Lernmaterialien für CSCW an der Universität Siegen

- 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

- general research attitude, rather than a specific collection of methods

- focus on

• small lifeworlds
• culture-sharing groups

- Aims: -> elaboration and understanding of the social organization of a group based on

- practices, rules, roles, relations, values, behaviors, beliefs and language 

- Immersion -> Extended (participant) observations and interviews

- 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 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

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

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

- éthnos (Greek folk people) + graphia (Greek description of)

- Roots in Anthropology /Ethnology

- Departure from armchair anthropology

-phenomenologically-oriented approach

- compares and contrasts group of people

- you have to talk to people to recognize peoples behaviour

- starts from premise: that every peoples worlds are highly contextual

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

- "Natural" research settings (should not disturb processes in ethnographic groups)

- Description of actual practice and not the desired/ prescribed

- Consideration of the context

- Longitudinal studies (necessary to "dive" into field)

- Understanding -> from point of view of the local actor