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Work supported by groupware systems

- Introduced by Irene Greid and Paul Cashman

- Taylorism

- Outsourcing

- Virtual teams

- Virtual organizations

- Telework 

- techniques to capture and describe the work practices in organizations 

• Divisions of labor
• Articulation work
• Coordination
• etc.

• Divide to conquer
• Efficiency improvement
• different from division of work
• task assignment based upon workers skills and abilities

- a protocol that stipulates and mediates distributed activities

- also reduce complexity of articulatind distributed activities of large cooperations

- encompasses a set of explicit conventions and prescribes procedures. supported by symbolic artifact with standardized format

- Kind of supra-type of work in any division of labour, done by various actors

- Amounts to following:

• meshing of tasks(clusters of tasks, segment of total arc.)
• meshing of efforts of various unit-workers (individuals, departments, etc.)
• meshing of actors with various types of work and implicated tasks
• (optional ) Coordination

- it centers decision-making regarding who is supposed to do what, when, where, how, with which quality etc ?

- everyone has to reflect over his work and its organization

- related to trust and social capital -> trading formal control vs flexible self-organzation

- A strategy to reduce the need for constant articulation work, but it can never be fully avoided

social presence: communicators sense of awareness of the presence of interaction partner

- important for process by which man comes to know and think about other persons (characteristics, qualities, inner states)

- increased presence leads to better person perception

- right level of richness and social presence depends on task and context

- Theories illustrate how choice of digital media can affect users view on work processes

- Digital media can and will be used to create a common ground between users -> may change way employees cooperate and perceive each other

-  choice must fit the environment 

• Positivist
• Objectivist

understanding and formation of truth are closely associatd with actions carried out in everyday life

- it is deemed wrong to separate the (lower appreciated) physically and real-world from the (higher appreciated, underlying) abstract world

- Concepts an propositions do not convey images of an objective reality but impact guidelines for practical behaviour

- Truth is not found when propositions represent objective facts, the truth of propositions can only be found in practical usage, in case it is successful