Abstract
This paper asks the question: how might CSCW system design obtain and be informed by an adequate real-world, real-time understanding of work and organisation on any occasion of work-oriented design? The problem is not a new one but foundational within contemporary research and development communities. Building on established, albeit contentious, sociological reasoning within CSCW, this paper proposes that existing approaches may be complemented through a methodological or procedural attention to the relationship between language, work and the local production of organisation. As such, this paper outlines a practical strategy or approach towards producing real-world understandings of work and organisation within the constraints of design. The approach is derived from work and lessons learnt in conducting ethnographic studies in the course of accomplishing the Dragon Project; an interdisciplinary project involved in the development of a production version prototype of a global customer service system supporting the commercial activities of a large geographically distributed shipping company.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anderson, R.J., J.A. Hughes and W. Sharrock (1989): Working for Profit: The Social Organisation of Calculation in an Entrepreneurial Firm. Aldershot: Avebury.
Bannon, L.J. and J.A. Hughes (1993): The Context of CSCW, Developing CSCW Systems: Design Concepts, Report of COST 14, 'CoTech' Working Group 4, 9–36, Denmark: Røskilde National Library.
Bittner, E. (1965): The Concept of Organisation. Social Research, vol. 32, pp. 239–255.
Blau, P.M. (1963): The Dynamics of Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blomberg, J., L. Suchman and R. Trigg (1994): Reflections on a Work-Oriented Design Project. PDC '94. Proceedings of the 1994 Participatory Design Conference. Chapel Hill, NC: ACM Press, pp. 99–109.
Christensen, M., A. Crabtree, H.D. Damm, K.M. Hansen, O.L. Madsen, P. Marqvardsen, P. Mogensen, E. Sandvad, L. Sloth and M. Thomsen (1998): The M.A.D. Experience: Multiperspective Application Development in Evolutionary Prototyping. ECOOP '98. Proceedings of the Twelfth European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Brussels, Belgium: Springer, pp. 14–41.
COMIC Deliverable 2.2 (1994): Field Studies and CSCW, Esprit Basic Research Project 622S. Lancaster University & Manchester University.
Coulter, J. (1982): Remarks on the Conceptualisation of Social Structure. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 33–46.
Crabtree, A., M. Twidale, J. O'Brien and D.M. Nichols (1997): Talking in the Library: Implications for the Design of Digital Libraries, Proceedings of ACM Digital Libraries '97. Philadelphia: ACM Press, pp. 221–228.
Crabtree, A., J. O'Brien, D. Nichols, M. Rouncefield and M. Twidale (to appear): Ethnomethodologically Informed Ethnography and Information Systems Design, Journal of the American Society for Information Science.
Crabtree, A. and P. Mogensen (in preparation): The Relevance of Specifics and the Specifics of Relevance. Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Ehn, P. (1988): Language-games: A Wittgensteinian Alternative. In Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artefacts. Stockholm, Sweden: Arbetslivscentrum, pp. 103–122.
Garfinkel, H. (1967a): Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures: the Documentary Method of Interpretation in Lay and Professional Fact Finding. In Studies in Ethnmethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 76–103.
Garfinkel, H. (1967b): Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities. In Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 35–75.
Garfinkel, H. (1986): Ethnomethodological Studies of Work. London: Routledge.
Garfinkel, H., E. Livingstone, M. Lynch, D. Macbeth and A.B. Robillard (1989): Respecifying the Natural Sciences as Discovering Sciences of Practical Action (I & II) Doing so Ethnographically by Administering a Schedule of Contingencies in Discussions with Laboratory Scientists and by Hanging Around Their Laboratories, unpublished manuscript. Department of Sociology: UCLA.
Garfinkel (unpub. manu. a): Observing with his Texts the Questionable Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy. Department of Sociology: UCLA. On Wittgenstein see also: Jules-Rosette, B. (unpub. manu.) Ethnomethodology's Contribution to Sociological Research: Conversation with Harold Garfinkel. Department of Sociology: UCLA.
Garfinkel (unpub. manu. b): Ethnomethodology's Rivalry with and Succession to Husserl's Program for Studies of the Lebenswelt Origins of the Sciences. Department of Sociology: UCLA.
Hacker, P.M.S. (1996): Wittgenstein's Impact upon Post-war Analytic Philosophy. In Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 137–182.
Heath, C. and P. Luff (1992): Collaboration and Control: Crisis Management and Multimedia Technology in London Underground Control Rooms. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: an International Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 69–94.
Hughes, J., D. Randall and D. Shapiro (1991): CSCW: Discipline or Paradigm. ECSCW '91. Second European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Toronto, Canada: ACM Press, pp. 115–122.
Hughes, J., D. Randall and D. Shapiro (1992): Faltering form Ethnography to Design. CSCW '92. Proceedings of the 1992 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Hughes, J., V. King, T. Rodden and H. Andersen (1994): Moving Out of the Control Room: Ethnography in System Design. CSCW '94. Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Chapel-Hill, NC: ACM Press, pp. 429–439.
Jirotka, M., N. Gilbert and P. Luff (1992): On the Social Organisation of Organisations. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 69–94.
Kensing, F. and J. Simonsen (1997): Using Ethnography in Contextual Design. Communications of the ACM, vol. 40, no. 7, pp. 820–888.
Knudsen, J.L., M. Löfgren, O.L. Madsen and B. Magnusson (1994): Object-Oriented Environments: The Mjølner Approach. New York: Prentice-Hall.
Lynch, M. (1993): From Quiddity to Haecceity: Ethnomethodological Studies of Work, Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodological and Social Studies of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 265–308.
Madsen, O.L., B. Møller-Pedersen and K. Nygaard (1996): Conceptual Framework. In Object-Oriented Programming in the BETA Programming Language. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing, pp. 289–322.
Malcolm, N. (1995): Language Game (2). In G. H. von Wright (ed.): Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays 1978–1989. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 172-181.
Mogensen, P. (1994): Challenging Practice: An Approach to Cooperative Analysis. Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Morgan, G. (1997): Images of Organisation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Orr, J.E. (1996): Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Pollner, M. (1987): Mundane Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Randall, D., M. Rouncefield and J.A. Hughes (1995): Chalk and Cheese: BPR and Ethnomethodologically Informed Ethnography in CSCW. ECSCW '95. Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Stockholm, Sweden. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 309–324.
Sacks, H. (1992): Lectures on Conversation, G. Jefferson (ed.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Schmidt, K. and L. Bannon (1992): Taking CSCW Seriously: Supporting Articulation Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work: An International Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 7–40.
Shapiro, D. (1994): The Limits of Ethnography: Combining Social Sciences for CSCW. CSCW '94. Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Chapel Hill, NC: ACM Press, pp. 417–428.
Sharrock, W. and R. Watson (1988): Autonomy Among Social Theories: The Incarnation of Social Structures. In N. Fielding (ed.): Actions and Structure. London: Sage, pp. 56–77.
Suchman, L. (1983): Office Procedures as Practical Action: Models of Work and System Design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 320–328.
Suchman, L. (1987): Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, L. and R. Trigg (1991): Understanding Practice: Video as a Medium for Reflection and Design. In J. Greenbaum and M. Kyng (eds.): Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 65–89.
Wittgenstein, L. (1968): Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Zimmerman, D.H. and M. Pollner (1973): The Everyday World as Phenomenon. In J.D. Douglas (ed.): Understanding Everyday Life: Towards the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 80–104.
Zimmerman, D.H. (1973): The Practicalities of Rule Use. In J.D. Douglas (ed.): Understanding Everyday Life: Towards the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 221–238.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Crabtree, A. Talking Work: Language-games, Organisations and Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 9, 215–237 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008708914285
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008708914285