answered is to what degree democratic governments are truly responsive to all their citizens or if this influence is substantially mediated by income. Bartels finds across multiple surveys and data sources that middle and lower income citizens tend to have their preferences negatively reflected in government policy.
|relevance=This article offers an important potential source for an explanation of why people in middle and lower income circumstances are disenchanted with democracy: it generally doesn't serve their preferences.
|journal=SSRN
|pub_date=July 11, 2017
|subject=Sociology
}}

The Democratic Disconnect

2020-04-02T00:55:56Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=The Democratic Disconnect
|authors=Roberto Foa, Yascha Mounk,
|summary=In this article, Foa and Mounk offer a challenge to political scientists: do we know how to detect when a democracy is collapsing (or "deconsolidating")? They observe that trust in institutions, voter turnout, party affiliation, and establishment party support are all declining. Dissatisfaction with democracy seems to be growing. Although past analyses of this dissatisfaction have attempted to paint an optimistic picture -- perhaps citizens really do appreciate democracy itself, it's just the current regime they dislike. Foa and Mounk took up the challenge of using a range of existing survey data to try to distinguish "government legitimacy" from "regime legitimacy", and find that support for democracy is in decline: the younger a European or American is, the less likely they are to call living in a democracy "essential"; and average within-age-group support for democracy is also declining while political apathy is increasing and a political apathy gap is emerging between older and younger voters. At the same time, support for authoritarian alternatives seems to be rising, even among those with experience of authoritarian rule. They find that undemocratic sentiments, such as rule by the military, are in particular rise among the wealthy and that support for having "experts" rather than "government" determine policy is also on the rise. These trends suggest that it is possible that stable, affluent democracies may indeed break down (as they note, every other form of government has done so in the past). They close with a research agenda: political science should engage with the puzzling trends in public sentiment toward mistrust and discontent, and seek to identify the signs, causes, consequences, and remedies for this situation.
|relevance=This piece offers a concise and readable overview of a pressing issue in political science, outlining a series of empirical puzzles and their associated data and theories.
|journal=Journal of Democracy
|pub_date=July 2016
|subject=Sociology
}}

The Democratic Disconnect

2020-04-02T00:45:58Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=The Democratic Disconnect |authors=Roberto Foa, Yascha Mounk, |summary=In this article, Foa and Mounk offer a challenge to political scientists: do we know ho..."

{{Summary
|title=The Democratic Disconnect
|authors=Roberto Foa, Yascha Mounk,
|summary=In this article, Foa and Mounk offer a challenge to political scientists: do we know how to detect when a democracy is collapsing (or "deconsolidating")? They observe that trust in institutions, voter turnout, party affiliation, and establishment party support is all declining. Dissatisfaction with democracy seems to be growing. Although past analyses of this dissatisfaction have attempted to paint an optimistic picture -- perhaps citizens really do appreciate democracy itself, it's just the current regime they dislike. Foa and Mounk took up the challenge of using a range of existing survey data to try to distinguish "government legitimacy" from "regime legitimacy", and find that support for democracy is in decline: the younger a European or American is, the less likely they are to call living in a democracy "essential"; and average within-age-group support for democracy is also declining while political apathy is increasing and a political apathy gap is emerging between older and younger voters. At the same time, support for authoritarian alternatives seems to be rising, even among those with experience of authoritarian rule. They find that undemocratic sentiments, such as rule by the military, are in particular rise among the wealthy and that support for having "experts" rather than "government" determine policy is also on the rise. These trends suggest that it is possible that stable, affluent democracies may indeed break down (as they note, every other form of government has done so in the past). They close with a research agenda: political science should engage with the puzzling trends in public sentiment toward mistrust and discontent, and seek to identify the signs, causes, consequences, and remedies for this situation.
|relevance=This piece offers a concise and readable overview of a pressing issue in political science, outlining a series of empirical puzzles and their associated data and theories.
|journal=Journal of Democracy
|pub_date=July 2016
|subject=Sociology
}}

Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla

2020-03-25T04:20:16Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla |authors=Audris Mockus, Roy T. Fielding, James D. Herbsleb |summary=The authors offer..."

{{Summary
|title=Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla
|authors=Audris Mockus, Roy T. Fielding, James D. Herbsleb
|summary=The authors offer a series of empirical tests of a series of claims about the production dynamics in open source, using quantitative comparison of two large projects, Apache (web server) and Mozilla (browser). Using email archives and bug reports, they examine participation, team size, code ownership, productivity, defect density, and problem resolution intervals. One of the challenges the authors consider is how coordination can occur in the absence of the coordination mechanisms present in the industrial development model: system-level designs, defined processes, schedules, and so on. The authors observe that the level of coordination matches the material conditions of the participants: they are decentralized, thus have a decentralized decision-making pattern; their time availability varies, so the taking up of intensive and more regimented roles varies. The authors examined the contributions of Apache contributors versus many others and found that the top 15 developers contributed 80\% of the code in Apache, and likewise a similar core versus periphery emerged from commercial projects and that defect density rates for Apache before release were better than commercial projects but the rate after release (customer-facing) was worse; however the comparison is difficult due to differences in release cycle. The authors then examine Mozilla and test their refined hypotheses against this case, finding that Mozilla as a hybrid project has many more of the recognizable coordination mechanisms of industrial projects, but is also much larger; Mozilla developer productivity seems to exceed commercial productivity, a fact that may be attributable to engagement with a development community. Defect density in Mozilla was better than Apache, but Apache solved problems more quickly.
|relevance=This article offers an empirical test of several debates about the role of open source models in shaping production dynamics. In addition to testing social theories, the article offers multiple clear measures and bases of comparison.
|journal=ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
|pub_date=2002/02/01
|doi=10.1145/567793.567795
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Through a Glass Darkly: Information Technology Design, Identity Verification, and Knowledge Contribution in Online Communities

2020-03-25T04:11:36Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Through a Glass Darkly: Information Technology Design, Identity Verification, and Knowledge Contribution in Online Communities |authors=Meng Ma, Ritu Agarwal..."

{{Summary
|title=Through a Glass Darkly: Information Technology Design, Identity Verification, and Knowledge Contribution in Online Communities
|authors=Meng Ma, Ritu Agarwal
|summary=This article uses survey data to weigh the relative significance of online social community features to participants' ease and sense of reward in them. The authors examine the relationship between individual's sense of co-presence, persistent labeling (use of consistent identifier), self-presentation (ability to appear in accordance with identity), and deep profiling (awareness of one's someone's past contributions), mediated through their satisfaction with the community as well as directly related to their knowledge contribution; they found that this model was sustained across two communities with the exception of persistent labeling and in the case of the car hobbyist community, deep profiling.
|relevance=This article offers a Computer-Mediated Communication view of online communities, weighing the relevance of specific technical features with respect to fulfillment of psychological needs.
|journal=Information Systems Research
|pub_date=2007/03
|doi=10.1287/isre.1070.0113
|subject=Psychology
}}

The Problem with 'Awareness': Introductory Remarks on 'Awareness in CSCW'

2020-03-25T00:50:11Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=The Problem with 'Awareness': Introductory Remarks on 'Awareness in CSCW' |authors=Kjeld Schmidt, |url=http://link.springer.com/10.1023/A:1021272909573 |summa..."

{{Summary
|title=The Problem with 'Awareness': Introductory Remarks on 'Awareness in CSCW'
|authors=Kjeld Schmidt,
|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1023/A:1021272909573
|summary=This article is the introduction to a special issue of the CSCW journal. The article describes in high-level terms the articles which follows, and then proceeds to problematize what we mean by awareness in the first place. Awareness as a concept in the context of CSCW came from the observation that when people work together, they do more than exchange artifacts or information, they also maintain some tacit sense of where others are and what they are doing, in order to coordinate actions, adjust their own actions, prevent problems, and so on. This coordination work is necessary for smooth execution of tasks, but difficult to characterize in ways that allow for the same capability to be supported in software. Schmidt observes that part of the challenge is the multiple ways in which the term awareness is used, sometimes with adjectives attached, signifying anything from knowledge ("cancer awareness") to mutual monitoring to direct exchange of instant messages. Schmidt also observes that the object of awareness ("awareness of what?", p. 288) is often not specified, but should be, in order to render the phrase meaningful. He suggests that the key issue for CSCW is to examine what our informal notion of awareness really is, and how it's accomplished -- how "displaying and monitoring" of work status, progress, actions, etc. come to be "subtly attuned"(p. 291). He closes with suggested areas for further research, each unpacking what we mean by awareness and how it is accomplished.
|relevance=Schmidt's work is useful in that he inspects and problematizes a key concept in CSCW work. Designers taking account of how their work supports collaboration, or researchers seeking to characterize task-oriented interactions, are likely to find his expansion on the concept illuminating.
|journal=Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
|pub_date=2002/09
|doi=10.1023/A:1021272909573
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Taking CSCW seriously

2020-03-25T00:44:43Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Taking CSCW seriously
|authors=Kjeld Schmidt, Liam Bannon,
|url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00752449
|tags=Computer supported cooperative work, Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing
|summary=This article aims to argue that CSCW should be about "support requirements of cooperative work arrangements" not "computer support for groups."

They also discuss a concept called 'articulation work.' Many interesting problems are not important for small groups, but will be important for large scale CSCW systems.

The problem is that although CSCW is starting to take off as field, it doesn't have a coherent identity or conception. This paper isn't about defining CSCW but about a framework for identifying the important research issues in the field. The meaning of CSCW while something of an umbrella term is also hotly contested and this article needs to account for the politics of the situation.

They bring in Richard Whitley, who says "a research area is constituted by a ''problem situation''." Therefore the authors seek to identify a problem situation for CSCW, but it seems like just about any application, including stuff that used to be information systems or CMC seems to get lumped into CSCW. They say that CSCW is essentially an application area to support cooperative work, and therefore should not be organized around the development of specific technologies but instead to understand cooperative work and to design computing technologies to support the its requirements.

They see CSCW as a fundamentally design oriented area. They think social scientists coming into CSCW must explain how their findings are constructive and not merely descriptive. They also think it's important to actually construct working artifacts to demonstrate designs.

Interestingly, they note Kling preferred the term 'coordinated' work as opposed to the 'happy' term 'cooperation.' They see cooperation as coming from a long tradition in sociology including "Marx who defined it as 'multiple individuals working together in a conscious way in the same production process or indifferent but connected production processes." All work is social, but cooperative workers have to ''articulate'' their activities in order to distribute activities and accomplish a task. Cooperative work has communication and coordination overhead. They argue that this meaning of cooperative is neutral and general and divorced from the idealistic and high-minded notions of compromise. Cooperative work is not always better than individual work.

They argue that cooperative work is a better term than Groupwork, because 'group' can mean a lot of different things to different people and may imply certain assumptions about how work is organized. Their definition of cooperation is intended to be general enough to cover all kinds of interdependence in work. Some kinds of interdependent workers may not directly communicate, in other cases they may communicate only through the computer medium, or through and artifact like a database. Interdependent work may also cross organizational boundaries. For example, computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) aims to make systems that support distributed cooperation through a database on a company-wide scale, but CIM was not involved in CSCW. They make a similar argument about office information systems (OIS). Group work tends not to emphasize considerations of systems like OIS and CIM.

=== Articulation work ===

They say we need cooperative work by no omniscient and omnipotent agent exists and cooperation expands the range of tasks that are feasible. However interdependence creates the need for new work to manage coordination tasks. The term "articulation work" seems to come from Anselm Strauss who uses the word "meshing" to describe the relations involved in coordination work.

Communication facilities are an important requirement for distributing work, but CSCW systems for communication are not sufficient because articulation involves much more than communication. It is a very broad term that involves high levels of decisions making in an environment with many complex contingencies and uncertainties and solutions are satisfactory not ideal.

"A key issue for CSCW is how to support the cooperative management of mechanisms of interaction themselves." That is to say, the management of articulation work and communication systems.

=== Why CSCW Now? ===

What makes CSCW different from information systems?

Information systems can be seen as rudimentary CSCW systems if they for example provide a database as a shared object for indirect communication. But these don't really have much to do with supporting articulation work like "cooperative problem solving and discretion decision making".

But why should CSCW exist as a field?

Organization work is transforming to meed the needs of the modern business and and workforce. CSCW can empower organizations with 'advanced information systems that can facilitate the coordination of distributed decision making.' This involves enabling local decision making with multiple strategies among agents with incompatible conceptualizations of the work.

The wide availability of computer workstations in the office provides an infrastructure ready for the widespread adoption of CSCW systems in the workplace.

They emphasize that office work is extremely difficult to fully automate and that rigid systems often do not fair well. For example "XCP, assumes that what people do in many work settings is to follow procedures." Instead good systems are flexible but afford new kinds of interaction like GROVE (a multiuser text editor).

Trying to build systems that are tightly coupled to organizational procedures are likely to fail because "procedures are not executable code but rather heuristic and vague statements to be interpreted, instantiated, and implemented." Organizational models are just limited abstractions and imperfect reproductions. So systems based on an underlying organizational model should allow users to tweak and interact with the model.

=== Supporting the management of a common information space ===

Complex organizations have to construct shared understandings of work, what the authors call a "common information space." This space is constructed through interpretation work. Database objects are also representations used by workers. Different departments have different jargon and the same words can take on quite different meanings. A common information space is a negotiated translation between such disparate areas.

A common information space is not just a shared view system which shows multiple users the same display. That's a shared object not a shared information space. "A shared information space requires an interpretive activity on the part of the recipients."

One of the big challenges both for workers and for CSCW is that common information spaces are often constructed 'at arm's length' as workers independently and asynchronously interact with information objects.

Engelbart and Lehtman 1988 proposed a virtual handbook which would be collaboratively produced by knowledge workers that seems to anticipate Wikis. Schmidt and Bannon thoughtfully criticize the claim that the handbook would be "uniform, complete, consistent, and up-to-date." Because distributed workers are not co-present, a shared understanding will be quite difficult to produce.

Even though an ideal handbook will not be possible, the idea of a handbook is still a good one. They discuss some important design considerations for the handbooks.

1. Identifying the originator of the information

The origin of information is often important to its interpretation, for example reputable doctors are trustworthy sources of medical information. In workplace settings the identity of decision makers is important for how decisions will be evaluated and critiqued. How identity should be constructed, represented, and engineered in different CSCW contexts remains an open question.

2. Identifying the context of information

They provide an example of a policy application that would use hypertext to make visible information about policy documents to policy makers. Knowledge of the strategies and perspectives employed in organizing the hypertext are important for users of the system to interpret and navigate the system.

3. Identifying the politics of the information

Information is not value free. Organizations have factions and power centers that find themselves in conflict. Information in organizations gets misrepresented and distorted by politics. "The realities of organizational life must be investigated seriously if CSCW is to be turned from a laboratory research activity into an activity producing useful real world systems."
|relevance=This article aims to articulate a vision for the emerging field of CSCW, which is now a major interdisciplinary area intersecting computer and social science. Their concern is to distinguish CSCW from information systems and to define it as more broad than just developing systems for group work. They see CSCW as a field with a focus on informing technology design by understanding the needs of cooperative work in the ever shifting work place. This article is an expansion of "CSCW: Four Characters in Search of a Context", and between the two of them, is probably the article to cite. However, it's a little heavier and less provocative in tone.
|journal=Computer Supported Cooperative Work
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside

2020-03-25T00:38:07Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside |authors=Michael S. Bernstein, Greg Little, Robert C. Miller, Björn Hartmann, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger..."

{{Summary
|title=Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside
|authors=Michael S. Bernstein, Greg Little, Robert C. Miller, Björn Hartmann, Mark S. Ackerman, David R. Karger, David Crowell, Katrina Panovich
|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1866029.1866078
|summary=This article proposes and implements a crowdwork design pattern (Find-Fix-Verify)m targeting editing tasks: text shortening, proofreading, and repetitive edits. Bernstein et al integrates this tool with Microsoft Word, and share their experience measuring the quality of the results they receive as well as the associated time and task cost. They observe that the results were valuable and largely successful, but also uneven and needed author review (especially when coordination among ideas from multiple Turkers was needed due to conflicts in how to resolve a given issue, which was not possible due to the pattern).
|relevance=This article offers multiple practical strategies for engaging with crowdworkers and explains a valuable design pattern that might be used in a wide variety of contexts. This article is also an example of a particularly high-quality empirical systems paper: it invokes some amount of theory, and demonstrates a series of interconnected activities; it makes a theoretical contribution, describes the work clearly and concisely, and offers empirical findings; it achieved a best paper award at UIST.
|journal=Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology - UIST '10
|pub_date=2010
|doi=10.1145/1866029.1866078
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes

2020-03-25T00:35:33Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes |authors=Thomas Erickson, Wendy A. Kellogg |url=http://portal.acm.org/cita..."

{{Summary
|title=Social translucence: an approach to designing systems that support social processes
|authors=Thomas Erickson, Wendy A. Kellogg
|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=344949.345004
|summary=This article introduces "social translucence" as a design consideration for communication systems. Erickson and Kellogg claim that design that promotes visibility, awareness, and accountability will yield systems that "support graceful human-human communication" (p. 59). They offer numerous practical and recognizable examples for the value of each trait: visibility (being able to see socially significant information) is exemplified by being able to see someone else is connected to a system; awareness (knowing what someone else is doing) is exemplified by the implicit understanding of the meanings of someone else's actions or motions in the system; awareness (mutual knowledge; you know that I know) is exemplified by the bi-directional nature of a record, e.g. everyone can see what's been said on a chat channel. They clarify that they chose "translucence" rather than "transparence" because "there is a vital tension between privacy and visibility" (p. 62). The authors go on to apply their ideas about social translucence to the example of the Babble online conversation/chat system, and the domain of knowledge management. They suggest that designers may consider multiple approaches in how translucence can be achieved in a design: realist (e.g. video chat), mimetic (e.g. animated avatars), and abstract (e.g. ambient communication or text chat representation). They close with suggested future research questions.
|relevance=This paper provides a definition and illustration of the influential idea of social translucence in design.
|journal=ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
|pub_date=2000/03/01
|doi=10.1145/344949.345004
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Social Construction of Communication Technology

2020-03-25T00:33:26Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Social Construction of Communication Technology |authors=Janet Fulk |summary=This article tests a series of hypotheses synthesized from social constructivist..."

{{Summary
|title=Social Construction of Communication Technology
|authors=Janet Fulk
|summary=This article tests a series of hypotheses synthesized from social constructivist theories about the relationship between individual attitudes toward their workgroup, attitudes and skills with respect to technology, and the traits of the technology itself. The empirical setting is a firm implementing and assessing use of e-mail, and the data was collected through surveys and direct observation of trace data counting the number of messages sent and received. Fulk found that an individual's attitude toward their work group is a key moderator in how readily they will take up a new technology and how useful they will perceive it to be, in particular that highly engaged workers will be more engaged and more satisfied with the technology, while disengaged workers will be more likely to simply conform to group requirements, and to perceive the technology as less rich.
|relevance=Researchers examining technology attitudes and satisfaction in workgroups should consider the potential relevance of this result and incorporate social attraction variables into their models. In addition to providing a key empirical test for a line of research into the relationship between social attitudes and technology attitudes and uses, this article also offers a strong summary of social constructivist theories of technology. One key takeaway from this article for technologists is the significance of the social relationships that exist prior to the introduction of a technology; people unhappy with their jobs are likely to be unhappy with any technology you implement.
|journal=Academy of Management Journal
|pub_date=1993/10/01
|doi=10.2307/256641
|subject=Business
}}

Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives in Recent Empirical Research

2020-03-25T00:28:22Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Social Analyses of Computing: Theoretical Perspectives in Recent Empirical Research
|authors=Rob Kling
|url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356806
|tags=Social Computing, Computer supported cooperative work, Social Computing, Human Computer Interaction,
|summary=In his introduction, Kling argues that speculative analysis of the roles computing will play in the social world is very important for informing decision making and planning for the potential consequences of technological development. However, to think that such speculations are objective and not based in prior beliefs about society is naive technological determinism. Social analysis of computing requires choosing assumptions about the nature of the social world. Configurations of assumptions are clustered into theoretical perspectives.

He focuses on two theoretical perspectives: systems rationalism and segmented institutionalism. Systems rationalists are optimistic about the roles technology will play in social life, they assume that there is consensus about social goals. They tend to be holistic, emphasize efficiency, and make computer users the center of their analysis.

Systems rationalists are concerned with "legitimate" aspects of social life (e.g. economic efficiency, the workplace as officially represented by managers). Segmented institutionalists are also concerned with "illegitimate" aspects like class (.e.g conflict, ambition). They value individual agency and social equity above economic efficiency. They consider broader implications of technology and how it may impact parties outside the workplace or firm.

Subtypes of systems rationalism include management scientists, who often place the interests of managers above subordinates; structural analysis are interested in the broader social world, but still focus on optimal decision making in the interests of the firm; and human-relations analysts, who see worker satisfaction as important for efficiency.

Segmented institutionalized include political analysts who focus on conflict between groups and power, interactions who focus on social construction of meaning through interaction, and Marxists who focus on how technology furthers labor exploitation or potentially liberating.

While Kling has lumped all these fields into two high level categories, he emphasizes that they actually differ in important ways about social assumptions. There is an amazing table on page 4 that summarizes the two theoretical perspectives and 6 sub-perspectives. He concludes the first section of the article with an example about the introduction of a new kind of organizational control system into a manufacturing company. The goal of this paper is to draw from prior empirical studies to learn the relative usefulness of the two perspectives.

=== Early studies of computing (50s and 60s) ===

During this period the systems rationalists mainly wrote speculative minded articles about how technological development might alter the work place and very few empirical studies of the "actual impacts of specific developments" on social life in or out of the workplace. On the other hand, the segmented institutionalists (Mann, Blum, Hoos, Mumford), found empirical evidence of the political roles of computer use, what happens to jobs that get automated (in the early days people were moved into different roles, but from the 70s on they got laid off), and how clerical jobs changed with the introduction of new technology.

=== Contemporary studies (70s) ===

In the 70s the systems rationalists finally got their act together. Whisler (1970) found that automation increased centralization of decision making in insurance firms. Gotlieb and Borodin (1973) "avoided largely speculative analyses" in their book reviewing empirical studies of computing in the workplace that refrains from the naive optimistic utopian accounts of the 60s.

=== Computing in organizations (70s) ===

Systems rationalists often assume that technological innovations diffuse in order to meet a "need of individuals or organizations." However defining "need" is a problem. Needs are not just economic conceptions, but also by "social features of an organization." Organizational efficiency is often subordinate to the private rationales of administrators. Computer systems can be introduced in order to "fit the political contours of existing organizations" and are selected as "instruments of bureaucratic politics" for their application to "ongoing conflicts and coalitions." For example computers can be used to impress auditors (who can't examine the code) in ways that and calculations can't. This fact is incongruous with the accounts provided by systems rationalists. Firms are much more than engines of economic production.

=== Work life ===

Although human relations people often suggest that work will be radically improved by technology, it turns out that computer use "did not profoundly alter the character" of jobs in the real world. Some jobs are made much more efficient through technology, but for others it has little effect. It seems most helpful for white collar workers and managers.

One common claim by structural analysis is that computing affords better monitoring of employees, but Kling didn't find strong evidence that this was common in settings like police detectives or accountants. Computers make records, but people were making manual records before. "Computing is selectively exploited as one strategy among many for organizing work and information." Political analysts have a better take because they consider the existing degrees of prior autonomy.

=== Operational problems. ===

Computers cause problems! While management analysts often think that computer problems have systematic solutions, this doesn't stop problems from happening. Kling suggests that we should think of computers not as tools but as packages of skills, organizational units, physical devises, and understandings of what computing is and means. The interactionist approach sees these as sociallly embedded. Kling and Kraemer did an empirical study to decide whether the tool or package concept is a better explination for why copmuter problems happen. They find that policies are retroactively not proactively and so cannot prevent new kinds of problems from arising and that new kinds of problems are more likely to arise in more technically and socially complex settings. They interpret this as a favorable to the segmented institutionalist perspective and in favor of the 'package' conception. Computing is not simply a 'tool'.

Automation can improve efficiency but it can also be uesd to produce an air of innovation and sophistication.

=== Decision making ===

Decision making is one of the most theoretically interesting applications of computing, but at the time a small share of computing resources were employed in decision making compared to the automation of mundane business operations.

Systems rationalists were interesed in technical problems with databases and when decisions could have used the data, but didn't. Interactionists and organizational-politics folks consider how computing systems interact with the external relations involved in decisions. "Computing was used because it convinced important parties that decisions were being carefully made."

When it comes to automating mundane tasks, there can be a surprising efficiency tradeoffs. People might spend more time doing less important work that can be partly automated. E.g. increasing police efficiency at minor offenses "further clogged the already jammed courts."

=== Management control ===

Systems rationalists usually focused on how well procedures worked. When a system is completely automated this is a Good approach, however when skill and cooperation are involved control systems can be "gamed" (see Campbell's law).

Control systems can exist for bureaucratic or political purposes and despite claims of importance may be basically useless. How 'efficacy' is constructed can be just as important as the capabilities of the technological system when it comes to whether models will be used or not. Computers can be sites of conflict between different groups, each seeking to enforce their desired forms of measurement by encoding them in the system.

Models are often only used when they justify already made decisions. They are often used rhetorically by advocates. They can be too difficult and expensive to develop and deploy quickly. Modelers rather than models become political tools because the modelers have an air of objective authority. "Computer-based analyses are a social resource used by political actors in the same manner as any other social resource."

=== Organizational Power ===

Introducing automation systems can alter power structures in organizations. Influence can shift and people's jobs cans change. These changes are not intended in the system design, or by managers. In politicized settings (e.g. municipal governments) computer systems can profoundly alter power relations. In municipal governments power shifted from the council to top administrators and data custodians.

=== Privacy ===

Lots of people, remembering McCarthyism are concerned about how computer use may lead to considerable loss of privacy because computers can collect a lot of information that can be shared. But according to studies by systems rationalist, "major institutional barriers ... prevent organizations from routinely pooling information about their data subjects." (Boy has this changed!!!)

Rule, a segmented institutionalist, was concerned with mass surveillance and social control by credit agencies. He studied TRW which was a highly centralized credit agency with 20 million records that collect and provide "derogatory information." While Rule anticipated the political abuse of such systems, he didn't find evidence of it being currently abused,

While the rationalists proposed "hygienic reform of record keeping systems," Rule thought that such mechanisms would not be able to limit the capacity of such information to "profoundly constrain" through organizations acting legitimately. "Rule is concerned that ''only'' economic costs serve as a barrier to collecting and using similarly delicate information." Kling argues that this is a much more serious consideration and that the rationalists misguidedly attempt to make their analyses "value free." The segmented institutionalizes do better by making their value commitments explicit.

=== Social Accountability ===

How are computer systems going to be made socially accountable? The public seems to have difficulties correcting errors encoded in computer systems. Systems rationalists tend to say that efficiency, authority and professionalism will be enough. Alternatives involve the state regulation, law, and citizen action. Because computer systems are often used for bureaucratic and political purposes not efficiency the systems rationalists are hopelessly naive. In settings like accounting where law already enforces accountability systems involving computers are likely to be accountable, but in other settings like police work they may be easily abused.

=== Conclusion ===

In conclusion, Kling reiterates that computers have little causal agency themselves, rather computer use is "purposive and varies between social settings." Impacts of computing cannot be decoupled from the social situations. Computer scientists need to learn that researchers is always informed by the researchers' prior theoretical commitments.

He ties up his argument that the two perspectives are complimentary but that as the focus becomes broader the segmented institutionalist perspective becomes more powerful.

With the development of the chip-based microprocessor (emerging at the time) the scope of computing is likely to become broader and more profound in the near future as email, ETF, and "wired societies" take off.

It is important that our theoretical assumptions correspond to reality not to some idealized utopian notions that can be easily analyzed.

This article shifted units of analysis (firm, municipality, broad social world, industry) in order to make a broad point about the kinds of theoretical assumptions on which analyses are based, but individual studies should be careful and explicit about levels of analyses.
|relevance=Rob Kling was an early researcher into studies of the role of computing in organizations. This seminal article argues for a theoretical approach that incorporates symbolic interactionism and political theory instead of assuming that organizations are rational and that systems can be uncritically designed to solve clearly defined problems. He reviews and synthesizes a lot of prior literature so this is a very good source for early perspectives into the role of computers in organizations.

This work sketches two categories of often-oppositional inquiry which have persisted from the time of its writing to today. Although naming conventions have shifted, of particular use are the summary table on page 64, which outlines both views and their sub-disciplines, and their general perspectives on technology, settings, organizing concepts, dynamics of technical diffusion, their notion of what constitutes good technology, and their affiliation with different workplace ideologies.
|journal=ACM Computing Surveys
|pub_date=1980
|doi=10.1145/356802.356806
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Shared leadership in the Apache project

2020-03-25T00:27:16Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Shared leadership in the Apache project |authors=Roy T. Fielding |summary=This article is a brief account of open source governance from the perspective of a..."

{{Summary
|title=Shared leadership in the Apache project
|authors=Roy T. Fielding
|summary=This article is a brief account of open source governance from the perspective of a co-founder of the Apache Project. Fielding points out that unlike other open source projects, Apache began as a collective rather than being organized around an individual. Fielding describes a system of voting and decisionmaking, characterizing the system as a meritocracy (in which frequent contributors are nominated and approved by unanimous consent). Fielding also stakes a philosophical position that contributors are motivated by "enlightened self-interest" -- their jobs involve web servers or web protocol research. He describes the fact that IBM joined the Apache group in 1998 as positive and providing resources to the project on its own terms. He closes with an assertion that the project holds a competitive innovative advantage by being open to new contributors and driven by multiple individuals rather than following a single person.
|relevance=This article is useful for its historical perspective (making clear that the philosophical stakes in open source are long-standing and that the relationship between volunteer efforts, paid efforts, and individual and corporate-organized interests has long been complex).
|journal=Communications of the ACM
|pub_date=1999/04/01
|doi=10.1145/299157.299167
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Membership turnover and collaboration success in online communities: Explaining rises and falls from grace in Wikipedia

2020-03-25T00:25:42Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Membership turnover and collaboration success in online communities: Explaining rises and falls from grace in Wikipedia |authors=Sam Ransbotham, Gerald C. (Je..."

{{Summary
|title=Membership turnover and collaboration success in online communities: Explaining rises and falls from grace in Wikipedia
|authors=Sam Ransbotham, Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane,
|url=http://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2973&context=misq
|summary=This article conducts a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia featured articles to assess the impact of the editing editors' experience as a predictor of promotion and demotion, controlling for article length, section depth, external and internal references, reading complexity, media references, and number of edits. Their goal is to assess the phenomenon of turnover. They find that average editor experience predicts promotion up to a point, and then the trend runs in the opposite direction; a similar but opposite and shallower curve describes the risk of demotion: decreasing to a point, then increasing again.
|relevance=This article offers an interesting and somewhat contrarian view of the role of turnover in promoting collaboration (a modest amount is good, up to a point, and then it becomes bad).
|journal=MIS Quarterly
|pub_date=2011
|subject=Business
}}

Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures

2020-03-25T00:16:33Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Membership Size, Communication Activity, and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures
|authors=Brian S. Butler
|url=http://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/isre.12.4.346.9703
|tags=Online Communities; Electronic Groups; Membership; Dynamics; Social Resources
|summary=The article opens with an introduction to the emerging importance of digital communication networks for social interaction. These networks promise to "support significant social activity," but the availability of communication systems is not sufficient for social activity. Social structures are also needed. Electronic infrastructure does not automatically provide social structures. However, computer-mediated-communication systems can "encourage the emergence of sustainable online social structures."

This article draws from theories of social structures to develop a "resource-based model of social structure sustainability." The key idea behind the model is that social structures must confer benefits to members in order to persist. The development of sustainable social structures over communication networks depends on the ability of social structures to transform resources into benefits.

Group size in a key variable in the model. Since larger groups provide more resources, they may be more likely to survive. There is a feedback loop between members and benefits: Members are a key resource. The social activity of members transforms resources into benefits, but providing benefits is essential for attracting and retaining members. Membership also reflects the "audience resources" that provide benefits like visibility.

On the other hand, group size can also increase the cost of transforming resources into benefits. These derive from logistical and communication problems and from social loafing and free-riding.

Butler sees the advantages and disadvantages as very complex and nonlinear, affecting member attraction and retention in different ways, and leading to dynamics that are difficult to predict. In the end, empirical evidence from group studies suggests that sustainable social structures tend to be small. Larger groups often use internal structures like teams, internal organizations, and roles to enable larger sustainable social structures.

One of the big promises of computer mediated communication for organizations is the possibility of further enabling large sustainable social structures. Butler enumerates several ways CMC might do this:

# Enable "flatter" organizations with more fluid processes
# Using group support systems that draw together more knowledge and aggregate the efforts of more people
# Buffering and archiving to reduce logistical problems
# Anonymity and pseudo-anonymity reduce psychological effects of sizes

Social structures over digital networks use communication activity to transform resources into value. As with group size a larger amount of communication activity may increase the benefits to members, but may also create problems like increasing the amount of noise users experience. The interaction of communication volume and variation determines the benefits to each individual. The costs associated with communication activity includes the direct costs in time, energy, and attention used in communication. Even audience members who receive communication contribute resources and incure costs. Again as with group size, internal structures and technologies can be used to alter the cost structure of communication activity and enable sustainable structures. These include

# Jargon
# Formal summaries and agendas
# Content filtering
# new text-based communication technologies

The resource-based model has three components:

# Resource availability (e.g. membership size)
# Benefit Creation Process (e.g. communication activity)
# Member attraction/retention (membership growth and loss, sustainability).

The causal structure of model is a cycle that goes from ''member attraction/retention'' to ''resource availability'', from ''resource availability'' to ''member attraction/retention'' and to ''benefit creation process'' and from ''benefit creation process'' to ''member attraction/retention''. Instead of treating communication activity or group size as fixed and allowing the other to vary, this model sees both variables as dynamic.

To study how technologically mediated communication might be used to support sustainable social structures by mitigating some of the costs of communication activity and group size, Butler applies the model to analyze a sample of listservs. At the time (2001) these were perhaps the single most used medium for online communities. He used a stratified sample of 1066 listservs to make sure that his sample had a diversity of topics. He removed groups that had identifiable internal structures like moderators, newsletters, or "formal new-member screening." After applying these inclusion criteria, he had a sample of 206 listservs.

The key measures in the study are size (number of active members), communication activity (number of broadcast messages), communication variation (1 - the concentration of messages across threads), and membership gain and loss. The analysis is longitudinal with measures constructed for each month.

He used time-series log-linear, random-effect, regression models. He fit three models and used F-tests to find support for the structure of the model. According to the models, group size is positively related to communication activity, and to both member gain and member loss. Communication activity is positively related to member gain and member loss, while communication variation is only positively related to member loss. To check that the relationship between group size and member loss was not just because big groups have more to lose, he also fit a model predicting proportional member loss instead of the number of members lost and the results held up. This also lets him estimate how much of membership gain and membership loss is attributable to group size and how much is attributable to communication variance using a t-test between the two models. He estimates that about 23% of member attraction and 44% of membership loss are due to group size.

In discussion, Butler emphasizes that the central contribution of this framework and analysis is to treat resources like membership and the communication activity process not as "outcomes predicted by a set of factors" but as "a set of opposing forces that serve to simultaneously promote and hinder the processes of change. In particular he calls out critical mass theory for ignoring the role of communication activity and systems. It is important to think about both group size and "the type and volume of communication activity" when it comes to understanding the growth and survival of online communities. He suggests that future work add other aspects to the resource-based framework. For example you might consider the role of internal structures and variation between different sorts of technologies (e.g. whether messages are pushed like email or pulled like www). He doesn't think that CMC is going to fundamentally change the model. Even though it will change some parameters of the model like communication costs, online social structures still have to balance the positive and negative aspects of size and communication activity as do traditional groups.
|relevance=This is an early and very influential model that not only applies extant theories of group communication to study online communication, but actually develops a new and improved model of the survival of social structures inspired by online communities and tested using data from listservs. This paper's model of resource-based analysis of groups offers a wide range of applications: although the model is built using evidence from mailing list participation the theoretical basis is built up from broad concepts. This model may be explanatory in the survival of groups of all kinds. A similar analysis might be done for almost any other medium.
|journal=Information Systems Research
|pub_date=2001
|doi=10.1287/isre.12.4.346.9703
|subject=Sociology
}}

Making work visible

2020-03-25T00:15:09Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Making work visible
|authors=Lucy Suchman
|tags=MIS,CSCW
|summary=Suchman (1995) is a short piece, published in the Communications of the ACM, that can be seen as an argument for ethnography in the study of information systems and in workplaces more generally. It is ''extremely'' dense and rich and offers few concrete conclusions. In some ways, it can be read a sort of high-level summary -- or even a justification -- of Lucy Suchman's ethnographic work on office work and technology over the previous decade.

The paper explores the topic of "making work visible" and essentially an exploration of a contradiction at the heart of ethnography and in empirical studies of work in general. By representing work, we create limited abstractions of the work in question. These imperfect pictures both allow us to give a better idea of what is happening, so we can support work better, but also reduces the work to an incomplete picture which means that the actions taken may limit, rather than facilitate the nature of the work being done.

It turns out that scholars of work don't actually seem to know much about how people do their work. Some research methods are trying to make work visible by representing work in the service of productivity. However, Suchman suggests that one's ability to construct a representation of one's work is a form of empowerment.

Put another way, some kinds of work are "black boxed"; invisible to others in the organization. Making service work visible for example might provoke questions and criticisms of how work is recognized and rewarded.

Suchman's goal is not to understand organizational processes by constructing representations of it, but to interpret work representations in view of the politics of organizations and to practice design in a way that sees representations of work as /part of the work/ and "part of the fabric of meanings with and out of which all working practices--our own and others'--are made.

The paper cites a Wood's (1992) [[The power of maps]] repeatedly and at length and makes extensive use of the metaphor of mapping to explore the two different sides of work representation. Maps are representations created with purposes and they necessarily represent some things and not others. Similarly and representation of work is going to include some aspects of work and not others. When it comes to considering how work practices inform technology design, questions of membership and identity are often left out. This is a problem when the fact that these
selection choices are practical, political, and economic is sublimated beneath the ideological veneer of necessity.

For example, even video recordings of work practices are misinterpreted by viewers in ways that can reinforce status hierarchy and privilege the proper use of technology according to technologists above what is sensible from the worker's perspective.

Next she turns to the ways that technologies for coordinating work are often also technologies for measuring and constructing representations of work. "In this way technologies for the local coordination of work become incorporated into the interests of global control."
For example airlines use ground operations workers to track planes and produces accountability because planes are tracked so that workers can coordinate with one another and by management for evaluation. This system has some wiggle room for ground workers to "maintain a reasonable relation between prescriptive representations like schedules and the actual contingencies of getting airplanes off the ground." Work tracking technologies can change that space.

Representations of work are often simplistic and reductionistic. For example, Lawyers at a firm had a naive and simplified view of a complex interpretive task performed by paralegals. /Distance/ between the observer and the work makes this kind of problematic reductionism and stereotyping possible. Distance might be organizational, but also it can be a distance in social location, or boundaries between technology designers and technology users.

The problem of simplistic reductionism has motivated Suchman to innovate new representational forms. These have "basic assumptions and commitments, including in brief

# Specifics of how people work are crucial.
# Some details are tacit because of "what our social milieu sanctions"
# Designing requires shared understanding across conflicting perspectives
# Representing work is itself a kind of work
# (Most important) Valid representations are derived from knowledge of the work (not normative accounts).

Normative accounts are particularly useless because they massively idealize or typify work. They might be useful within an organization for use by workers, but when they are "generated at a distance from the sites" of work they lead to problems. Instead we should build new representations that "acknowledge the often power-differentiated dialogues in which design gets done and resist the appropriation of different voices and interests into one dominant logic or single representational form."

Designers should draw from ethnography, and critical ethnography in particular when working to construct representations of work because critical ethnography sees the "cultural positioning" of the ethnographer as a necessary aspect of representation. Our goal should be to achieve dialog about work practices based on understanding the relationships between designers, developers, workers, and researchers. That is, to contribute to the social construction of work.

In conclusion, she returns to maps and to the subjective and power-laden choices involved in constructing representations. Designers and researchers should not just be concerned with the "adequacy of representational forms" but also with the "dialog and debate regarding the various places of representations in work and system design."

The paper was inspired by, and is in some ways encapsulated in, a full page table included in the article that shows the two sides of representing work. This article is a brief and light overview of a longer book on the subject.
|relevance=The paper is highly cited and been used in wide variety of different literature. It is often included as a core theoretical or methodological text in CSCW curricula or readings lists on information systems in particular. It is perhaps most widely used in the knowledge management sub-field of the information systems literature. This article offers multiple tangible examples of how engaging with work practices can lead to better technology design -- or to misunderstandings and oppression of technology users.
|journal=Communications of the ACM
|pub_date=1995
|doi=10.1145/223248.223263
|subject=Anthropology
|journal_vol=38
|pub_open_access=No
}}

Internet Paradox Revisited

2020-03-25T00:13:28Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Internet Paradox Revisited |authors=Robert Kraut, Sara Kiesler, Bonka Boneva, Jonathon Cummings, Vicki Hegleson, Anne Crawford |url=http://doi.wiley.com/10.11..."

{{Summary
|title=Internet Paradox Revisited
|authors=Robert Kraut, Sara Kiesler, Bonka Boneva, Jonathon Cummings, Vicki Hegleson, Anne Crawford
|url=http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/1540-4560.00248
|summary=This article is a follow-up to a 1998 study examining potential psychological damage caused by internet usage. This study describes a reversal of conclusions: rather than causing harm, the study concludes a Matthew effect is present -- those who have social support experience positive effects, and those without social support experience negative effects.
|relevance=This article offers detailed information on the correlation of a range of social factors and the use of the internet. This article is also a case-study for how scientists respond when their later work disproves their own earlier ideas.
|journal=Journal of Social Issues
|pub_date=2002/01
|doi=10.1111/1540-4560.00248
|subject=Psychology
}}

HomeNet: a field trial of residential Internet services

2020-03-25T00:11:25Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=HomeNet: a field trial of residential Internet services |authors=Robert Kraut, William Scherlis, Tridas Mkhopadhyay, Jane Manning, Sara Kiesler |url=http://po..."

{{Summary
|title=HomeNet: a field trial of residential Internet services
|authors=Robert Kraut, William Scherlis, Tridas Mkhopadhyay, Jane Manning, Sara Kiesler
|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=238386.238531
|tags=CHI
|summary=This early study of Internet usage suggested that broad demographic groups are interested in Internet use, although teenagers tend to have the greatest interest and to drive family usage patterns. They found difficulties connecting, a skewed range of topics available (i.e. lots of sports), displayed modest interest in porn, communicated heavily, used diverse services, and were often expressive in their uses. A later study (1998) found harmful effects on social well-being.
|relevance=This project was controversial for its claims that the Internet caused psychological harm, and should be read alongside a 2002 retrospective (http://doi.org/10.1111/1540-4560.00248).
|journal=Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems common ground - CHI '96
|pub_date=1996
|doi=10.1145/238386.238531
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communications

2020-03-25T00:08:29Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communications |authors=Kevin Crowston, James Howison |url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007..."

{{Summary
|title=Hierarchy and centralization in free and open source software team communications
|authors=Kevin Crowston, James Howison
|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s12130-006-1004-8
|summary=This article describes a series of predictions and assumptions made both by practitioners and empirical researchers about the structure and communication dynamics of open source projects. Using a multi-site, multi-project dataset, the authors use network measures to test whether or not open source projects tend to be hierarchical, centralized and display mutuality of communication. They find that in general multiple structures are observed, but larger projects tend to be modularized i.e. less centralized (although it's unclear whether modularity tends to precede or follow growth). Code-level participation was observed to be centralized with a small subset of participants developing the bulk of the code, and that communications between contributors and bug-reporters tended not to be mutual, suggesting hierarchy. A measure of 'lubness' (least-upper-boundedness), interpreted to mean the degree to which a single person tended to eventually participate in each discussion,
|relevance=This article offers direct answers to several questions about how open source projects are structured and succeed, serving to debunk some assumptions about them as free-wheeling to the point of being chaotic; instead we see a diverse range of structures with some regularity observed in participation patterns consistent with the long tail: many people contributing only a little (in the form of bug reports) and a few people contributing quite a lot (in the form of the bulk of the code).
|journal=Knowledge, Technology & Policy
|pub_date=12/2006
|doi=10.1007/s12130-006-1004-8
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Functional Roles and Career Paths in Wikipedia

2020-03-24T23:58:41Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Functional Roles and Career Paths in Wikipedia |authors=Ofer Arazy, Felipe Ortega, Oded Nov, Lisa Yeo, Adam Balila |url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=26..."

{{Summary
|title=Functional Roles and Career Paths in Wikipedia
|authors=Ofer Arazy, Felipe Ortega, Oded Nov, Lisa Yeo, Adam Balila
|url=http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2675133.2675257
|tags=CSCW
|summary=This article develops evidence about role progression patterns in Wikipedia, both theorizing a hierarchy composed of multiple roles at the same layer, and testing the Reader to Leader framework. They also offer narrative accounts of what some of these role progressions might look like, conveyed in terms of archetypal patterns. The article concludes that individuals do indeed follow a path, especially that "content curation" and "border patrol" functions tend to form distinct paths.
|relevance=This article offers a useful way to talk about roles and transitions in a social system. One important implication for design is the consideration of whether a proposed community offers career paths, and whether without them it can be sustainable.
|journal=Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW '15
|pub_date=2015
|doi=10.1145/2675133.2675257
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community

2020-03-24T23:49:41Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community |authors=Cliff Lampe, Erik Johnston |url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?..."

{{Summary
|title=Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community
|authors=Cliff Lampe, Erik Johnston
|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1099203.1099206
|tags=GROUP
|summary=This study examines newcomer socialization, retention, and expectations in the context of Slashdot. The authors found that newcomers did not make very effective use of their past experience in terms of making contributions that are positively received. Newcomer retention is low, and although moderation direction (up/down) may not influence whether someone returns, it does predict speed of next comment.
|relevance=This paper contributes to our understanding around newcomer retention and socialization. Also, there are relatively few papers on Slashdot, and this one has some useful articulations of the empirical context.
|journal=Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work - GROUP '05
|pub_date=2005
|doi=10.1145/1099203.1099206
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control

2020-03-24T23:46:29Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control |authors=R. Bentley, J.A. Hughes, D. Randall, T. Rodden, P. Sawyer, D. Shapiro, I. Sommervill..."

{{Summary
|title=Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control
|authors=R. Bentley, J.A. Hughes, D. Randall, T. Rodden, P. Sawyer, D. Shapiro, I. Sommerville
|url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=143457.143470
|tags=CSCW
|summary=The article opens with a description of the way air traffic control works in the UK, with a framing context of implementing a multi-user and dynamically updated database to disseminate information about flights. The analog approach supports individuals in constantly tracking, fixing, and predicting flight paths---and the anticipating of scenarios that could occur, and shifting schedules while every component is in motion, is quite complex. After they describe the controllers' working process in detail, they go on to talk about how the social research team went about working with the implementation team. They observe that the teams have very different approaches and must adjust to one another in order to collaborate successfully. One important observation they make about technology in this context is the risk that it may make controllers too passive and less engaged with the work. This seems like a difficult tradeoff and one we have not resolved; does anyone really believe that the "driver" of a self-driving car will be as engaged with the road as a driver without the self-driving function? Anticipating that humans will closely monitor machines doing a boring task, with the intention of keeping them from making a very rare error, may not be consistent with the data.
|relevance=This is an early and widely-referenced case study illuminating complex ways of working as part of the development of technology where lives are clearly at stake.
|journal=Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work - CSCW '92
|pub_date=1992
|doi=10.1145/143457.143470
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Ecologies, Institutions, and Power in the Analysis of Organizations

2020-03-24T23:01:08Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Ecologies, Institutions, and Power in the Analysis of Organizations |authors=Stewart Clegg |summary=In this chapter, Clegg describes a series of perspectives..."

{{Summary
|title=Ecologies, Institutions, and Power in the Analysis of Organizations
|authors=Stewart Clegg
|summary=In this chapter, Clegg describes a series of perspectives on organizations, detailing their advantages, flaws, relationship to one another, and the evidence supporting them. He opens with a discussion of the population ecology perspective, explaining the metaphor mapping biological notions of ecology to organizational notions of ecology, and the market-oriented competitiveness perspective that underlies both. As he explains, the metaphor does not necessarily account for important observed features of organizations, such as the ability to change the environment, the migration of people among entities, and the fundamentally unconscious nature of organizations. One alternative to the ecological perspective is the institutionalist, where organization leaders devise strategies to support their own competitiveness and perpetuate themselves. Clegg goes on to describe the ``power" perspective, considering how power relationships inside an organization He goes on to explain what this perspective predicts about organizational structures and survival relative to environmental/market conditions: e.g. a business cycle of consolidation, expansion, contraction, a historical relationship of different configurations of power among actors. He concludes that organizations are composed of an ``interpenetration" of power, institutions, and efficiency components (i.e. the three perspectives outlined in the chapter) but that empirical evidence seems strongest when informed heavily by power and institutional perspectives. He says ``there clearly is no single iron cage of bureaucracy" -- multiple organizational forms are viable and the status quo is constructed, rather than inevitable.
|relevance=This chapter offers a dense but seemingly thorough overview to a series of debates about the most generative theoretical perspectives one might take in analyzing organizations.
|journal=Modern organizations: organization studies in the postmodern world
|pub_date=1999
|subject=Business
}}

CSCW: Four Characters in Search of a Context

2020-03-24T22:59:27Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=CSCW: Four Characters in Search of a Context |authors=Liam J. Bannon, Kjeld Schmidt |url=https://dl.eusset.eu/handle/20.500.12015/2602 |summary=This article s..."

{{Summary
|title=CSCW: Four Characters in Search of a Context
|authors=Liam J. Bannon, Kjeld Schmidt
|url=https://dl.eusset.eu/handle/20.500.12015/2602
|summary=This article sketches out the definitional issues present in early days of CSCW, when cooperative work systems were being rapidly produced without very much study into how to produce them, other than a strong finding that early "office automation" systems often suffered from a belief that their task was to automate the "handbook" type procedures of an office, whereas the people working in the office accomplished an important portion of their work using practices that never made it into a handbook. CSCW at this time took on a fairly focused view of what was meant by "Work" (all of the examples are oriented toward firms and labor, e.g. offices and factories). However, even at this point in history the precise meaning of cooperation was an open question: was this really all group work, or only that work where some collaborative attitude was maintained among people, or might it be collaboration that also occurred between people and machines, or between people mediated by machines? The authors describe CSCW as more than simply groupware, but also extends to other lines of investigation such as the critique of technology that supports work, the extension of design powers to disempowered groups or the rendering of such designs in a more democratic way as part of workplace democracy, or else the melding of systems creation and design research in an applied research frame.

Bannon and Schmidt describe the three key issues for CSCW as "articulating cooperative work", "sharing an information space", and "adapting the technology to the organization, and vice versa". (p. 364). Arguably these are core concerns that continue today.
|relevance=Early work like this offers a certain kind of clarity; before particular vendors and ways of working became dominant, it was perhaps easier to talk in terms of a "shared information space". Likewise although group work and collaboration are heavily normative today, this article characterizes cooperation as "merely technically necessary or economically beneficial in certain work environments". I suspect the terminology of "strict constructionist" and "loose constructionist" is not what we would use today; the distinctions are not dissimilar to Kling's (1980) notion of the "systems rationalist" versus the "segmented institutionalist". The article closes with a summary of the overall findings of the field with respect to "Office Automation" (p. 368-369); by failing to see the informal rules, processes, and interactions involved in people working together, early attempts to "automate the office" were a substantial failure.
|journal=ECSCW 1989: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
|pub_date=1989
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Communication Processes for Virtual Organizations

2020-03-24T22:57:11Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Communication Processes for Virtual Organizations |authors=Gerardine DeSanctis, Peter Monge |url=https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/4584413 |summary=This a..."

{{Summary
|title=Communication Processes for Virtual Organizations
|authors=Gerardine DeSanctis, Peter Monge
|url=https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/4584413
|summary=This article takes up the notion of the virtual organization as an emerging form (characterized by geographically distributed components, functionally or culturally diverse members, electronic links, and connected via lateral relationships). The article uses a literature review format to identify what communication research might suggest about how such an organization may communicate, for what tasks might this virtual nature promote success and where might it be a drawback. DeSanctis and Monge examine 6 areas, which are described below along with a comment on their findings. 1) Communication volume and efficiency: research predicts communication volume will increase and that efficiency gain may not follow. 2) Message understanding: research predicts high potential, especially if shared context is constructed. 3) Virtual tasks: Empirical results do not seem to support early beliefs that a loss in channel capacity diminishes media richness. However, consensus seems more difficult to reach electronically while divergent thinking activities may be more effective. 4) Lateral communication: many studies predict that electronic communication is more lateral than it was in pre-electronic communication. 5) Norms of technology use: social norms still hold sway in how we use technology, and organizations should cultivate the norms they want to see. 6) Evolutionary effects: uses and patterns seem likely to evolve, and organizations should think carefully about which cases they will intervene in to reshape the pattern of usage versus letting it evolve.
|relevance=This article is a good example of why systemizations of knowledge are important contributions and offers a model structure for evaluating a trend prospectively.
|journal=Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
|pub_date=2006
|doi=10.1111/j.1083-6101.1998.tb00083.x
|subject=Psychology
}}

Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms

2020-03-24T22:54:24Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Collaborative Activity and Technological Design: Task Coordination in London Underground Control Rooms
|authors=Christian Heath, Paul Luff
|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-94-011-3506-1_5
|tags=Computer supported cooperative work, ethnography
|summary=While computer supported cooperative was making progress in technology development, Heath and Luff say that little is known about how collaborative technologies get used in actual workplace environments. They cite Galegher and Kraut who attribute the failure of systems to a lack of considering knowledge of social interaction. While studies of "technologically mediated cooperative work environments" have been emerging, they have lacked important implications for technology design. They aim to intervene with a study observing technologically mediated work in a Line Control Room on London Underground with implications for "distributed, intelligent systems ... to support cooperative work and the design process.

=== Methodological considerations ===

In this section they argue that using ethnographic "naturalistic" methods inspired by sociology lets you see the broader interaction between workers, technology, in realistic contexts. Much of work depends on the context that laboratories can't reproduce. They used field audio and video recordings as well as field observation and interviews.

=== The technology in the control room. ===

They focus on the control room for the Bakerloo Line. There are a number of technological elements in the room including a PA system, alarm, and CCTV monitors for viewing platforms. The people on the team sit 2 two a desk and there are two controllers, a DIA (divisional information assistant) and a trainee DIA.

There is a "paper timetable" which is a key artifact that everybody uses to define good service. The controller's main job is to manage gaps between trains on the line so as to keep up with the timetable. Severe problems can be managed by making temporary markings on the time table to signal disrupted service to the team. This kind of communication is essential so that the team can act in concert and not make things worse.

Even though roles are formally quite different in practice the Controller and DIA engage in complex and close collaboration. People in different roles practice "emergent and flexible division of labour" to support one another and "manage difficulties and crises".

=== Surreptitious monitoring and interrelating tasks. ===

The nature of work in the control room depends on amazingly subtle communication between Controller and DIA. They have to rapidly respond to events on the line by calling drivers, station managers, and issuing announcements. They overhear each others calls in order to infer the situation and make their own calls. They are able to simultaneously monitor their collaborator and perform their own tasks. They do all this while leaving one another a lot of elbow room and not directly interacting this is why Heath and Luff call it "surreptitious"

=== Rendering activities visible ===

The workers often perform tasks with implications to their collaborators, in doing so they make their activities visible through subtle non-interactive communication like talking to themselves about the decisions they have to make. This alerts collaborators that they will have to adapt to the change. Heath and Luff discuss modification of the timetable by the controller in particular and how the controller mutters numbers that make visible the thought process behind the reformation. They cite Goffman's participation framework in which their may be a 'primary recipient' of communication (e.g. the driver on the phone.), but communication with that recipient is modified in ways that communicate with those in the 'perceptual range of the event' (the DIA).

=== Overseeing the local environment of events and activities ===

The DIA and controller also monitor the other's activities in order to detect oversights or mistakes and to correct the others behavior. Corrections typically take the form of subtle or nonverbal signals to draw attention that avoid crossing boundaries or violating "territorial rights" of the others roles. For example, they provide an account of a controller on the phone ignoring a crisis on the line while the DIA rapidly glances back and forth between the hard line display and the monitor in attempt to attract attention.

=== Shaping tasks and coordinating activities ===

Work in the control room blurs the line between collaborative and individual. The prior sections showed how the workers collaborate through subtle and nuanced communication while primarily engaged in their own occupational tasks. In this section they discuss how the shared technological media displays in the control room including a hard line display showing the locations of trains and the CCTV system that shows the platforms create a shared information space that helps provide context for collaboration. However Heath and Luff argue that this information is not sufficient for them to make sense out of the others subtle cues. Instead, the context of daily crises and reformations, "natural history of the day" is also required. The subtle cues and interactions between the controller and DIA are needed to constitute the natural history of the day in the minds of the collaborators.

*** The design of tools to support collaborative work In conclusion they outline a number of insights they think this study contributes to design.

* Giving each person in the control room their own display would decrease awareness of the other by undermining the glancing at monitor signal.
* Given the increasing number of people who use the timetable, they think it is important to develop an electronic timetable system that uses electronic pens to fit into the existing workflow but allow changes to the time table to be immediately distributed.
* Subsequently an algorithm might predict the outcomes of timetable changes.

They also have more general insights for CSCW researchers and designers. These are to reconsider the dichotomy between individual and collaborative work, to consider shared resources that afford mutual monitoring and "a seamlessness between public and private activities."

In a more speculative turn, they imagine systems for awareness that move away from dependence on screen displays. They consider DigitalDesk which is a desk with a camera and a projector that allows work on paper documents but provides a resource for monitoring and awareness that could be distributed but also affords co-present, collaborative work.

They also speculate as to what methodological frameworks would be suitable for fieldwork design of technological work, calling the method used here 'structured ethnography.' It is not so clear what makes this different from normal ethnography. Although they don't mention it, they may be anticipating the rise of actor network theory.
|relevance=This was an early and influential paper during the ethnographic turn in studies of computers in work places. At the time, sociology was still at the margins of computer science and information systems. By showing how ethnographic methods could produce deep insights that show how technology is actually used in a setting of intricate coordination, this article helped legitimize ethnographic studies of the workplace in computer supported cooperative work. They also contributed to understanding the importance of awareness in CSCW. This article offers a useful example of studying the coordination practices of workers and analyzing their patterns using ethnomethodology and conversation analysis: listening and observing closely how people work together to achieve their shared purposes.
|journal=Proceedings of the Second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work ECSCW ’91
|pub_date=1991
|doi=10.1007/978-94-011-3506-1_5
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Coase's penguin, or, Linux and the nature of the firm

2020-03-24T22:52:31Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Coase's penguin, or, Linux and the nature of the firm
|authors=Yochai Benkler
|url=http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
|tags=economics,law and economics,peer production,FLOSS
|summary=Benkler's article primary contribution is its introduction an important new term, ''commons-based peer production'', that Benkler uses to describe a type of economic production or organization that describes a variety of phenomena including: work in the free and open source software movement, Wikipedia and collaboration in other wiki-based projects, and a variety of other Internet-mediated, large-scale collaborative projects. Benkler later took up the concepts of peer-production in greater detail in his 2006 book [[The wealth of networks]]. ''Coase's Penguin'' can be understood as an early attempt at the exploration of the ideas in ''Wealth of networks'' -- and in particular Part 1 of that book.

Benkler's argument in favor of peer production as a type or work organization is radical. He argues that peer production is most properly understood as a category of economic organization that is fundamentally different from either market or firm based work. In doing so, he ties together a set of examples including free and open source software -- which in 2001 had recently been thrust into the popular consciousness during the dot-com boom -- with examples like commenting and moderation on Slashdot and with work on Wikipedia (then a "small to medium sized" project with only 30,000 articles). Each of these projects were facilitated by the Internet, incorporated contributions from large numbers of individuals, and were driven by voluntary free-revealing of contribution -- frequently without monetary compensation.

Benkler's empirical work in the article is limited to the presentation of a grab bag of examples that try to describe the breadth of the peer-production and argue for both its continued existence and potential value to society. In ''Wealth of Networks'', the number of examples is expanded but the nature of the empirical work is not fundamentally different. Benkler's goal with the article, and alter with the book, is not empirical -- it is primarily theoretical and subsequently based around the construction of relevant policy arguments.

Benkler aimed to provide a economics-based theoretical explanation to explain the rise of Internet-based, volunteer-driven production of information goods of kinds and in ways that were previously unseen. In doing so, Benkler turns to Coase and Williamson's discussion of transaction cost economics; Coase argued that firms exist because costs associated with use of markets would often outweigh the market's benefits in efficiency. Benkler argues that the costs of collaboration on the Internet have reached a threshold where new forms of collaborative work are being ushered in. In constructing this argument, Benkler creates a way to tie together work in projects as diverse as Slashdot, Wikipedia, and the Free Software movement -- a tactic that been used by many scholars subsequently. Benkler mentions that sociological approaches at understanding the phenomena may be useful but he makes no attempt to explore these in the essay.

And yet, while the paper's primary contribution seems to be the presentation of an economic theory, it ends with a discussion of law and policy. After all, Benkler is a professor at a law school (then NYU, now Harvard) and his essay was published in the Yale Law Journal. Benkler's ultimate thesis is that copyright and patent law place restrictions on the free flow of information and, in doing so, prevent commons-based peer-production. Because peer production can be shown to be effective, Benkler argues that policy makers should reconsider the scope and contours of intellectual property with an eye to allowing peer production to flourish.
|relevance=The paper is a reference to Coase's (1937) [[The nature of the firm]]. The title is a reference to the fact that Benkler's argument about peer production essentially boils down to one about a novel arrangement around ''transaction cost economics'', a major theme in organizations.

''Peer production'' has become a common way for a variety of researches to frame their research and a phenomena in its own right. This paper was the go-to citation for the phenomena until Benkler release [[Wealth of networks]] which is largely based around the core idea at the heart of this paper.
|journal=Yale Law Journal
|pub_date=2002
|doi=10.2307/1562247
|journal_vol=112
|pub_open_access=No
}}

Building for social translucence: a domain analysis and prototype system

2020-03-24T22:51:50Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Building for social translucence: a domain analysis and prototype system |authors=David W. McDonald, Stephanie Gokhman, Mark Zachry |summary=This paper tackle..."

{{Summary
|title=Building for social translucence: a domain analysis and prototype system
|authors=David W. McDonald, Stephanie Gokhman, Mark Zachry
|summary=This paper tackles the question of how to design a system that reflects principles of social translucence as described by Erickson and Kellogg (2000). The paper considers architectural features of systems that support features of this kind. They conduct a domain analysis to identify traits of socially translucent systems, then detail them as operating in the Action Dimension (composed of content representations, interactions among users, relations among users and content, and systemic state e.g. logins, application for higher privileges), and in the Systemic Interpretation Dimension (composed of Instances -- a discrete event, Series -- a meaningful sequence of Instances, and Structures -- social structures such as community norms, roles, and expectations).
|relevance=This paper offers an application of social translucence to a prototype design, exemplifying the traits of "(a) mutual awareness of activities, (b) contextual propagation of socially salient cues (visibility), and (c) accountability for one's actions."(p. 637)
|journal=Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW '12
|pub_date=2012
|doi=10.1145/2145204.2145301
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Beyond Being There

2020-03-24T22:48:16Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Beyond Being There
|authors=Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta
|summary=This is a classic CHI paper that marks a pivot in the field of telecommunications and early social computing from pursuit of technologies that reproduce the phenomenological experience of face-to-face communication---referred to as 'being there' to taking advantage of the strengths of new media in order to provide new mechanisms for meeting underlying communication needs.

They introduce a conception of the 'the telecommunication problem', with which to do battle.

"To create systems that allow the same richness and variety of interaction, but with distance no longer an issue .... those at a distance should be at no disadvantage to those who are physically present."

The history of telecommunications pursues establishing audio and video connections in attempt to create a sense of 'being there'.

Two social psychological measures in decreasing order:
1. social presence
2. information richness

f2f >>> audio/visual > audio >>> written.
Audio visual is closer to audio than to f2f.

Are telecom a/v systems ever going to achieve parity with f2f?

Their argument is no, people will always prefer f2f. The article describes how the logic of the field currently targets social presence and information richness, and suggests that systems may never reach the level of fidelity this requires; so long as people close to each other prefer to use a different mechanism than when they are far apart, to accomplish the same task, proximity will always carry some advantage.

The goal should be instead to use same media when close as when far.

'We must develop tools that go beyond being there'

Shoes provide advantages over running barefoot -- they correct problems of our natural condition and enhance performance. Why not telcom to do the same thing?

== Framing human communication: needs, media, mechanisms ==

'''Needs''' are human requirements for communication, e.g. cue variety, feedback, message personalization, being reminded of a need to talk, having a communication channel, turn taking, repair, stylized openings... ....

'''Media''' are literally the medium that carry communication messages. In the case of F2F communication this means physically proximate reality.

'''Mechanisms''' are the ways a medium meets the needs.

Mechanisms are tightly coupled to the media.
Needs are media independent -- universal.

Therefore we should not be committed to reproducing the mechanisms of f2f communication in new media. Imitation will never be as good as the real thing because new and old media have relative strengths.

"Focus not on the tele- part, but the commmunication part"

Email is a good example because it "exploits the asynchronous nature of the electronic medium rather than attempting to imitate synchronous physical interactions."

They are working on a system the call an "ephemeral interest group." This are sites for discussion about a topic or event that are meant to be short lived unlike a normal bulletin board. They aim to lower the cost of creating and disposing of groups in order to create a more informal space. Their goal is for people who use the system to feel more like a part of a community, even if they are not co-located, than people who are elsewhere."

They are also working on a sort of personal profile for an individual's network presence. Their aim is to decrease the cost of initiating contact and to support the maintenance of interactions over time.

They also raise anonymity, how it may promote truthfulness and affordances not available in F2F.

They also propose semi-synchronous mechanisms that might batch synchronous responses to publish them asynchronously. Thinking about semisynchronization might open up new mechanisms.

On page 5 they speculate a bit about the cellular future.

On page 6 they suggest some ways that CMC might improve upon "unassisted face-to-face interaction." These are clarity by helping to resolve reference ambiguation, feedback (they are thinking about tablet gestures, but these days you might think about emoji), archive (obvious).

Finally they suggest that "auditory paper" "will some day,even without the face-to-face component be viewed as having greater social presence than unassisted face-to-face conversations."

== Potential Criticisms ==
Next they turn to addressing potential criticisms, they say they are taking an extreme position in order to make their point clear.

# Imitation has advantages of familiarity, but imperfect imitations will still be unfamiliar.
# Cultural change is required to use new media, but culture can change to incorporate new media mechanisms if they "provide better ways of meeting underlying requirements".
# F2F affords rich intersubjectivity, but there isn't any reason that intersubjectivity cannot be provided in other ways. Disabling
intersubjectivity can be useful since participating in intersubjetivity is demanding.

== Conclusions ==

In conclusion they summarize their argument, emphasizing the importance of understanding fundamental communication needs that are "not ideally met in the medium of physical proximity" and working on mechanisms that leverage new media to meet these needs.

We don't need to abolish distance, but rather abolish "our current concept of 'being there'"
|relevance=This paper was a very big deal in the field of human computer interaction. It was highly prescient, anticipating profiles, ephemeral message boards, the importance of anonymity, and mobile computing. In addition, it is worth mulling over at a meta-level: how does one introduce a paradigm shift? In this case, a combination of theoretical basis, apt observation, tight phrasing, and coherent examples seems to have been effective.
|journal=CHI '92
|pub_date=1992
|doi=10.1145/142750.142769
|subject=Computer Science
}}

A language action perspective on the design of cooperative work

2020-03-24T22:44:32Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=A language action perspective on the design of cooperative work
|authors=Terry Winograd,
|summary=(Title: A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work)

This article offers a perspective on design for cooperative work systems called the language/action perspective. The language/action perspective builds on a rough consensus around theory for cooperative work, including an agreement that structure "determines" the possibilities for action, that design is ontological (participates in a larger design of an organization and practices, that systems design necessarily includes a perspective, and that perspectives can be chosen and applied to work. The language/action perspective is "based on understanding language as the primary dimension of human cooperative activity" (p. 203). Alternative perspectives include focusing on information processing, systems of rules, authority structures, competition, and personal relationships. Language/action takes up linguistic perspectives on interaction, including examining the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of language use. Pragmatics include types of statements (performatives, assertive, directive, commissive, declaration, expressive). These types can be used to label steps in an interaction (e.g. the diagram on p. 206); possible interaction types include conversations for action, for clarification, for possibilities, and for orientation. Interpreting these pragmatics includes context: consideration of individuals, roles, professions, and locations. Semantics include tracing distinctions, including establishing a background context, new distinctions emerging, indicating distinctions, and using metaphors. Syntax includes patterns and flows. The paper shifts gears to an example of how nurses communicate as part of providing care, and applies the theory to interpreting this case study. The article closes by describing what the language/action perspective doesn't provide: very little understanding of equipment considerations, or physical issues of resources and locations, or an analysis of power and authority, or insight into conflict, or a deeper study of interpersonal relations.
|relevance=This article offers a thorough description of both the language/action perspective and its alternatives, then applies the perspective to an example; the article closes by describing the limitations of the perspective.
|journal=Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work - CSCW '86
|pub_date=1986
|doi=10.1145/637069.637096
|subject=Computer Science
}}

Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces

2020-03-24T22:43:52Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Awareness and coordination in shared workspaces
|authors=Paul Dourish, Victoria Bellotti
|tags=CSCW,awareness,writing
|summary=Paul Dourish and Victoria Bellotti argue that awareness is key aspects of successful cooperation work and it one is that handled poorly by many CSCW applications. The authors argue that while awareness is supported, it tends to be supported by active methods and they suggest a series of passive methods that may be more useful.

The authors suggest that awareness is important not just about the content of individual contributions but on the character and nature of those contributions. They argue that awareness information is also necessary to coordinate work but that this awareness may be generated either actively or passively. Most CSCW systems, the authors argue, ask that the users actively make other users aware of their activities. They cite several CSCW collaborative editing systems including Ellis et al.'s [[Groupware: Some issues and experiences|GROVE]] systems, Quilt, and Prep, use explicit annotations and workflow-based roles to help make users aware of the nature of users contributions. They call these ''informational'' and ''role-restrictive'' modes of awareness. They argue these methods depend on assumption that such cognitively heavy and limit involvement in ways that are costly to collaboration.

A more powerful mode, they suggest, involves means of passively collecting and distributing information about others work. They call their model ''shared feedback'' (See Gutin and Greenberg's concept of "feedthrough" in [[Design for individuals, design for groups: Trade offs between power and workspace awareness]]) that essentially involves making changes in a users space visible in a global shared workspace.

The authors present their own editor called ShrEdit which they present as a case study and which locks windows at the level of a text selection. They present a user study and suggest that the lack of workflow and process constraints allowed users to vary their work and roles that led to powerful and successful use of the tool. Building on this, they suggest that, "there is clearly much to be learnt about the way people collaborate before we can presume to preordain how that collaboration should be structured" (pg 112).

Dourish and Bellotti argue that the shared feedback concept is useful not just for synchronous editors for also for "semi-synchronous" systems which support both synchronous and asynchronous work modes and suggest that shared feedback can presented as a form of history that treats the timing differences as "two facets of a single view of awareness information."

They argue that shared feedback offers a viable "third way" from direct messaging and role and activity constraints that (a) reduces the costs to producers by reducing the need to send explicit messages and (b) also allows users to extract awareness information when its useful to them instead of forcing them to receive all of it.
|relevance=Dourish and Bellotti's article is the seminal citation in the CSCW literature on awareness. Awareness, more generally, has become a ''major'' stream of work in CSCW. The paper has been cited more than 1700 times in the 18 years since it's initial publication. The methods and suggestions for managing awareness have certainly been influential but is the major suggestion that CSCW developers should consider and take into account awareness, and that they should do so passively, that has driven most citations to the work.

Although modern developments allow for a more sophisticated interface distributed over a longer distance, some of the design questions raised in this experiment remain: how to provide the right level of mutual awareness, source attribution, and collision protection to best support cooperative production work.
|journal=CSCW '92: Proceedings of the 1992 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work
|pub_date=1992
|doi=10.1145/143457.143468
|subject=Computer Science
|pub_open_access=No
}}

A language action perspective on the design of cooperative work

2020-03-24T22:40:06Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=A language action perspective on the design of cooperative work |authors=Terry Winograd, |summary=(Title: A language/action perspective on the design of coope..."

Studying Work Practices in Organizations: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Guidelines

2019-12-16T05:03:41Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Studying Work Practices in Organizations: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Guidelines |authors=Paul M. Leonardi |summary=In this article, Leonardi off..."

{{Summary
|title=Studying Work Practices in Organizations: Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Guidelines
|authors=Paul M. Leonardi
|summary=In this article, Leonardi offers a unifying view of the various approaches that have characterized studies of practices. He opens by identifying two problems: first, that studies of work as it is done in practice are often not directly tied to examination and description of actual work practices, and second, that studies of work practices do not always treat practices similarly which limits the cross-setting applicability of their findings. He chooses not to engage in passing judgment on the level of granularity at which these practices should be studied, and proceeds instead to characterize work practices as having five features: they are materially bound, recurrently enacted, temporally emergent, historically influenced, and goal oriented. He also identifies three roles for work practices in organizing: instrumental, communicative, and constitutive; he argues that scholars should attend to all three. He goes on to suggest strategies for making contributions to the subfield: work longitudinally, examine micro-macro links, and consider the use of alternative theories (other than ethnomethodology or structuration).
|relevance=Leonardi’s approach offers a useful framework for anyone seeking to study how work gets done. He offers both an overview of the key features of the field, pointers to important contributions, and practical suggestions for how to formulate research in this area.
|journal=Communication Yearbook
|pub_date=2015
|subject=Sociology
}}

The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations

2019-12-15T23:51:50Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations |authors=Wanda J. Orlikowski, |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/2635280 |summa..."

{{Summary
|title=The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations
|authors=Wanda J. Orlikowski,
|url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/2635280
|summary=In this article, Orlikowski extends Giddens’ theory of structuration by applying it to the role of technology in organizations. She both describes how this approach addresses an ongoing problem for organization studies (i.e. whether to treat technology as cause or effect) while also illustrating both how the theory applies in the specific context of an organization. Orlikowski’s “structurational model of technology” contains two key components: the notion that technology has a duality within it (i.e. that it is iteratively designed and used) and that it is interpretively flexible (i.e. that humans have agency in how they take it up and use it).
|relevance=This article is the key statement of the structurational model of technology, and serves as a clear and concise guide to both articulating and applying the theory.
|journal=Organization Science
|pub_date=1992
|subject=Sociology
}}

Cultural-historical activity theory: Exploring a theory to inform practice and research

2019-11-18T06:00:35Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Cultural-historical activity theory: Exploring a theory to inform practice and research |authors=Kirsten A. Foot |summary=This article summarizes and synthesi..."

{{Summary
|title=Cultural-historical activity theory: Exploring a theory to inform practice and research
|authors=Kirsten A. Foot
|summary=This article summarizes and synthesizes work from Engstrom and others on the key elements, contours, and lenses employed in cultural-historical activity theory, or CHAT. CHAT invites scholars to model activity systems in a holistic manner, considering Tools, Object/Outcomes, Division of Labor, Community of Significant others, Rules, and the Subjects themselves. An activity system elaborated through CHAT can then be assessed for key features such as contradictions -- which are not seen as problems per se but rather viewed as places of growth and innovation. A problem may be solved by exercise of a system as it is, but a contradiction requires the system to change; all activity systems have a primary contradiction within them (defined as the conflict induced by capitalism, which assigns both an inherent use value and an exchange value, which may not always align). Contradictions may also arise in secondary positions (component versus component, such as rules conflicting with tools), tertiary positions (when an object from a more “culturally advanced” activity is introduced), and quaternary positions (activity system versus another activity system). CHAT proposes what Foot calls an Expansive Cycle as a process for resolving contradictions, with the following steps: questioning, analyzing, modeling, analyzing the model, implementing the model, reflecting, consolidating (into a new, stable form of practice).
|relevance=This article can serve as a primer for scholars characterizing and theorizing any phenomenon as an activity system or a component of one, or for reflective practitioners seeking to understand and engage with transformation processes of their own environments.
|journal=Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment
|pub_date=2014
|doi=http://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2013.831011
|subject=Sociology
}}

The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics

2019-11-14T08:42:20Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics |authors=W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg |summary=Bennett..."

{{Summary
|title=The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics
|authors=W. Lance Bennett, Alexandra Segerberg
|summary=Bennett and Segerberg elaborate a theory of connective action as an extension and elaboration of Mancur Olson’s collective action, as a reflection of and response to observed recent forms of social movements. Responding to such movements as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and los indignados, they describe the emergent uses of technology to coordinate protest activity despite the absence of formal organizations. They describe this pattern as Digitally Networked Action (DNA) emphasizing personalizable ideas and personal communications. For Bennett and Segerberg, the logic of collective action is oriented toward a weighing of costs and benefits for individuals, the monitoring of free riders, and the development of formal organizational structures; for collective action entities, digital technology is useful and reduces costs, but does not fundamentally reshape their activities. By contrast, connective action is an alternative model emphasizing fluid social networks, no substantial need for organizational control or development of a unified shared identity; connective action entities make use of multiple emergent technologies to constitute and sustain their efforts.
|relevance=Theories of connective action offer perspective on modern social movements and how they may differ from more traditional movements characterized through collective action.
|journal=Information, communication & society
|pub_date=2012
|doi=https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661
|subject=Sociology
}}

Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment

2019-11-05T00:51:37Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment |authors=Bruce Bimber, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl |summary=Bimber, Flanag..."

{{Summary
|title=Reconceptualizing collective action in the contemporary media environment
|authors=Bruce Bimber, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl
|summary=Bimber, Flanagin and Stole tackle the question of re-considering theories of collective action in light of technological change, in particular the way in which Mancur Olson (1965) originally framed collective action. They suggest an expansion and amendment to theories of collective action which includes greater understanding of how technology enables informal organizations to function effectively to solve collective action problems. They also suggest that collective action is best understood as a special case of boundary-crossing phenomenon.
|relevance=This article seems most useful in the way it draws attention to informal organizations and their solutions to collective action problems using technology.
|journal=Communication Theory
|pub_date=2005
|doi=10.1111/j.1468-2885.2005.tb00340.x
|subject=Sociology
}}

Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization

2019-10-27T20:09:42Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization
|authors=Wanda J. Orlikowski, Susan V. Scott
|summary=In Sociomateriality, Orlikowski and Scott identify a gap in organizational scholarship: a lack of consideration to the role of technology. They identify two essential positions with respect to technology as it is studied in the contexts of organizations: technology as discrete entities and technology as mutually dependent ensembles. They advance a view of sociomateriality as an alternative approach to these two. Sociomateriality takes up the view that technology, organizations, and work are intermingled and that the technical and the social are inseparable.
|relevance=This article clearly details the state of research in management literature about how technology and organizations relate or, in the ANT view, are inseparable. Reviewing these approaches pushes the researcher to clarify the concepts and relationships they are examining, and to weigh alternate approaches.
|journal=The Academy of Management Annals
|pub_date=2008
|doi=10.5465/19416520802211644
|subject=Business
}}

Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization

2019-10-27T20:09:15Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization |authors=Wanda J. Orlikowski, Susan V. Scott |summary=In Sociomateriality, O..."

Organizing and the process of sensemaking

2019-10-22T05:13:55Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Organizing and the process of sensemaking |authors=Karl E. Weick, K.M. Sutcliffe, D. Obstfeld |summary=This article provides an overview of how organizational..."

{{Summary
|title=Organizing and the process of sensemaking
|authors=Karl E. Weick, K.M. Sutcliffe, D. Obstfeld
|summary=This article provides an overview of how organizational theory can engage with the concept of sensemaking: the process by which we respond to disruptions in our environment, develop some explanation for it, choose a response, and then proceed.
|relevance=The statement of theory is clear, useful, and insightful. The ideas systematized and discussed in this article provide a useful series of considerations for explaining how people respond to change and challenging situations, as well as how organizations manage to be both stable and evolve over time.
|journal=Organization Science
|pub_date=2005
|subject=Sociology
}}

Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation

2019-10-22T05:12:12Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation |authors=D.A. Gioia, K. Chittipeddi |summary=This article serves as both a description of conductin..."

{{Summary
|title=Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation
|authors=D.A. Gioia, K. Chittipeddi
|summary=This article serves as both a description of conducting ethnography to gain insight in organizational processes and contains its own empirical example. The authors suggest that strategic change leadership can be understood as a process which tacks between sensemaking and sensegiving on the part of a strategic leader. They identify a four-stage process of envisioning (a sensemaking action), then signaling (a sensegiving action), then re-visioning (a sense-making action) and energizing (a sensegiving action). The last two components repeat, re-visioning and energizing, sensemaking and sensegiving.
|relevance=This study provides a concise explanation and example of ethnographic methods in the analysis of organizational processes.
|journal=Strategic Management Journal
|pub_date=1991
|subject=Business
}}

Introduction: Advancing theory and research in organizational communication

2019-10-16T06:57:42Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Introduction: Advancing theory and research in organizational communication |authors=Linda L. Putnam, Dennis K. Mumby |summary=This is the introduction to a b..."

{{Summary
|title=Introduction: Advancing theory and research in organizational communication
|authors=Linda L. Putnam, Dennis K. Mumby
|summary=This is the introduction to a book about Organizational Communication, and it lays out both a brief history of the discipline as well as a series of important topics for scholars to be introduced to the state of the field before suggesting areas of future research. The authors observe that organizational communication as a discipline is growing and is more deeply theorized. The authors also cite some examples in which ideas in organizational communication seem to also be gaining prominence in the business world.
|relevance=The handbook acts as a resource guide for scholars seeking grounding in organizational communication as a discipline.
|journal=The SAGE handbook of organizational communication
|pub_date=2014
|subject=Sociology
}}

Disciplining Organizational Communication Studies

2019-10-16T06:26:13Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Disciplining Organizational Communication Studies |authors=Dennis K. Mumby, Cynthia Stohl |summary=This article offers a definition of organizational communic..."

{{Summary
|title=Disciplining Organizational Communication Studies
|authors=Dennis K. Mumby, Cynthia Stohl
|summary=This article offers a definition of organizational communication as a discipline, distinguishing it especially from the work done in business schools, and the way in which communication skills are taught in business courses from an instrumental perspective, versus the way in which the organization itself is problematized and examined within the field of organizational communication.
|relevance=The authors identify key "problematics" characterizing organizational communication. The problematic of "voice" addresses the notion that organizations are made up of many people, not just a dominant manager's perspective. The problematic of "rationality" invokes the notion that organizations are not composed of mathematically-optimized entities but rather people who assemble their own patterns of action driven by their own interests and preferences as well as responding to the structuring influence of managerial power. The problematic of "organizational/societal relationship" considers this circumstance on a macro level, as participating in a broader context of social forces.
|journal=Management Communication Quarterly
|pub_date=1996
|subject=Sociology
}}

From practice to field: a multilevel model of practice-driven institutional change

2019-10-08T06:55:05Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=From practice to field: a multilevel model of practice-driven institutional change.
|authors=Michael Smets, Tim Morris, Royston Greenwood
|summary=This article uses a case study to suggest a bottom-up, contextualized, and, as they call it, “practice-driven” model for change. They offer their model as an alternative to macro-level, top-down theorizing about organizational change. Their case study describes how lawyers from differing legal backgrounds (German, English) restructured all of their ideas about their profession, though the process of actually working in that profession in a context that put them into contact with new ideas. German lawyers adapted to a client-oriented, problem-solving approach, English lawyers learned that their assumptions about how legal systems work was unfounded, and both oriented themselves toward the views of rating agencies and client satisfaction rather than the courts or the public.
|relevance=This article provides a roadmap to future theorizing in this area, empirical findings which address a fundamental question in social sciences (given an explanation change, how might we explain stability, and given an explanation of stability, how might we explain change) and also a detailed account of how the case and its conclusions were built.
|journal=Academy of Management Journal
|pub_date=08/2012
|doi=10.5465/amj.2010.0013
|subject=Sociology
}}

From practice to field: a multilevel model of practice-driven institutional change

2019-10-08T06:54:40Z

Kaylea:

From practice to field: a multilevel model of practice-driven institutional change

2019-10-08T06:54:07Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=From practice to field: a multilevel model of practice-driven institutional change. |authors=Michael Smets, Tim Morris, Royston Greenwood |summary=This articl..."

The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis

2019-10-08T05:15:53Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=The new institutionalism in organizational analysis |authors=Paul J. DiMaggio, Walter W. Powell |summary=The introduction to this book provides an overview an..."

{{Summary
|title=The new institutionalism in organizational analysis
|authors=Paul J. DiMaggio, Walter W. Powell
|summary=The introduction to this book provides an overview and intellectual history of "New Institutionalism", largely in contrast to the institutionalism which came before it. The authors trace the evolution of, and points of departure from, a previous approach which examined institutions using behavioralist perspective, often directly tied to the perspective more common in economics: that institutions are the product of individual choices, and represent a rational way to optimize effort, manage risk, and minimize transaction costs. However, this approach does not explain how stable institutions are, and how little individuals may generally be able to do them. By contrast, new institutionalism draws attention to the ways in which institutions may be greater than the sum of individual choices of their employees, and instead restrict the range of choices available to their members. The account traces "new institutionalism" as it evolved along similar lines in sociology, international relations, and political science, as well as informing some aspects of economics.
|relevance=New institutionalism draws our attention to features of institutions which go beyond the combination of individual choices in the strict/narrow rational choice model and instead becomes objects of study in and of themselves, with rules of their own. New institutionalism provides a broad framework and a series of observations about the nature of institutions: embedded in context, often difficult to change from within, and often more habitual than rational in their actions.
|journal=Thew New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis
|pub_date=1991
|subject=Sociology
}}

Technology as an occasion for structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments

2019-10-07T00:49:16Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments
|authors=Stephen R. Barley
|url=http://www.jstor.org/pss/2392767
|tags=Structuration Theory, Technology, Information Technology, Organizational Change, Organizational Sociology, radiology
|summary=Barley offers new theory to explain how new technology and the social system in an organization interact.

He distinguishes himself from previous work by treating technology as a social, not physical object, and organization structure as a dynamic process, not a fixed entity. His data (gathered from two “demi ethnographies” of two hospitals with new CT scanners) indicate that changes in an organization’s structure are less a result of new technologies, but rather one of many potential outcomes of the interaction between technologies and social context.

This article opens with the description of a substantive theoretical puzzle: prior work on the relationships between technology and society have assigned primary determination to humans, or to technology, or to an interaction between them, but empirical work to test these theories have been found to support all of them, rather than settle the question of which is a better explanation. Barley takes up the strategy of calling these variable outcomes the observed consistency, and finds that similar technologies and similar environments can experience similar patterns of action with significantly different final results.

Barley takes the implementation of a new CT scanner in two hospitals as his setting, and finds that while both hospitals experienced social tension in the hierarchy between doctors and technicians, and struggled to learn the new technology, and tried different arrangements of labor, in one case the final organization structure had doctors and technicians working side-by-side, while in another they dissociated from one another and ended up working autonomously.
|relevance=Previous attempts to understand and predict the effects of the introduction of novel technologies into organizational environments generally presumed a static social environment, had an overly-materialistic view of the technology in question (as opposed to seeing it as a social artifact), and/or focused on decision making as the driver of technologically-induced organizational change.

On a theoretic level, this article advances our understanding of how it may come to pass that despite similar entities, technologies, and social forces, multiple narratives are possible and perhaps even likely. And, further, that these regularities and disparate outcomes can still be observed and explained with empirical and contextualized techniques. This article provides a clear and admirable example of discerning themes and interaction patterns which combine both qualitative and quantitative methods, offering both empirical findings and a durable theoretical contribution.
|journal=Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1
|pub_date=1986/03/01
|subject=Sociology
}}

Comparing and Miscomparing

2019-10-01T16:12:49Z

Kaylea: Created page with "{{Summary |title=Comparing and Miscomparing |authors=Giovanni Sartori |summary=In this article, Sartori addresses what he sees as the serious failure of the field of comparati..."

{{Summary
|title=Comparing and Miscomparing
|authors=Giovanni Sartori
|summary=In this article, Sartori addresses what he sees as the serious failure of the field of comparative politics to make genuine progress. He outlines the basic framework which he believes defines the comparative method, which in turn defines the field of comparative politics. First, he asserts that the purpose of comparative work is to allow for checking of generalizations across cases and to provide "control" -- akin to statistical controls. He confronts the question of "incommensurability" -- that is, concern that nothing can ever be compared to anything else because of differences in context -- by challenging scholars to be guided by the question "comparable in what respect?" He then proceeds to outline several flaws observed in the field: parochialism (only considering one case), misclassification (categorizing things into the same category when they are not), degreeism (treating everything as on a continuous scale, with arbitrary cut-points), and conceptual stretching (applying labels that don't really belong). He closes by referring to an approach he recommends called a "ladder of abstraction", where one proceeds from particulars to generalities, in a focused and disciplined way.
|relevance=This article offers a sharp, clear roadmap for producing comparative scholarship and avoiding nihilistic conceptual muddiness.
|journal=Journal of Comparative Politics
|pub_date=1991
|subject=Sociology
}}

A Review and Technological Consideration of the Bona Fide Group Perspective

2019-09-30T22:18:10Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=A Review and Technological Consideration of the Bona Fide Group Perspective
|authors=Stephenson John Beck, Renee Bourdeaux, Nancy DiTunnariello, Emily A. Paskewitz
|summary=Bona fide groups refers to the perspective that when studying groups, we should account for "complex dynamics associated with interdependent contexts and stable, yet permeable boundaries" (p. 685). This article reiterates the basic tenets of Putnam and Stohl 1990, describing the history and impact of the bona fide group perspective, as well as summarizing work which has advanced the basic body of understanding about relevant dimensions. The article closes with a suggestion of areas of future work, particularly the role of technology in such dimensions as communicating presence and absence, membership and non-membership, and maintaining group identity.
|relevance=This article provides a useful updating to Putnam and Stohl 1990, with an expanded context on applications and uses of the bona fide group perspective. The article is interdisciplinary in its orientation, and connects the bona fide group perspective with significant issues of interest not only in communication, but also in psychology, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction.
|journal=Small Group Research
|pub_date=2016/12/01
|doi=https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1046496416665703
|subject=Sociology
}}

A Review and Technological Consideration of the Bona Fide Group Perspective

2019-09-30T22:17:48Z

Kaylea:

{{Summary
|title=A Review and Technological Consideration of the Bona Fide Group Perspective
|authors=Stephenson John Beck, Renee Bourdeaux, Nancy DiTunnariello, Emily A. Paskewitz
|summary=Bona fide groups refers to the perspective that when studying groups, we should account for "complex dynamics associated with interdependent contexts and stable, yet permeable boundaries" (p. 685). This article reiterates the basic tenets of [Putnam and Stohl 1990| Bona_fide_groups_A_reconceptualization_of_groups], describing the history and impact of the bona fide group perspective, as well as summarizing work which has advanced the basic body of understanding about relevant dimensions. The article closes with a suggestion of areas of future work, particularly the role of technology in such dimensions as communicating presence and absence, membership and non-membership, and maintaining group identity.
|relevance=This article provides a useful updating to Putnam and Stohl 1990, with an expanded context on applications and uses of the bona fide group perspective. The article is interdisciplinary in its orientation, and connects the bona fide group perspective with significant issues of interest not only in communication, but also in psychology, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction.
|journal=Small Group Research
|pub_date=2016/12/01
|doi=https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1046496416665703
|subject=Sociology
}}