CSCW is a research area of which lively debates are characteristic. This was from the beginning manifested in often hot debates among proponents of different schools of thought.

CSCW is an interdisciplinary research area, welcoming researches from widely different disciplines, from sociology, anthropology, social psychology, and organizational studies on the one hand to computer science, software development, and sensor network engineering on the other. Moreover, within each of the involved disciplines, a host of competing schools of thinking make their voices heard. From sociology and anthropology, for example, the CSCW community has notably benefitted from the approaches represented by Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology, the Symbolic Interactionism of Strauss and Becker, Sachs’ Conversation Analysis, Bourdieu’s or Giddens’ or Schatzki’s Practice Theory, Hutchins’ Distributed Cognition, Austin’s Speech Act Theory, Wittgenstein and Ryle’s Ordinary Language Philosophy, or Latour’s Actor Network Theory. This has of course been accompanied, or rather, facilitated by often heated debates. Likewise, in computing, such debates have been matched by perhaps equally strong disagreements. However, while they have not typically developed into open debates, there has been obvious discord concerning competing technical paradigms such as, for example, client–server versus distributed architectures, groupware apps versus coordinative functionality embedded in infrastructures, computational models of cooperative work relations versus generic computational mechanisms, and, in general, automation vs interactivity.

Such heterogeneity of voices might reflect the particular intellectual constellation under which CSCW was born in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s. The variety is not the sign of an immature field; CSCW is turning forty, which makes it a rather mature research area. But more importantly, the heterogeneity is probably a condition of life of a field such as CSCW that is constantly welcoming researchers from all domains. Indeed, as new computer and network technologies are developed and put to work, all sorts of troubles arise. Moreover, as existing collaborative computing technologies are transferred to new application domains, unanticipated outcomes occur time and again. Hence, practitioners and researchers engaged in these interventions turn to CSCW to try to make sense of it all, to inform their problems, and possibly find solutions. And this influx may engender disruptions of the existing conceptual field and give rise to new paradigms and approaches. CSCW is not a ‘normal science’ in Thomas Kuhn’s sense and probably never will be. Not only are the cornerstone concepts of the field — the ones that allow us to express, articulate, and compare research problems and findings — repeatedly subject to examination, they may also routinely be challenged by new competitors.

These ongoing debates of and among different schools of thought with respect to emerging technological challenges, possibilities, and problems are essential, as are critical considerations of CSCW’s responsibilities with respect to ongoing societal challenges and the uses and abuses of collaborative technologies. Crucial discussions also emerge to face disciplinary backlash against inherently interdisciplinary research, the recurring obsession with ‘scientific methods’, or the managerialist ideology of automation disregarding the practical circumstances in which computational artifacts are to be embedded, or in other words, the problem of plans and situated action. These intellectual issues are foundational to CSCW but they are not settled: the debates are a going concern.

The CSCW Journal has from its beginning been welcoming ‘more open and combative debate and discussion on CSCW issues than is normal in archival journal material’, as Liam Bannon put it in his editorial note introducing the debate on Lucy Suchman’s question ‘Do categories have politics?.Footnote 1 In line with this, and to strengthen the opportunity for debate in CSCW, we are introducing significant changes in the ways debates are organized and contributions are made available in the CSCW Journal.

In doing so, we take advantage of the new publication scheme that is currently being implemented by Springer Nature, moving to a publication model based on the notion of ‘Continuous Article Publishing’ (CAP), under which accepted articles are automatically assigned to an issue and directly published upon completion of the proof process; authors do therefore no longer have to wait for the printed issue to be compiled and published to have their articles acknowledged as published in the final form. To accommodate for this transition, the notion of a Special Issue has been changed into that of a Collection. The difference is that articles in a Collection do not necessarily appear in the same issue but may be published to different issues, as if a Collection is a ‘virtual issue’. All articles in a Collection are identifiable and accessible at the Springer Nature site.Footnote 2

This means that we can have a debate that runs over a long time, as scholarly debates tend to do, with contributions being identifiable and integrated in a thread (the Collection).

More specifically, we have taken action at three levels:

First, and as noted, the CSCW Journal has already welcomed lively debates. Taking advantage of the notion of Collections, we have created corresponding Debate Collections post hoc (see the list below). That is, we have put together a number of previously published articles according to the debate to which they contributed. These collections of debates can now be found at SpringerLink.Footnote 3 In doing so, we aim in particular at supporting young researchers and newcomers to the CSCW research area to grasp the intellectual debates that framed and are continuously shaping the field.

Second, we have created an Article Type named ‘Debate’ (on par with other Articles Types such as ‘Research Article’, ‘ECSCW Contribution’, ‘Book Review’). The purpose of this Article Type is to encourage submissions from CSCW researchers who would like to engage in a debate about conceptual, methodological, and other foundational issues for CSCW. The Editors-in-Chief handle ‘Debate’ submissions and invite reviewers as appropriate. Submissions are evaluated based on their relevance and pertinence to the topic addressed as well as the intellectual validity of the argumentation. As opposed to regular research articles, ‘Debate’ contributions are not expected to be comprehensive in their coverage of related research, in as much as issues under debate are presumably still being articulated and developed and contributions are expected to engender debate and invite rejoinders.

Third, we have invited scholars to put together Collections in which topical debates are addressed. Calls for papers will begin to appear shortly. Watch the journal’s website at Springer Nature for news.Footnote 4 For each of these Debate threads, a specific Collection will be created for easy access.