About Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW)

CSCW - Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a community of behavioral researchers and system builders at the intersection of collaborative behaviors and technology. The collaboration can involve a few individuals or a team, it can be within or between organizations, or it can involve an online community that spans the globe. CSCW addresses how different technologies facilitate, impair, or simply change collaborative activities.

The CSCW community revolves around a journal and two conference series, one typically held in North America and one in Europe. Books and academic courses followed, and relevant papers appear in other conferences as well. Pointers to these resources conclude this chapter.

Supporting Groups, Organizations, and Communities

Another lens for considering CSCW research is the social unit: small groups, teams, projects, organizations, and communities. Many distinctions arise on the continuum from dyads to globe-spanning communities. Three research and development clusters have been (i) the social psychology of groups or teams and technologies to support them; (ii) organizational behavior and support; and (iii) community analysis and support.

Social psychology and group support

Social psychologists seek general principles of social behavior that are independent of organizational context. Participants in controlled experiments are often students who are assigned to work in groups. The psychologists’ hope is to generalize the results of controlled experiments to the more variable conditions of the workplace environment. These generalizations may be questionable, but findings of these experiments may suggest behaviors that should be carefully examined in the workplace. 

Kraut (2003) discusses why the research approach of social psychology was of limited value to technology developers. This research approach led, however, to Joseph McGrath’s (McGrath 1991) invaluable framework that characterizes team behavior in terms of three functions (production, group well being, and member support) and four modes (inception, problem solving, conflict resolution, and execution), as shown in Table 27.2 below.

Production	Group well-being	Member support
Inception	Production demand and opportunity	Interaction demand and opportunity	Inclusion demand and opportunity
Problem-solving	Technical problem solving	Role network definition	Position and status achievements
Conflict resolution	Policy resolution	Power and payoff distribution	Contribution and payoff distribution
Execution	Performance	Interaction	Participation

Table 27.2: McGrath’s (1991) framework for categorizing team behaviors.

 

The key to understanding the framework’s utility is to focus on the columns. Organizations are obsessed with demonstrating that a new technology or process yields a “return on investment,” measured as increased performance: the lower left cell, the production function and the execution mode. This apparently logical goal has two significant drawbacks: It is often impossible to prove that a communication or collaboration tool yields positive performance effects in real-world settings, so much time and money is squandered in futility. Lab studies of technology use overwhelmingly focus on impacts in the lower left cell. Second, with a laser focus on performance, it is easy to overlook that positive or negative impacts in other cells can have crucial indirect consequences.

For example, no one could prove a productivity benefit for email. Eventually people stopped questioning it. On the other hand, group support systems (electronic meeting rooms, a major focus of research in the 1980s and commercialization attempts in the 1990s) did well in controlled studies but were never commercially successful. Why? An analysis by Dennis & Reinicke (2004) attributes this to the lack of support for group well-being and member support. One participant in a meeting conducted using a group support system told us that it was the most unpleasant meeting he had experienced in his life, despite its success at accomplishing its stated objective.

Some technologies that show no positive effects in lab studies that focus on performance can provide benefits in other cells. They can aid in conflict resolution or problem-solving, enable people to achieve recognition or status, and so on. Videoconferencing can have subtle effects that are difficult to measure in terms of return on investment: It can assist conflict-resolution or problem-solving (Williams, 1997), and if people like it, it could strengthen group ties.

Sumber: http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/cscw_computer_supported_cooperative_work.html