Coordinative Practices

Abstract

One of the major research issues in CSCW is the understanding of how cooperative work is coordinated. This issue has often been cast as a question of exploring how articulation work is practiced and supported by way of artifacts. In the words of Strauss, articulation work is a kind of supra-type work in any division of labour, done by the various actors concerning the meshing and integration of interdependent cooperative work tasks (Strauss 1985, p.8). A series of focused, in-depth field studies have been undertaken with the specific purpose of investigating how the distributed activities of cooperative work arrangements are articulated and, in particular, how prescribed artifacts are devised, appropriated and used for these purposes (e.g. Carstensen and Sørensen 1996; Schmidt and Bannon 1992). In this chapter we will first follow in the footsteps of these studies and consider articulation work in the building process, i.e. in meetings, articulation work with coordinative artifacts such as Gantt charts, a file sharing system, and title blocks. Subsequently, within the context of design as well as construction we will consider a phenomenon that contributes to the integration of cooperative work, but perhaps cannot tenably be described as articulation work: We will consider how cooperative work task may be integrated by virtue of individuals acting on the material evidence of work previously accomplished by others.