SOME THOUGHTS ON COMPUTER-SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK (CSCW)
Philip Doty

One of the burgeoning fields related to IT has been computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW).  While it is not a field in the sense of being recognized as a separate discipline with, for example, academic departments and accredited degrees, CSCW is widely recognized as an important research front in IT studies.  It began in the early 1980’s and continues to evolve.  Because CSCW began before the Web was invented, you will see little mention in the roots of the CSCW literature of what we now regard as certain “ubiquitous” applications, e.g., HTML.  Despite that limitation in its early literature, CSCW has successfully adapted to the boom in collaboration facilitated by the Web and other advanced Internet-based tools.

The many strengths of electronic tools have not been fully realized, and much of the CSCW literature makes it clear that these tools have not been designed with sufficient concern about their users.  As we might expect, this lack of care is, in part, a result of the quite reasonable assumption that users of computer systems would be computer scientists, engineers, and other technically adept groups.  Such groups clearly dominated the first several decades of computing.  The last 20 years, however, have seen the explosion of computing in disciplines (especially the humanities and social sciences) and among groups (ordinary citizens and organizations) without the technical training and expertise, the programming ability, and access to those with such resources.  It is the increased recognition of this problem, with the concomitant realization that social scientists could help close this gap, that gave birth to CSCW.

Perhaps the single most important source with regard to CSCW is Greif (1988b).  This volume is widely identified as laying out many of the most important characteristics and concerns of CSCW.  Like much of the literature in this field, the book is the result of a series of conferences, aiming to serve as a basic reference source for audiences interested in CSCW.

The two primary audiences for such literature reflect the two main thrusts in computer-supported cooperative work generally.  One group is comprised of computer scientists, software and hardware designers, and other computing and telecommunications specialists.  The other is made up of social scientists interested in computing, group interactions, social psychology, and organizational behavior on the other.

Greif (1988a) provides a general introduction to the field.  Among the questions that lie at the heart of the field are (p. 5):

• How can such technologies best facilitate collaboration?
  
  
• What kinds of software need to be developed to help users collaborate?

These questions indicate that most CSCW, at least as imagined for most of the past 20 years, tightly intertwines application software and group software.  Such applications include CAD/CAM, office systems of all kinds, joint authorship, and project management (p. 8).  One of the particular challenges that CSCW faces is the disjunction between testing software, especially interfaces, for individuals and small groups on the one hand and such testing for widely distributed, heterogeneous user populations on the other.

One of the strengths of Greif (1988b) is its inclusion of fundamental and defining papers from the past.  One of the most prominent is Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945), published, as many of you realize, in the Atlantic Monthly.  If you have not yet read this paper, or even if you have, you may find it profitable to look at it.  The paper is also available at http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm for online retrieval.

One of the other fundamental papers included in this collection is Englebart (1988).  Doug Englebart is famous as the (co-)inventor of the computer mouse as well as graphical interfaces, especially for group work.  His paper is a very useful introduction to the relatively early conceptions of computing as a cooperative enterprise and serves to remind us just how revolutionary an idea it was.

One of the most useful elements in Englebart’s paper is its list of four ways in which “human capabilities” have been extended or augmented (p. 38)

1. Artifacts or physical objects designed to manipulate things, materials, or symbols, as well as to provide for human comfort
   
   
2. Language
   
   
3. Methodology, especially for problem-solving
4. Training.

While the list is by no means definitive, it still is quite useful in helping us understand the conceptual state of affairs well before the invention of the microcomputer and what eventually became the Internet, especially the Web.  This list also gives us a flavor of how cybernetic, problem-based thinking dominated the theory and practice of computing in its early days.

Another of the important themes of the paper is still of great value today – its emphasis on the need for the maximization of the system’s powers and its responsiveness to and links with the people using it.  Computer scientists of the time rarely, if ever, talked about the people using the technologies being developed.  If they did so, computer scientists usually limited their remarks to organizations, systems, or some other, often highly abstract group.  Part of what makes this paper fundamental to CSCW is its emphasis on people and their use of technologies.

A further link to the later CSCW literature is the paper’s focus on language and the constitutive nature of language for our world and world view (the “traditional” Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [cf. Underwood (2001)]).  Englebart takes the argument a step further by discussing how it is that technical systems, as a major means of symbol manipulation, in turn affect language and our capability for “effective intellectual activity” (p. 48).  This point, of course, recalls, much of the argument in the literature about communities of practice, usability, and information ecologies, e.g., Nardi & O’Day’s Information Ecologies (1999), one of our textbooks.

Englebart’s placement of language at the center of IT and CSCW is echoed in Winograd (1988, p. 624) and his discussion of how it is that people act through language.  This perspective is placed in specific contrast with the common view, especially in computing and organizational studies, that people “process” information and then make decisions based on that processing.  This contrast between decision-making and acting through language, too, is at the heart of CSCW.  As an aside, it is important for us in Information Studies to disabuse ourselves of the easy assumption that information is essentially for decision making, with people acting as rational, individual advantage-maximizing individuals.  As I hope is clear by this point in the semester, whatever information is, it is a concept not exhausted by assertion of its identity as a resource for decision making.

In this collection, like most other CSCW collections in print and online, the theoretical and historical pieces are always balanced with empirical studies of social scientists and others.  These studies often look at specific, situated IT uses as well as particular software and/or hardware components of systems.  Themes related to decision support systems, computer conferencing, new product groups, and widely dispersed co-authors characterize much of the work in CSCW.

Sproull & Kiesler (1988) is one of the most widely cited papers, whether explicitly or implicitly, in CSCW and IT studies.  What makes this paper so influential is its integration of anecdotal and scattered evidence under the overarching theory that electronic communication essentially reduces the ordinary cues we use to identify social contexts and, therefore, complicates our decisions about what sorts of behavior should be considered appropriate online.  This paper is well worth reading closely.  As students of social and organizational behavior, the authors identify three important variables that help determine the social context of communication:  geography, organizational characteristics, and situational characteristics.  They discuss each of these in turn and specify how each is compromised by the use of email.  Their earlier empirical work led them to a series of hypotheses, largely supported by the study reported in this paper.  Two of the most important for our purposes are:

1. Social context cues are relatively weak in email.
2. One of the results of this loss of social context cues for electronic communication is that users of email systems tend to display more uninhibited and nonconforming behavior than that exhibited in face-to-face or other communication media.

Such uninhibited behavior can generate more and better ideas, especially from organizational members who may not communicate well in other situations.  At the same time, however, it is clear that this relative lack of inhibition also encourages flaming and the creation of more junk mail.  They conclude that the real benefits of email communication may be its ability to increase (1) sociability among its users and (2) attachment to the organization (p. 708).

Sproull & Kiesler’s identification of paper’s social context cues is especially valuable to keep in mind for LIS.  These cues are themselves closely linked with clear norms that paper-based communication should not be used as a substitute for discussion and conversation, preferably face-to-face (pp. 688-689).  Interested students are encouraged to read further, especially Sproull & Kiesler’s classic on the networked organization (1991).

Other important papers in Greif’s edited collection are Attewell & Rule (1988) and Kraut et al. (1988).  The former is particularly useful for its grounding in organizational studies, while the latter is also useful as a reminder that much of the original work in CSCW was done with researchers, whether in academic, for-profit, or government environments.  This second paper also emphasizes two other important themes in CSCW and other social perspectives on computing:  the importance of tasks and goals (although this point is somewhat contentious) and the understanding of computing as a means to create and maintain existing relationships.

Galagher, Kraut, & Egido (1990b) is another very influential early collection of CSCW material, and it, too, emerged from a workshop.  As the editors say in their Preface (Galagher et al., 1990a), CSCW is important because much, if not most, of the work we do demands some cooperation and communication with other people, whether local or remote, whether in our organization or outside it, whether known to us or unknown.  Doug Englebart, as noted above, was one of the few computer scientists who seized upon this fact and made considerable commitment to studying how to improve such collaboration.  Galagher et al. identify the essence of social scientists’ interest in CSCW, saying that (xiv):

The book helps to achieve those goals by including the work of researchers developing the tools to support collaboration and the work of social scientists studying such collaboration, with two interrelated goals.  The first is to attract more social scientists to focus on practical concerns about user communities that are of interest to systems designers, while the second is to encourage such designers to use what we increasingly know about group work and organizational behavior to increase the utility of electronic tools.  While we have made considerable progress on both goals in the ensuing decade, there is still much work to be done.

Galagher & Kraut (1990) is the opening chapter in the collection.  Their paper is particularly useful for its reminder that much of CSCW and other socially-oriented research into computing recognizes the importance of informal, complex, and rich information environments to group work.  Decades of empirical work investigating the work and communicative behavior of scientists and engineers made this point very clear.  What is more difficult is understanding how to unite designers and social scientists, despite the great differences in their training, professional foci, conceptual tools, and standards for high-quality work.  What makes this nonconformity even more difficult is the complexity of the behavior and social settings that advanced tools involve.  Further, IT also can help us understand how it is that many organizational problems involve not just uncertainty (what we might colloquially call “lack of information”) but also “equivocality, uncertain preferences, and internal conflict over goals and values” (p. 7).  Thus, as we know only too well in our field, organizational decisions involve problem interpretation, definition of goals and strategies, and so on.  Obviously, there are no technical fixes for such tasks.

McGrath (1990) is another useful paper in the same collection.  His clever trope in the title of the chapter, “time matters,” underscores his major message that the temporal aspects of group work are constitutive of the work and of its success.  Similarly, he makes it clear that ignoring the temporal elements of collaboration in enthusiasm about the possibilities of asynchronous communication leads to system and work group dysfunctions.  The empirical evidence is quite clear that electronic tools can fundamentally alter the temporal aspects of communication in groups (p. 53), and, as we would expect, such changes are both beneficial and detrimental to communication and to groups’ goals.

According to McGrath, the two most important temporal elements of group work are (1) the temporal structuring of the group’s larger context, what is commonly referred to as the “phases and stages” question and (2) the specific rhythms of the group’s work, particularly synchrony (p. 24).  The bulk of the chapter engages the meaning and implications of these two temporal characteristics of collaboration.  McGrath (p. 44) also offers a very useful reminder that “any particular communications system . . . offers both possibilities for and potential constraints on communication.”  One of the particular responsibilities of our field is to be aware of this (sometimes) paradoxical situation and to help our clients understand it as well.

There are a number of other sources about or contributing to CSCW that you might want to consult.  Among them are Computer Supported Cooperative Work (2000); Daft & Langel (1986), a widely-cited classic; Kelly & McGrath (1988); Coakes et al. (2000);  CSCW Research Centre (1997); Information Resources Management (1998); and An Annotated Bibliography (1991).  ACM also sponsors a series of on-going and influential conferences on CSCW.

We can see the influence of CSCW in a number of places, some of the most prominent of which are:

•  Social informatics (Social Informatics, 2000)
•  Organizational studies, e.g., Weick (1995)
•  The social science team of the Digital Library Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2000)
• The literature on communities of practice, e.g., Wenger (1998)
• Social epistemology or social cognition, e.g., Fiske & Taylor (1984).

Other fields, for example, rhetoric and composition, discourse analysis, and humanities computing are also part of the CSCW/IT mix.

Sources

Attewell, Paul, & Rule, James.  (1988).  Computing and organizations:  What we know and what we don’t know. In Irene Greif (Ed.).  Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings  (pp. 557-580). ).  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann. (Original published 1984)

Bush, Vannevar.  (1988).  As we may think. In Irene Greif (Ed.).  Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings  (pp. 17-34). ).  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann. (Original published 1945) http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

Coakes, Elayne, Willis, Dianne, & Lloyd-Jones, Raymond.  (Eds.).  (2000).  The new sociotech:  Graffiti on the long wall.  London:  Springer.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work:  The Journal of Collaborative Computing.  (2000). http://www.wkap.nl/journalhome.htm/0925-9724

CSCW Research Centre.  (1997). http://www.ul.ie/~cscw/

Davenport, Thomas H, & Prusak, Laurence.  (1998).  Working knowledge: How organizations manage what they know.  Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Englebart, Douglas C.  (1988).  A conceptual framework for the augmentation of man’s intellect.  In Irene Greif (Ed.).  Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings (pp. 35-65).  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann.  (Original published 1963)

Fiske, S.T., & Taylor, S.E.  (1984).  Social cognition.  New York:  Random House.

Galagher, Jolene, & Kraut, Robert E.  (1990).  Technology for intellectual teamwork:  Perspectives on research and design. In Jolene Galagher, Robert E. Kraut, & Carmen Egido (Eds.), Intellectual teamwork:  Social and technological foundations of cooperative work (pp. 1-20).  Hillsdale, NJ:  Lawrence Erblaum Associates.

Galagher, Jolene, Kraut, Robert E., & Egido, Carmen.  (1990a).  Preface.  In Jolene Galagher, Robert E. Kraut, & Carmen Egido (Eds.), Intellectual teamwork:  Social and technological foundations of cooperative work (xiii-xiv).  Hillsdale, NJ:  Lawrence Erblaum Associates.

Galagher, Jolene, Kraut, Robert E., & Egido, Carmen.  (Eds.).  (1990b).  Intellectual teamwork:  Social and technological foundations of cooperative work.  Hillsdale, NJ:  Lawrence Erblaum Associates.

Greif, Irene.  (1998a). Overview.  In  Irene Greif (Ed.), Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings (pp. 5-12).  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann.

_____.  (Ed.).  (1988b). Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings.  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann.

Kelly, Janice R., & McGrath, Joseph E.  (1988).  On time and method. Newbury Park, CA:  Sage.

Kraut, Robert, Galagher, Jolene, & Egido, Carmen.  (1988).  Relationships and tasks in scientific research collaborations. In Irene Greif (Ed.).  Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings  (pp. 741-770). ).  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann. (Original published 1988)

McGrath, Joseph E.  (1990).  Time matters in groups. In Jolene Galagher, Robert E. Kraut, & Carmen Egido (Eds.), Intellectual teamwork:  Social and technological foundations of cooperative work (pp. 23-61).  Hillsdale, NJ:  Lawrence Erblaum Associates.

Social Informatics Home Page.  (2000). http://www-slis.lib.indiana.edu/SI/index.html

Social Science Team.  (2000). http://forseti.grainger.uiuc.edu/dlisoc/socsci_site/completed-papers.html

Sproull, Lee, & Kiesler, Sara.  (1988).  Reducing social context cues:  Electronic mail in organizational communication. In Irene Greif (Ed.).  Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings (pp. 683-712).  San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann.  (Original published 1986)

_____.  (1991).  Connections:  New ways of working in the networked organization.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press.

Underwood, Mick. (2000). The Sapir-Whort hypothesis. http://www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/index.html

Weick, Karl E.  (1995).  Sensemaking in organizations.  Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage.

Wenger, Étienne.  (1998).  Communities of practice:  Learning, meaning, and identity.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

Winograd, Terry.  (1988).  A language/action perspective on the design of cooperative work. In Irene Greif (Ed.).  Computer-supported cooperative work:  A book of readings (pp. 623-653). San Mateo, CA:  Morgan Kaufmann. (Original published 1988)