Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work: Beyond the Great Divide

by Bowker; Geoffrey C.

• ISBN13: 9780805824025
• ISBN10: 0805824022
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-09-01
• Publisher: Psychology Pres

Summary

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Geoffrey C. Bowker
Susan Leigh Star
William Turner
Les Gasser
I INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL THEORY AND CSCW	1	(120)
Susan Leigh Star
1 Representations of the Group and Group Processes in CSCW Research: A Case of Premature Closure?	5	(22)
Martin Lea
Richard Giordano
2 Toward a Social, Ethical Theory of Information	27	(30)
Joseph A. Goguen
3 Reconfiguring the Social Scientist: Shifting From Telling Designers What to Do to Getting More Involved	57	(22)
Yvonne Rogers
4 Engineering Investigations: Practical Sociological Reasoning in the Work of Engineers	79	(26)
Wes Sharrock
Graham Button
5 Computer Systems as Text and Space: Toward a Phenomenological Hermeneutics of Development and Use	105	(16)
Jun Yoneyama
II INTRODUCTION: DESIGN THEORY AND CSCW	121	(172)
Les Gasser
6 Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI	131	(28)
Philip E. Agre
7 According Tools With Meaning Within the Organization of Concrete Work Situations	159	(30)
Erik Axel
8 Reflections on a Work-Oriented Design Project	189	(28)
Jeannette Blomberg
Lucy Suchman
Randall H. Trigg
9 Scenarios as Springboards in CSCW Design	217	(18)
Susanne Bodker
Ellen Christiansen
10 Building a Collective Knowledge Management System: Knowledge-Editing Versus Knowledge-Elicting Techniques	235	(22)
Jean-Pierre Poitou
11 "As real as it gets...." Taming Models and Reconstructing Procedures	257	(18)
Mike Robinson
12 An Approach to Identifying the Role of "Information" in a Health Care System: Implications for the Quality of Health	275	(18)
Cesar A. Macias-Chapula
III INTRODUCTION: THE SOCIOTECHNICAL SYSTEM AND CSCW	293	(162)
William Turner
13 Formal Tools and Medical Practices: Getting Computer-Based Decision Techniques to Work	301	(30)
Marc Berg
14 Mapping Sociotechnical Networks in the Making	331	(24)
Ira A. Monarch
Suresh L. Konda
Sean N. Levy
Yoram Reich
Eswaran Subrahmanian
Carol Ulrich
15 Dwelling in the "Great Divide": The Case of HCI and CSCW	355	(24)
Liam J. Bannon
16 The Worldviews of Cooperative Work	379	(36)
James R. Taylor
Geoffrey Gurd
Thierry Bardini
17 On Multidisciplinary Grounds: Interpretation Versus Design Work	415	(18)
Ina Wagner
18 Understanding of Work and Explanation of Systems	433	(22)
Kurt D. Keller
Author Index	455	(12)
Subject Index	467