Introduction: Meeting the Challenge of Change

Abstract

There is little doubt that insights gleaned from the turn to the ‘social’ (whatever that might mean) have had a profound impact on the development of information and communication technologies (ICTs). As was reported many years ago by Bannon (From human factors to human actors: the role of psychology and human-computer interaction studies in system design. In: Greenbaum J, Kyng M (eds) Design at work: cooperative design of computer systems. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, pp 25–44, 1991), there was a major epistemological shift away from the ‘human factors’ approach which privileged ‘usability’ issues towards problems which seemed, at first glance, more intractable. These included, for brief mention, the problem of how ICTs might fit, or otherwise, into complex organisational contexts (see, e.g. Grudin J, The computer reaches out: the historical continuity of interface design. In: CHI’90 proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, pp 261–268, 1990), how they might support interaction between different individuals and groups who might not be co-located and how coordinative and cooperative functions of various kinds might be supported. A range of by-now familiar (even classic) literature addressed various issues that attended on this shift, including how best to conceptualise the field (Schmidt K, Riding a tiger, or computer supported cooperative work. In: Proceedings of the 2nd European conference on CSCW. Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1991; Schmidt K, Bannon L, Int J 1(1–2):7–40, 1992), what perspectives might prove fruitful for analysis (see, e.g. Hughes JA, Randall D, Shapiro D, Faltering from ethnography to design. In: Turner J, Kraut R (eds) Proceedings of CSCW’92 conference on computer-supported cooperative work. ACM Press, Toronto, pp 115–122, 1992, Hughes JA, Randall D, Shapiro D, Interact Comput 5:239–253, 1993; Heath C, Liff P, Collaborative activity and technological design: task coordination in London Underground control rooms. In: Bannon L, Robinson M, Schmidt K (eds) ECSCW’91. Proceedings of the second European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Amsterdam. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp 65–80, 1991; Dourish P, Where the action is: the foundations of embodied interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995), what methodologies might be usefully deployed (see, e.g. Randall et al. 2007), what a developing corpus of studies might reveal (Heath C, Hindmarsh J, Luff P, Workplace studies: recovering work practice and informing system design. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000) and what the consequences overall for our picture of information systems might be (see, e.g. Lamb R, Kling R, MIS Q 27(2):197–235, 2003). It is not unreasonable to suggest that these insights, insights which were largely promoted within the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), have had an influence in many different contexts. One only has to look at, for instance, the way in which ‘ethnographic’ approaches have become commonplace in any number of design- related areas. Having said that, these largely academic changes have not been accompanied by wholesale acceptance in the commercial and industrial world. Moreover, the greatly accelerating pace of change means that as fast as we reconceptualise our analytic problems, we are confronted with new ones. Few of us dealing with the way new technology had organisational and interactional consequences foresaw the development of, and huge consequences of, the World Wide Web. The various chapters in this book, therefore, constitute attempts to grapple with these themes.