Thus, a computer-basedsystem supporting cooperative work involving decision making should enhancethe ability of cooperating workers to interrelate their partial and parochial domainknowledge and facilitate the expression and communication of alternative perspec-tives on a given problem. This requires a representation of the problem domainas a whole as well as a representation, in some form, of the mappings betweenperspectives on that problem domain.

If the decision making process (1) involves a large and indefinite number of peo-ple, (2) requires the integration of a number of different perspectives or domains,and (3) continues for a protracted period of time or even indefinitely, the interpreta-tion of the objects in a common database and hence the construction of a commoninformation space is hampered by the fact that the other originators and recipientsare not co-present.

The fact that information produced by discretionary decision making cannotbe conveyed anonymously has important implications for CSCW systems design.Naturally, such information must be accompanied by the identity of the source.But how to represent and present the identity of the source?

In cooperative work settings involving discretionary decision making, the exer-cise of mutual critique of the decisions arrived at by colleagues is required for allparticipants. Therefore, in order to be able to assess information generated by dis-cretionary decision making, each participant must be able to access the identity ofthe originator of a given unit of information.

At the level of the objects themselves, shareabilitymay not be a problem, but in terms of their interpretation, the actors must attempt tojointly construct a common information space which goes beyond their individualpersonal information spaces. A nice example of how this is a problem has been givenby Savage (1987, p. 6): ‘each functional department has its own set of meaningsfor key terms. [...] Key terms such aspart, project, subassembly, toleranceareunderstood differently in different parts of the company.’

Their importance lies in the interpretation human actors place on themeaning of the representational object. The distinction between the material carrierof information—the object—and its meaning is crucial. The material representationof information in the common space (e.g., a letter, memo, drawing, file) exists asan objective phenomenon and can be manipulated as an artifact. The semantics ofthe information carried by the artifact, however, is, put crudely, ‘in the mind’ of thebeholder, and the acquisition of information conveyed by the artifacts requires aninterpretive activity on the part of the recipient. Thus, a common information spaceencompasses the artifacts that are accessible to a cooperative ensembleas well asthe meaning attributed to these artifacts by the actors.

Cooperative work is not facilitated simply by the provision of a shared database, butrequires the active construction by the participants of a common information spacewhere the meanings of the shared objects are debated and resolved, at least locallyand temporarily. Objects must thus be interpreted and assigned meaning, meaningsthat are achieved by specific actors on specific occasions of use. Computer supportfor this aspect of cooperative work raises a host of interesting and difficult issues.

These protocols, formal structures, plans, procedures, and schemes can be con-ceived of asmechanismsin the sense that they (1) are objectified in some way(explicitly stated, represented in material form), and (2) are deterministic or at leastgive reasonably predictable results if applied properly. And they aremechanisms ofinteractionin the sense that they reduce the complexity of articulating cooperativework.

Therefore, instead of pursuing the elusive aim of devising organizational modelsthat are not limited abstractions and thus in principle brittle when confronted withthe inexhaustible multiplicity of reality, organizational models in CSCW applica-tions should be conceived of asresourcesfor competent and responsible workers.

In this section of the paper we broach two aspects of this articulation issue, onefocusing on the management of workflow, the other on the construction and manage-ment of what we term a ‘common information space’. The former concept has beenthe subject of discussion for some time, in the guise of such terms as office automa-tion and more recently, workflow automation. The latter concept has, in our view,been somewhat neglected, despite its critical importance for the accomplishmentof many distributed work activities

Articulation work

However, in general cooperative workin real world settings has a number of characteristics that must be taken into accountif CSCW systems are to be acceptable to users and, hence, commercially viable:

A cooperative work arrangement arises simply because there is no omniscientand omnipotent agent. Specifically, a cooperative work arrangement may emerge inresponse to different requirements (Schmidt,1990):

The Rich Diversity of Cooperative Work

As a research effort that involves a large number of established disciplines,research areas, and communities, CSCW is an arena of discordant views, incom-mensurate perspectives, and incompatible agendas. However, in the conception ofCSCW proposed here—as a research area devoted to exploring and meeting the sup-port requirements of cooperative work arrangements, CSCW is basically adesignoriented research area. This is the common ground. Enter, and you must change.

CSCW should be conceived of asan endeavor to understand the nature andrequirements of cooperative work with the objective of designing computer-basedtechnologies for cooperative work arrangements.

Reflective Design Strategies In addition shaping our principles or objectives, our foundational influences and case studies have also helped us articulate strategies for reflective design. The first three strategies identified here speak to characteristics of designs that encourage reflection by users. The second group of strategies provides ways for reflecting on the process of design.

Some Reflective Design Challenges

Principles of Reflective Design

Reflective design, like reflection-in-action, advocates practicing research and design concomitantly, and not only as separate disciplines. We also subscribe to a view of reflection as a fully engaged interaction and not a detached assessment. Finally, we draw from the observation that reflection is often triggered by an element of surprise, where someone moves from knowing-in-action, operating within the status quo, to reflection-in-action, puzzling out what to do next or why the status quo has been disrupted

In this effort, reflection-in-action provides a ground for uniting theory and practice; whereas theory presents a view of the world in general principles and abstract problem spaces, practice involves both building within these generalities and breaking them down.

CTP is a key method for reflective design, since it offers strategies to bring unconscious values to the fore by creating technical alternatives. In our work, we extend CTP in several ways that make it particularly appropriate for HCI and critical computing.

CTP synthesizes critical reflection with technology production as a way of highlighting and altering unconsciously-held assumptions that are hindering progress in a technical field.

Ludic design promotes engagement in the exploration and production of meaning, providing for curiosity, exploration and reflection as key values. In other words, ludic design focuses on reflection and engagement through the experience of using the designed object.

goal is to push design research beyond an agenda of reinforcing values of consumer culture and to instead embody cultural critique in designed artifacts. A critical designer designs objects not to do what users want and value, but to introduce both designers and users to new ways of looking at the world and the role that designed objects can play for them in it.

value-sensitive design method (VSD). VSD provides techniques to elucidate and answer values questions during the course of a system's design.

From participatory design, we draw several core principles, most notably the reflexive recognition of the politics of design practice and a desire to speak to the needs of multiple constituencies in the design process.

PD strategies tend to be used to support existing practices identified collaboratively by users and designers as a design-worthy project. While values clashes between designers and different users can be elucidated in this collaboration, the values which users and designers share do not necessarily go examined. For reflective design to function as a design practice that opens new cultural possibilities, however, we need to question values which we may unconsciously hold in common. In addition, designers may need to introduce values issues which initially do not interest users or make them uncomfortabl

We define 'reflection' as referring tocritical reflection, orbringing unconscious aspects of experience to conscious awareness, thereby making them available for conscious choice. This critical reflection is crucial to both individual freedom and our quality of life in society as a whole, since without it, we unthinkingly adopt attitudes, practices, values, and identities we might not consciously espouse. Additionally, reflection is not a purely cognitive activity, but is folded into all our ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

Our perspective on reflection is grounded in critical theory, a Western tradition of critical reflection embodied in various intellectual strands including Marxism, feminism, racial and ethnic studies, media studies and psychoanalysis.

ritical theory argues that our everyday values, practices, perspectives, and sense of agency and self are strongly shaped by forces and agendas of which we are normally unaware, such as the politics of race, gender, and economics. Critical reflection provides a means to gain some awareness of such forces as a first step toward possible change.

We believe that, for those concerned about the social implications of the technologies we build, reflection itself should be a core technology design outcome for HCI. That is to say, technology design practices should support both designers and users in ongoing critical reflection about technology and its relationship to human life.

In sum, we shall say that the fullest development of personhood involves a free ordering of psychic energy at the level of the indi­vidual, the wider human community and social institutions, and the total environment. At each level, attention is invested in inten­tions that should lead toward consistency with each other. Thus the consciousness of the person in itself unifies the pattern of forces within those dimensions of the universe that are accessible to humans. The person who is able to cultivate his or her own desires, the goals of the community, and the laws of nature, and is able to reconcile these patterns, succeeds in establishing a tempo­rary structure of order out of potential randomness. This is the creation of cosmos out of chaos and the ultimate touchstone of what is ordinarily called mental health, or self-actualization. We have called this process cultivation. Cultivation refers to the process of investing psychic energy so that one becomes con­scious of the goals operating within oneself, among and between other persons, and in the environment. It refers also to the process of channeling one's attention in order to realize such goals. This, then, is the ideal against which our model of the per­son can be assessed.

It follows that to achieve a vital community the psychic energy of individuals must be congruently structured. This congruence can result from either historical or environmental pressures, as in Durkheim's examples of "mechanical solidarity," or it can be achieved by intentionally cultivating common values, ideals, or in­terests. In either case, harmony exists among the goals held by individuals in the community. This implies, in turn, a restruc­turing of attention, a partial reallocation of psychic energy that will be invested willingly in goals that might not benefit each indi­vidual directly.

Phenomenologically, one recognizes psychic disorder be­cause one's attention is split: Psychic energy is focused on conflict­ing intentions. This reduces the effectiveness of psychic activity, for the two goals interfere with each other. Because inner conflict both introduces noise in the information-processing system of consciousness and reduces its capacity to do work, one may think of it as psychic entropy.

inner harmony people can freely choose to invest their psychic energy in goals that are congruent with the rest of their inten­tions. Subjectively, this is felt to be a state of heightened energy, a state of increased control. The experience is considered challeng­ing and enjoyable. In previous research this state of vital activity and inner order has been described in detail as the "flow" experi­ence (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1976, 1978a,b).

Personhood depends on the ability to allocate one's psychic energy freely. An individual cannot become a person if he or she is unable to cultivate his or her goals, and therefore the shape that the self will take.

Psychic energy has another characteristic to be considered in this context. When someone invests psychic energy in an object - a thing, another person, or an idea -that object becomes "charged" with the energy of the agent.

When socialization is viewed from the perspective of per­sonhood as developed here, some additional aspects of the process become salient -for instance, a person should not only accept uncritically the conventional goals of society but he or she should be able to change them if evidence shows their limitations. This critical element, usually omitted from the accounts of social­ization, is the cutting edge of cultivation. Thus by the cultivation of goals through limited attention, indi­viduals become persons.

Social systems involving more than two people also rely on the same pool of limited attention for their survival. A business com­pany, an army, or a nation exist only as long as people pay atten­tion to the goals of such systems. Thus social systems owe their organization of goals to attention, and in turn these goals struc­ture their members' attention, giving shape to the selves of those who are part of the system. The relationship between social sys­tems and personal consciousness, each structuring and being structured by the other, is so delicate as to appear circular. The process that explains how social systems survive by struc­turing the attention of individuals-and incidentally, avoids circu­larity in the argument -is socialization. Whenever a person begins to interact with another individual or a group, at first the respec­tive goals will tend to be out of phase. If the newcomer is to be­come a part of the already existing system, a reordering of inten­tions is required.

A social system is a predictable pattern of interaction among persons made possible by shared structures of attention.

Part of the infor­mation in consciousness consists of intentions, structured in a hi­erarchy of goals. These intentions, then, direct attention and as a result, we can interpret information. Without intentions we could have no meaningful information and there would be no consist­ent change in human affairs except for those produced by genetic evolution. Thus for each person the pattern of information that constitutes the self is shaped by conscious goals -no matter what other factor "below" conscious intentionality determines it.

The actualization of intentions is dependent on the available psychic energy, or attention. Any intentional act requires atten­tion -reaching for a cup of coffee, reading a paper, or conducting a conversation. Only by concentrating attention can we "make things happen." Therefore it is convenient to think of attention as psychic energy, because through its allocation ordered patterns of information and action are created.

Our approach will involve go­ing in the other direction, toward the ends or goals of experience and the means used in getting there. We shall view the self in a context of cultivation (Rochberg-Halton, l 979a,b), a process of in­terpretation and self-control motivated by goals rather than by origins.

When we say, "Who am I?" we attend to certain bits of information or signs that represent the "I," and these signs become an object of interpretation. One could never attend to all the feelings, memories, and thoughts that con­stitute what one is; instead, we use representations that stand for the vast range of experiences that make up and shape the self and enable one to infer what the object of self-awareness is. Because self-awareness is a process occurring in time, the self can never be known directly. Instead, self-knowledge is inferential and mediate -mediated by the signs that comprise language and thought. Self­awareness, resulting from an act of inference, is always open to correction, change, and development. Therefore it seems more correct to think of self-awareness as a process of self-control rather than as a static moment of original apperception.

From our perspective, the most basic fact about persons is that they are not only aware of their own existence but can assume control of that existence, directing it toward certain purposes (cf., Smith, 1978).

Outliers : All data sets have an expected range of values, and any actual data set also has outliers that fall below or above the expected range. (Space precludes a detailed discussion of how to handle outliers for statistical analysis purposes, see: Barnett & Lewis, 1994 for details.) How to clean outliers strongly depends on the goals of the analysis and the nature of the data.

Understanding the structure of the data : In order to clean log data properly, the researcher must understand the meaning of each record, its associated fi elds, and the interpretation of values. Contextual information about the system that produced the log should be associated with the fi le directly (e.g., “Logging system 3.2.33.2 recorded this fi le on 12-3-2012”) so that if necessary the specifi c code that gener-ated the log can be examined to answer questions about the meaning of the record before executing cleaning operations. The potential misinterpretations take many forms, which we illustrate with encoding of missing data and capped data values.

Data transformations : The goal of data-cleaning is to preserve the meaning with respect to an intended analysis. A concomitant lesson is that the data-cleaner must track all transformations performed on the data .

Data Cleaning A basic axiom of log analysis is that the raw data cannot be assumed to correctly and completely represent the data being recorded. Validation is really the point of data cleaning: to understand any errors that might have entered into the data and to transform the data in a way that preserves the meaning while removing noise. Although we discuss web log cleaning in this section, it is important to note that these principles apply more broadly to all kinds of log analysis; small datasets often have similar cleaning issues as massive collections. In this section, we discuss the issues and how they can be addressed. How can logs possibly go wrong ? Logs suffer from a variety of data errors and distortions. The common sources of errors we have seen in practice include:

In addition, real world events, such as the death of a major sports fi gure or a political event can often cause people to interact with a site differently. Again, be vigilant in sanity checking (e.g., look for an unusual number of visitors) and exclude data until things are back to normal.

Recording accurate and consistent time is often a challenge. Web log fi les record many different timestamps during a search interaction: the time the query was sent from the client, the time it was received by the server, the time results were returned from the server, and the time results were received on the client. Server data is more robust but includes unknown network latencies. In both cases the researcher needs to normalize times and synchronize times across multiple machines. It is common to divide the log data up into “days,” but what counts as a day? Is it all the data from midnight to midnight at some common time reference point or is it all the data from midnight to midnight in the user’s local time zone? Is it important to know if people behave differently in the morning than in the evening? Then local time is important. Is it important to know everything that is happening at a given time? Then all the records should be converted to a common time zone.

Log Studies collect the most natural observations of people as they use systems in whatever ways they typically do, uninfl uenced by experimenters or observers. As the amount of log data that can be collected increases, log studies include many different kinds of people, from all over the world, doing many different kinds of tasks. However, because of the way log data is gathered, much less is known about the people being observed, their intentions or goals, or the contexts in which the observed behaviors occur. Observational log studies allow researchers to form an abstract picture of behavior with an existing system, whereas experimental log stud-ies enable comparisons of two or more systems.

Two common ways to partition log data are by time and by user. Partitioning by time is interesting because log data often contains signifi cant temporal features, such as periodicities (including consistent daily, weekly, and yearly patterns) and spikes in behavior during important events. It is often possible to get an up-to-the- minute picture of how people are behaving with a system from log data by compar-ing past and current behavior.

An important characteristic of log data is that it captures actual user behavior and not recalled behaviors or subjective impressions of interactions.

Table 1 Different types of user data in HCI research

Large-scale log data has enabled HCI researchers to observe how information diffuses through social networks in near real-time during crisis situations (Starbird & Palen, 2010 ), characterize how people revisit web pages over time (Adar, Teevan, & Dumais, 2008 ), and compare how different interfaces for supporting email organi-zation infl uence initial uptake and sustained use (Dumais, Cutrell, Cadiz, Jancke, Sarin, & Robbins, 2003 ; Rodden & Leggett, 2010 ).

Behavioral logs are traces of human behavior seen through the lenses of sensors that capture and record user activity.

Resistance Realily is 'that which resists,' according to Latour's (1987) Pragmatist­inspired definition. The resistances thal designers and users encounter will change lhc ubiquitous networks of classifications and standards. Although convergence may appear at times to create an inescapable cycle of feedback and verification, the very multiplicity of people, things and processes involved mean lhat they are never locked in for all time.

Infrastructure and Method: Convergence These ubiquitous, textured dai;sifications and standards help frame our representation of the past and the sequencing of event� in the present. They (:an best be understood as doing the ever local, ever partial work of making it appear that science describes nature (and nature alone) and that politics is about social power (and social power alone).

Practical Politics �1 ·he fourch major theme is uncovering the practical politics of classifying awl standardizing. 'fhi<; is the de.sign end of the spectrum of investigat­ing categories and standards as technologies. There are two processes associated with these politics: arriving at categories and standards, and, along the way, deciding what will be visible or invisible within the system.

The Indeterminacy of the Past: Multiple Times, Multiple Voices The third methodological theme concerns ihe f1asl as indetc,rr,1inate. 10 We are constantly revising our knowledge of the past in light of new developments in the present.

Materiality and Texture The second methodological departure point is that. classifications and standards are material, as well as symbolic.

This categorical saturation furthermore forms a complex web. Al­though it is possible to pull out a single dassilication scheme or stan­dard for reference purposes, in reality none of them stand alone. So a subproperty of ubiquity is interdependence, ,md frequently, integration. A systems approach might see the proliferation of both standards and classilications as purely a matter of integration-almost like a gigantic web of interoperability. Yet the sheer density of these phenom­ena go beyond questions of interoperability. They are layered, tangled, textured; they interact lo form an ecology as well as a flat set of compatibilities.

Ubiquity The first major theme is the ubiquity of classifying and standardizing. Classification schemes and standards literally saturate our environ­ment.

A definition of infrastructure

This chapter offers four themes, methodological points of departure for the analysis of these complex relationships. Each theme operates as a gestalt switch-it comes in the form of an i11fras/:ruclural inversion (Bowker 1994). This inversion is a struggle against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear (except when breaking down). Tt means learning to look closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and hy habit, tend to fade into the woodwork (sometimes literally!). Infrastructural inversion means recognizing the depths of interde­pendence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production8 on the other.

Standards Classifications and standards are closely related, but not identical. \-Vhile this book focuses on classificalion, standards are crucial compo­nents of the larger argument. The systems we discuss often do become standardized; in addition, a standard is in part a way of classifying the world. What then are standards? The term as we use it in the book has several dimensions:

Infrastructures are never transparent for everyone, ancl lheir '\\•ork­abilit y as they scale up becomes increasingly complex. Through due methodological attention to the architecture and use of these syslems, we can achieve a deeper understanding of how it is that individuals and communities meet infrastructure. ·we know that this means, at Lhe leasl, an understanding of infraslructure that includes these points:

The sheer density of the collisions of classification schemes in our lives calls for a new kind of science, a new set of metaphors, linking tradi­tional social science and computer and information science. We need a tqpography of things such as the distribution of ambiguity; the fluid dynamics of how classification systems meet up-a plate tectonics rather than a static geology. This nevi science will draw on the best empirical studies of work-arounds, information use, and mundane tools such as desktop folders and file cabinets (perhaps peering back­wards out frorn the Web and into the practices). It will also use the best of object-oriented programming and other areas of computer science to describe this territory. It will build on years of valuable research on classification in library and information s<:ience.

Information infrastrucLUre is a tricky thing to analyze_l; Good, usable systems disappear almost by deiinition. The easier they arc lo use, the harder they are to see.

A� we know from studies of work of all sorts, people do not do the ideal joh, but the doable job. \Vhen faced with too many alternatives and too much information, they satisfice (Mard1 and Simon 1958).

Forms like Lhe death certificate, ·when ag6TTcgated, form a case of what Kirk and Kutd1ins (1992) call "the substitution of precision for validity" (see also Star 1989b). That is, when a seemingly neutral data collection mechanism is substituted for ethkal conflict about the con­tents of the forms, the moral debate is partially erased. One may get ever more prn:ise knowledge, without having resolved deeper ques­tions, and indeed, by burying those questions.

we ·define boundary o4_jects as those o�jects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of them. In working practice, tJ1ey are objects that are able both to travel across borders and maintain some sort of constant identity. They can be tailored to meet rhe needs of any one community (they arc plastic.: in this sense, or customizable). At the same time, they have common identities across settings. 'Ibis is achieved by aJlowing the objects to be weakly struc­tured in wmmon use, imposing stronger structures in the individual­site cailored use. They a.re thus both ambiguous and constant; they may be abstract or concrete.

Classifications may or may not become standardized. If they do not, they are ad hoc, limited to an individual or a local community, and/or of Limited duration. At the same time, every successful standard imposes a classification system, al the very least between good and bad ways of organizing acLions or things. And the work-arounds involved in the practical use of standards frequently entail the use of ad hoc nonstandard categories.

Nomenclature and dassifi<:at..ion are frequently confused, howevc1; since attempts are often made to model nomencla­ture on a 1>ingle, stable system of classification principles, as for exam­ple with bot.any (Bowke1; in press) or anatomy.

Clas.�ification A classification is a spatial, temporal, or sjH1ti11-lemporal segmm,tation rif lhe world. ,\ "classification system" is a set of boxes (rnelaphorical or literal) inlo which things can be pul to then do some kind of work-bureau­cratic or knowledge production. In an abstract, .ideal sense, a classifica­tion system exhibits the frillowing properties:

vVe have a moral and ethical agenda in our querying of these systems. Each standard and each category valorizcs some point of view and silences another. This is not inherently a bad thing-indeed it is inescapable.

Table 1.1 A definition of infrastructure

This categorical saturation furthermore forms a complex web. Al­though it is possible to pull out a single classification scheme or stan­dard for reference purposes, in reality none of them stand alone. So a_ subproperty of ubiquity is interdependence, and frequently, integra­t10n. A systems approach might see the proliferation of both standards and classifications as purely a matter of integration-almost like a gigantic web of interoperability. Yet the sheer density of these phenom­ena go beyond questions of interoperability. They are layered, tangled, textured; they interact to form an ecology as well as a flat set of compatibilities.

Ubiquity __ The first major theme is the ubiquity of classifying and standardmng. Classification schemes and standards literally saturate our environ­ment.

This chapter offers four themes, methodological points of departure for the analysis of these complex relationships. Each theme operates as a gestalt switch-it comes in the form of an infrastructural inversion (Bowker 1994). This inversion is a struggle against the tendency of infrastructure to disappear (except when breaking down). It means learning to look closely at technologies and arrangements that, by design and by habit, tend to fade into the woodwork (sometimes literally!). Infrastructural inversion means recognizing the depths of interde­pendence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production8 on the other.

Infrastructures are never transparent for everyone, and their work­ability as they scale up becomes increasingly complex. Through due methodological attention to the architecture and use of these systems, we can achieve a deeper understanding of how it is that individuals and communities meet infrastructure. We know that this means, at the least, an understanding of infrastructure that includes these points:

Information infrastructure is a tricky thing to analyze.6 Good, usable systems disappear almost by definition. The easier they are to use, the harder they are to see. As well, most of the time, the bigger they are, the harder they are to see.

The sheer density of the collisions of classification scheme� in_ our liv�s calls for a new kind of science, a new set of metaphors, hnkmg tradi­tional social science and computer and information scien�e. We ne�d a topography of things such as the distribution of ambiguity; the flu_,d dynamics of how classification systems �eet u�-a plate tectomcs rather than a static geology. This new science will draw on the best empirical studies of work-arounds, info�mation use, and �undan_e tools such as desktop folders and file cabmets (perhaps peering back­wards out from the Web and into the practices). It will also use th<: best of object-oriented programming and other areas of compute, science to describe this territory. It will build on years of valuablt research on classification in library and information science.

s we know from studies of work of all sorts, people do not do the ideal job, but the doable job. When faced with too many alternatives and too much information, they satisfice (March and Simon 1958).

Forms like the death certificate, when aggregated, form a case of what Kirk and Kutch ins ( 1992) call "the substitution of precision for validity" (see also Star 1989b). That is, when a seemingly neutral data collection mechanism is substituted for ethical conflict about the con­tents of the forms, the moral debate is partially erased. One may get ever more precise knowledge, without having resolved deeper ques­tions, and indeed, by burying those questions.

we define boundary objects as those objects that both inhabit several communities of practice and satis� the informational requirements of each of them. In working practice, they are objects that are able both to travel across borders and maintain some sort of constant identity. They can be tailored to meet the needs of any one community (they are plastic in this sense, or customizable). At the same time, they have common identities across settin�s. This is achieved by allowing the objects to be weakly struc­tured m common use, imposing stronger structures in the individual­site tailored use. They are thus both ambiguous and constant; they may be abstract or concrete.

Classifications may or may not become standardized. If they do not, they are ad hoc, limited to an individual or a local community, and/or of limited duration. At the same time, every successful standard imposes a classification system, at the very least between good and bad ways of organizing actions or things. And the work-arounds involved in the practical use of standards frequently entail the use of ad hoc nonstandard categories.

Standards Classifications and standards are closely related, but not identical. While this book focuses on classification, standards are crucial compo­nents of the larger argument. The systems we discuss often do become standardized; in addition, a standard is in part a way of classifying the world.

Nomenclature and classification are frequently confused, however, since attempts are often made to model nomencla­ture on a single, stable system of classification principles,

Classification A classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A "classification system" is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some kind of work-bureau­cratic 9r knowledge production.

We have a moral and ethical agenda in our querying of these systems. Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another.

The distinct sorts of questions asked of science and design manifest the different kinds of accountability that apply to each - that is, the expectations of what activities must be defended and how, and by extension the ways narratives (accounts) are legitimately formed about each endeavour.science is defined by epistemological accountability, in which the essential requirement is to be able to explain and defend the basis of one’s claimed knowledge. Design, in contrast, works with aesthetic accountability, where ‘aesthetic’ refers to how satisfactory the composition of multiple design features are (as opposed to how ‘beautiful’ it might be). The requirement here is to be able to explain and defend – or, more typically, to demonstrate –that one’s design works.

The issue of whether something ‘works’ goes beyond questions of technical or practical efficacy to address a host of social, cultural, aesthetic and ethical concerns.

To be sure, the topicality, novelty or potential benefits of a given line of research might help it attract notice and support, butscientific researchfundamentally stands or falls on the thoroughness with which activities and reasoning can be tied together. You just can’t get in the game without a solid methodology.

A repertoire of very general, made-in-the-academy concepts and systems of concepts-"integration," "rationalization," "symbol," "ideology," "ethos," "revolution," "identity," "metaphor," "structure," "ritual," "world view," "actor," "function," "sacred," and, of course, "culture" itself-is woven into the body of thick-description ethnography in the hope of rendering mere occurrences scientifically eloquent

Such a view of how theory functions in an interpretive science suggests that the distinction, relative in any case, that appears in the experimental or observational sciences between "descrip­tion" and "explanation" appears here as one, even more relative, between "inscription" ("thick description") and "specification" ("diagnosis")-between setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are, and stating, as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found, and beyond that, about social life as such. Our double task is to uncover the conceptual struc­tures that inform our subjects' acts, the "said" of social discourse, and to construct a system of analysis in whose terms what is generic to those structures, what belongs to them because they are what they are, will stand out against the other determinants of human behavior. In ethnog­raphy, the office of theory is to provide a vocabulary in which what symbolic action has to say about itself-that is, about the role of culture in human life-can be expressed.

conceptualization is directed toward the task of generating interpretations of matters already in hand, not toward projecting outcomes of experimental manipulations or deducing future states of a determined system. But that does not mean that theory has only to fit (or, more carefully, to generate cogent interpre­tations of) realities past; it has also to survive-intellectually survive-realities to come. Although we formulate our interpretation of an outburst of winking or an instance of sheep­raiding after its occurrence, sometimes long after, the theoretical framework in terms of which such an interpretation is made must be capable of continuing to yield defensible interpretations as new social phenomena swim into view

The first is the need for theory to stay rather closer to the ground than tends to be the case in sciences more able to give themselves over to imaginative abstraction. Only short flights of ratiocination tend to be effective in anthropology; longer ones tend to drift off into logical dreams, academic bemusements with formal symmetry. The whole point of a semiotic approach to culture is, as I have said, to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term, converse with them. The tension between the pull of this need to penetrate an unfamiliar universe of symbolic action and the requirements of technical advance in the theory of culture, between the need to grasp and the need to analyze, is, as a result, both necessarily great and essentially irremovable.

Ethnographic findings are not privileged, just particular: another country heard from. To regard them as anything more (or anything less) than that distorts both them and their implications, which are far profounder than mere primitivity, for social theory.

Cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape. So, there are three characteristics of ethnographic description: it is interpretive; what it is interpretive of is the flow of social discourse; and the interpreting involved consists in trying to rescue the "said" of such discourse from its perishing occasions and fix it in perusable terms ... But there is, in addition, a fourth characteristic of such description, at least as I practice it: it is microscopic.

But as the standard answer to our question has been, "He observes, he records, he analyzes"-a kind of veni, vidi, vici conception of the matter-it may have more deep-going consequences than are at first apparent, not the least of which is that distinguishing these three phases of knowledge­seeking may not, as a matter of fact, normally be possible; and, indeed, as autonomous "opera­tions" they may not in fact exist

But it is an aim to which a semiotic concept of culture is peculiarly well adapted. As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignor­ing provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, some-· thing within which they can be intelligibly-that is, thickly-described ....

rom this view of what culture is follows a view equally assured, of what describing it is-the writing out of systematic rules, an ethnographic algorithm, which, if followed, would make it possible so to operate, to pass (physical appearance aside) for a native. In such a way, extreme subjectivism is married to extreme formalism, with the expected result: an explosion of debate as to whether particular analyses (which come in the form of taxonomies, paradigms, tables, trees, and other ingenuities) reflect what the natives "really" think or are merely clever simula­tions, logically equivalent but substantively different, of what they think. ...

One is to imagine that culture is a self-contained "super-organic" reality with forces and purposes of its own; that is, to reify it. Another is to claim that it consists in the brute pattern of behavioral events we observe in fact to occur in some identifiable community or other; that is, to reduce it.

Once human behavior is seen as (most of the time; there are true twitches) symbolic action-action which, like phonation in speech, pigment in painting, line in writing, or sonance in music, signifies-the question as to whether culture is patterned conduct or a frame of mind, or even the two somehow mixed together, loses sense

Here, in our text, such sorting would begin with distinguishing the three unlike frames of interpretation ingredient in the situation, Jewish, Berber, and French, and would then move on to show how (and why) at that time, in that place, their copresence produced a situation in which systematic misunderstanding reduced traditional form to social farce.

Analysis, then, is sorting out the structures of signification-what Ryle called established codes, a somewhat misleading expression, for it makes the enterprise sound too much like that of the cipher clerk when it is much more like that of the literary critic-and determining their social ground and import.

Quoted raw, a note in a bottle, this passage conveys, as any similar one similarly presented would do, a fair sense of how much goes into ethnographic description of even the most elemental sort-how extraordinarily "thick" it is. In finished anthropological writings, includ­ing those collected here, this fact-that what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to-is obscured because most of what we need to comprehend a particular event, ritual, custom, idea, or what­ever is insinuated as background information before the thing itself is directly examined.

But the point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin description" of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher ... ) is doing ("rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the "thick description" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion") lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwiches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids

HCI has traditionally been built on a procedural foundation. HCI, from its very beginning, took on the trap­pings of the traditional computational model and set out its account of the world in terms of plans, procedures, tasks, and goals. In contrast, the model of HCI I set out here is one that places interaction at the center of the picture. By this I mean that it considers interaction not only as what is being done, but also as how it is being done. Interaction is the means by which work is accomplished, dynamically and in context.

lnteractional approaches conceptual­ize computation as the interplay between different components, rather than the fixed and prespecified paths that a single, monolithic computa­tional engine might follow. These models of computation have more in common with ecosystems than with the vast mechanisms we used to imagine. They emphasize diversity and specialization rather than unity and generality.

Embodied Interaction is interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and that exploit this fact in how they interact with us

These two trends-the massive increase in computational power and the expanding context in which we put that power to use-both suggest that we need new ways of interacting with computers, ways that are bet­ter tuned to our needs and abilities. Over the last few years, research into Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has begun to explore ways to con­trol and interact with a new breed of computer systems. Prototype sys­tems have been developed; new forms of interaction explored; new research groups established; new designs developed and tested.

Stepping back, one can broadly distinguish among two gen-eral ways that feminism contributes to interaction design: Critique-based and generative. •Critique-based contributions rely on the use of feminist approaches to analyze designs and design processes in order to expose their unintended consequences. Such contributions indirectly benefit interaction design by raising our sensibilities surrounding issues of concern. •Generative contributions involve the use of feminist ap-proaches explicitly in decision-making and design proc-ess to generate new design insights and influence the de-sign process tangibly. Such contributions leverage femi-nism to understand design contexts (e.g., “the home” or the “workplace”), to help identify needs and require-ments, discover opportunities for design, offer leads to-ward solutions to design problems, and suggest evalua-tion criteria for working prototypes, etc.

The quality of self-disclosure refers to the extent to which the software renders visible the ways in which it effects us as subjects. Self-disclosure calls users’ awareness to what the software is trying to make of them, and it both intro-duces a critical distance between users and interactions, and also creates opportunities for users to define themselves for software.

he next stage of this agenda, that is, development on the quality of embodi-ment, needs to push embodiment in the direction of gender commonalties and differences, gender identity, human sexuality, pleasure and desire, and emotion.

Extending this notion of material ecology, the quality of ecology in feminist interaction design integrates an aware-ness of design artifacts’ effects in their broadest contexts and awareness of the widest range of stakeholders through-out design reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation. It invites interaction designers to attend to the ways that de-sign artifacts in-the-world reflexively design us [79], as well as how design artifacts affect all stakeholders.

Material ecology theory emphasizes the extent to which an artifact participates in a system of artifacts [73, 52]. This structural approach considers ways that relationships among artifacts determine their meaning in the system or ecology.

The quality of advocacy engages with this dilemma seri-ously. On the one hand, feminist interaction design should seek to bring about political emancipation and not just keep up with it. At the same time, it should also force designers to question their own position to assert what an “improved society” is and how to achieve it. Participatory approaches just described are a natural ally to this quality, because they distribute the authority and responsibility for such decisions across a polyvocal dialogue among stakeholders.

participatory approach is compatible with empathic user research [81] that avoids the scientific distance that cuts the bonds of humanity between researcher and subject, pre-empting a major resource for design (empathy, love, care).

The quality of participation refers to valuing par-ticipatory processes that lead to the creation and evaluation of design prototypes.

Pluralist designs are likely to be more human-centered than universalizing designs simply because “human” is too rich, too diverse, and too complex a category to bear a universal solution. Pluralist design en-courages an alternative sensibility to design, foregrounding questions of cultural difference, encouraging a constructive engagement with diversity, and embracing the margins both to be more inclusive and to benefit from the marginal as resources for design solutions.

A key feminist strategy is to denaturalize normative conven-tions, both exposing their constructedness as human dis-courses situated in socio-political institutions and exploring alternative approaches. A related strategy is to investigate and even nurture the marginal, for here alternatives to nor-malizing discourses are often most visible. The quality of pluralism refers to design artifacts that resist any single, totalizing, or universal point of view.

The qualities I propose as a starting point are as follows: pluralism, participation, ad-vocacy, ecology, embodiment, and self-disclosure.

In sum, I see the contribution of feminist theories and methods to HCI in the following ways: •Theory: Feminism can critique core operational concepts, assumptions, and epistemologies of HCI, and at the same time, open up opportunities for the future •Methodology: Interaction designers and researchers can incorporate feminism in user research, iterative design, and evaluation methodologies to broaden their repertoire for different contexts and situations •User Research: The notion of “the user” can be updated to reflect gender in a way that noticeably and directly af-fects design •Evaluation: Feminism can help make visible ways that designs configure users as gendered/social subjects—and what implications these configurations bear for future design work

HCI continues to expand beyond the preoccupations with how efficiently a system performs and is becoming increas-ingly concerned with culture [8, 9, 5], society [11], and interested in the experiential qualities of computing [59].

Science and technology studies (STS) investigate how so-cial, political, and cultural values and assumptions affect technological advancement and scientific research; it also investigates the converse, that is, the influences science and technology have on society.

Academically, feminism is often seen as a domain of critical theory that examines “the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppres-sion of women.” [72]. Feminism integrates a collection of theories, analytical and interpretative methodologies, ethi-cal values, and political positions, which have evolved over the past two centuries.

Specifically, I am concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems that are imbued with sensitivity to the central commitments of feminism—agency, fulfillment, identity and the self, equity, empowerment, diversity, and social justice. I also seek to improve understanding of how gender identities and relations shape both the use of interac-tive technologies and their design. Additionally, feminist HCI entails critical perspectives that could help reveal un-spoken values within HCI’s dominant research and design paradigms and underpin the development of new ap-proaches, methods and design variations.

Our under-standing of the gap is driven by technological exploration through artifact cre-ation and deployment, but HCI and CSCW systems need to have at their corea fundamental understanding of how people really work and live in groups, or-ganizations, communities, and other forms of collective life. Otherwise, wewill produce unusable systems, badly mechanizing and distorting collabora-tion and other social activity.

The gap is also CSCW’s unique contribution. CSCW exists intellectually atthe boundary and interaction of technology and social settings. Its unique intel-lectual importance is at the confluence of technology and the social, and its

Nonetheless, it has been argued here that theunique problem of CSCW is the social–technical gap. There is a fundamentalmismatch between what is required socially and what we can do technically.Human activity is highly nuanced and contextualized. However, we lack thetechnical mechanisms to fully support the social world uncovered by the socialfindings of CSCW. This social–technical gap is unlikely to go away, although itcertainly can be better understood and perhaps approached.

Nonetheless, several guiding questions are required based on thesocial–technical gap and its role in any CSCW science of the artificial:• When can a computational system successfully ignore the need fornuance and context?• When can a computational system augment human activity withcomputer technologies suitably to make up for the loss in nuance andcontext, as argued in the approximation section earlier?• Can these benefits be systematized so that we know when we are add-ing benefit rather than creating loss?• What types of future research will solve some of the gaps betweentechnical capabilities and what people expect in their full range of so-cial and collaborative activities?

The final first-order approximation is the creation of technical architecturesthat do not invoke the social–technical gap; these architectures neither requireaction nor delegate it. Instead, these architectures provide supportive oraugmentative facilities, such as advice, to users.

Another approximation incorporates new computational mechanisms tosubstitute adequately for social mechanisms or to provide for new social issues(Hollan & Stornetta, 1992).

First-order approximations, to adopt a metaphor from fluid dynamics, aretractable solutions that partially solve specific problems with knowntrade-offs.

Similarly, an educational perspective would argue that programmers andusers should understand the fundamental nature of the social requirements.

CSCW’s science, however, must centralize the necessary gap between whatwe would prefer to construct and what we can construct. To do this as a practi-cal program of action requires several steps—palliatives to ameliorate the cur-rent social conditions, first-order approximations to explore the design space,and fundamental lines of inquiry to create the science. These steps should de-velop into a new science of the artificial. In any case, the steps are necessary tomove forward intellectually within CSCW, given the nature of the social–tech-nical gap.

Ideological initiatives include those that prioritize the needs of the peopleusing the systems.

Simon’s (1969/1981) book does not address the inevitable gaps betweenthe desired outcome and the means of producing that outcome for anylarge-scale design process, but CSCW researchers see these gaps as unavoid-able. The social–technical gap should not have been ignored by Simon.Yet, CSCW is exactly the type of science Simon envisioned, and CSCW couldserve as a reconstruction and renewal of Simon’s viewpoint, suitably revised. Asmuch as was AI, CSCW is inherently a science of the artificial,

At a simple level,CSCW’s intellectual context is framed by social constructionism andethnomethodology (e.g., Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Garfinkel, 1967), systemstheories (e.g., Hutchins, 1995a), and many large-scale system experiences (e.g.,American urban renewal, nuclear power, and Vietnam). All of these pointed tothe complexities underlying any social activity, even those felt to be straightfor-ward.

Yet,The Sciences of the Artificialbecame an an-them call for artificial intelligence and computer science. In the book he ar-gued for a path between the idea for a new science (such as economics orartificial intelligence) and the construction of that new science (perhaps withsome backtracking in the creation process). This argument was both charac-teristically logical and psychologically appealing for the time.

The HCI and CSCW research communitiesneed to ask what one might do to ameliorate the effects of the gap and to fur-ther understand the gap. I believe an answer—and a future HCI challenge—is toreconceptualize CSCW as a science of the artificial. This echoes Simon (1981)but properly updates his work for CSCW’s time and intellectual task.2

As Heilbroner (1994) and other researchers have argued, technological tra-jectories are responsive to social direction. I make the case that they may alsobe responsive to intellectual direction.1Indeed, a central premise of HCI isthat we should not force users to adapt.

The coevolutionary form of this argument is that we adapt resources in theenvironment to our needs. If the resources are capable of only partial satisfac-tion, then we slowly create new technical resources to better fit the need.

A second argument against the significance of the gap is historically based.There are several variants: that we should adapt ourselves to the technology orthat we will coevolve with the technology.

A logically similar argument is that the problem is with the entire vonNeumann machine as classically developed, and new architectures will ame-liorate the gap. As Hutchins (1995a) and others (Clark, 1997) noted, the stan-dard model of the computer over the last 30 years was disembodied, separatedfrom the physical world by ill-defined (if defined) input and output devices.

First, it could be that CSCW researchers merely have not found the properkey to solve this social–technical gap, and that such a solution, using existingtechnologies, will shortly exist.

Theproblem, then, was centered by social scientists in the process of design. Cer-tainly, many studies in CSCW, HCI, information technology, and informa-tion science at least indirectly have emphasized a dichotomy betweendesigners, programmers, and implementers on one hand and the social ana-lyst on the other.

In particular, concurrency control problems arise when the software, data,and interface are distributed over several computers. Time delays when ex-changing potentially conflicting actions are especially worrisome. ... Ifconcurrency control is not established, people may invoke conflicting ac-tions. As a result, the group may become confused because displays are incon-sistent, and the groupware document corrupted due to events being handledout of order. (p. 207)

Moreover,one of the CSCW findings was that such categorization (and especially howcategories are collapsed into meta-categories) is inherently political. The pre-ferred categories and categorization will differ from individual to individual.

Because some of the idealization must be ignored to pro-vide a working solution, this trade-off provides much of the tension in anygiven implementation between “technically working” and “organizationallyworkable” systems. CSCW as a field is notable for its attention and concern tomanaging this tension.

Incentives are critical.

People not only adapt to their systems, they adapt their systems to theirneeds

There appears to be a critical mass problem for CSCW systems

The norms for using a CSCW system are often actively negotiatedamong users.

Visibility of communication exchanges and of information enableslearning and greater efficiencies

eople prefer to know who else is present in a shared space, and they usethis awareness to guide their work

Exceptions are normal in work processes.

Members of organizations sometimes have differing (and multiple)goals, and conflict may be as important as cooperation in obtaining is-sue resolutions (Kling, 1991). Groups and organizations may not haveshared goals, knowledge, meanings, and histories (Heath & Luff,1996; Star & Ruhleder, 1994).

One finding of CSCW is that it is sometimes easier and better toaugment technical mechanisms with social mechanisms to control,regulate, or encourage behavior (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991)

because people of-ten lack shared histories and meanings (especially when they are indiffering groups or organizations), information must berecontextualized to reuse experience or knowledge. Systems often as-sume a shared understanding of information.

Yet, systems often have considerable difficulty han-dling this detail and flexibility.

Social activity is fluid and nuanced, and this makes systems techni-cally difficult to construct properly and often awkward to use.

March and Simon’s (1958; Simon, 1957) limited rational actormodel underlies CSCW

I also arguelater that the challenge of the social–technical gap creates an opportunity to re-focus CSCW as a Simonian science of the artificial (where a science of the arti-ficial is suitably revised from Simon’s strictly empiricist grounds).

In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible,nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as informa-tion sharing, roles, and social norms need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, andcontextualized.

Thesocial–technical gapis the divide between what we know we must support sociallyand what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefullyameliorating this social–technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as afield and one of the central problems for human–computer interaction.

create the effect of temporal symmetry, of the group sharing a moment, even though individual members clearly read the message at different moments.

The notion of temporal structuring views "real time" not as an inherent property of Internet­based activities, or an inevitable consequence of technol­ogy use, but as an enacted temporal structure, reflecting the decisions people have made about how they wish to structure their activities, both on or off the Internet. As an alternative to the idea of '·real time," Bennett and Wei II ( 1997) have suggested the notion of "real-enough time," proposing that people design their process and technology infrastructures to accommodate variable timing demands, which are contingent on task and context. We believe such "real-enough" temporal structures are important ar­eas of further empirical investigation, allowing us to move beyond the fixation on a singular, objective "real time" to recognize the opportunities people have to (re)shape the range of temporal structures that shape their lives.

The notion of temporal structuring we have de­veloped here suggests instead that people enact multiple, heterogeneous, and shifting temporal structures in all as­pects of their lives.

Our empirical example also highlighted the value of achieving virtual temporal symmetry for members of a geographically dispersed community. As electronic me­dia become increasingly central to organizational life, in­dividuals may use asynchronous media in various ways to shape devices of virtual symmetry that help them co­ordinate across geographical distance and across multiple temporal structures. This suggests that when studying the use of electronic media, researchers should pay attention to the conditions in which virtual temporal symmetry may be enacted to coordinate distributed activities, and with what consequences. Interesting questions for empirical research include the following. As work groups in orga­nizations become more geographically dispersed and/or more dependent on electronic media, do members enact virtual temporal symmetry for certain purposes? If so, for which types of purposes? And how? If not, how do such work groups achieve temporal coordination?

By examining a community's repertoire of temporal struc­tures, we can understand the variety of ways in which community members' actions (re)produce the different temporal structures they constitute through their ongoing practices

The notion of temporal structuring focuses attention on what people actually do temporally in their practices, and how in such ongoing and situated activity they shape and are shaped by particular temporal structures. By exam­ining when people do what they do in their practices, we can identify what temporal structures shape and are shaped (often concurrently) by members of a community; how these interact; whether they are interrelated, over­lapping, and nested, or separate and distinct; and the ex­tent to which they are compatible, complementary, or contradictory.

In all these cases, the notion of temporal structuring through ongoing practices helps us understand and bridge the temporal oppositions underlying the research litera­ture. We tum now to an empirical example to demonstrate how this perspective can offer a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life.

In practice, however. an open-ended or closed temporal orientation is not a stable property of occupational groups, but an emergent property of the temporal structures being enacted at a given moment by the groups' members.

Viewed from a practice perspective, the distinction be­tween cyclic and linear time blurs because it depends on the observer's point of view and moment of observation. In particular cases, simply shifting the observer's vantage point (e.g., from the corporate suite to the factory floor) or changing the period of observation (e.g., from a week to a year) may make either the cyclic or the linear aspect of ongoing practices more salient.

An emphasis on the cyclic temporality of organizational life also underpins the work on entrain­ment, developed in the natural sciences and gaining cur­rency in organization studies. Defined as "the adjustment of the pace or cycle of one activity to match or synchro­nize with that of another" (Ancona and Chong 1996, p. 251 ), entrainment has been used to account for a variety of organizational phenomena displaying coordinated or synchronized temporal cycles (Ancona and Chong 1996, Clark 1990, Gersick 1994, McGrath 1990).

In spite of the general movement from particular to­wards universal notions of time (Castells 1996, Giddens 1990, Zerubavel 1981 ), we can see that in use, all uni versa! temporal structures must be particularized to local contexts because they are enacted through the situated practices of specific community members in specific locations and time zones.

One such op­position is that between universal (global, standardized, acontextual) and particular (local, situated, context­specific) time.

Table 1 Different Perspectives on Time in Organizations

That is, people are purposive, knowledgeable, adaptive, and inventive ac­tors who, while they are shaped by established temporal structures, can also choose (whether explicitly or implic­itly) to (re)shape those temporal structures to accomplish their situated and dynamic ends.

scholars have begun to recognize the importance of what Nowotny (1992, p. 424) has termed pluritemporalism­"the existence of a plurality of different modes of social time(s) which may exist side by side." Our structuring lens sees this not so much as the existence of multiple times, but as the ongoing constitution of multiple tem­poral structures in people"s everyday practices.

Like social structures in general (Giddens 1984 ), tem­poral structures simultaneously constrain and enable.

While adopting one side or the other of this dichotomy may offer re­searchers analytic advantages in their temporal studies of organizations, difficulties arise when these positions are treated-not as conceptual tools-but as inherent prop­erties of time. Focusing on one side or the other misses seeing how temporal structures emerge from and are em­bedded in the varied and ongoing social practices of peo­ple in different communities and historical periods, and at the same time how such temporal structures powerfully shape those practices in turn. By focusing on what or­ganizational members actually do, our practice-based per­spective on temporal structuring may offer new insights into how people construct and reconstruct the temporal conditions that shape their lives.

Event time, in contrast, is conceived as "qualitative time-heterogeneous, discontinuous, and unequivalent when different time periods are compared" (Starkey

Thus temporal structures, like all social structures (Giddens 1984), are both the medium and the outcome of people's recurrent practices.

Our purpose in this paper is to develop the basic out­lines of an alternative perspective on time in organiza­tions that is centered on people's recurrent practices that shape (and are shaped by) a set of temporal structures. We see this emphasis on human practices (as distinct from external force or subjective construction) as bridg­ing the current opposition between objective and subjec­tive conceptualizations of time, and thus as making pos­sible a new understanding of the temporal conditions and consequences of organizational life. By grounding our perspective in the dynamic capacities of human agency we believe we gain unique insights into the creation, use, and influence of time in organizations.

This in­tegration suggests that time is instantiated in organiza­tional life through a process of temporal structuring,1 where people (re)produce (and occasionally change) tem­poral structures to orient their ongoing activities.

In this paper we explicitly integrate the notion of social practices from this literature with that of enacted struc­tures drawn from the theory of structuration (Giddens 1984 ), arguing that the combination can be valuable for the study of organizations in general and of time in or­ganizations in particular. With respect to the latter, we have obtained important insights into how temporality is both produced in situated practices and reproduced through the influence of institutionalized norms.

We contribute to this discussion within organizational re­search by offering an alternative third view-that time is experienced in organizational life through a process of temporal structuring that characterizes people's everyday engagement in the world. As part of this engagement, people produce and reproduce what can be seen to be temporal structures to guide, orient, and coordinate their ongoing activities.

researchers explore the embodied. embedded. and mate­rial aspects of human agency in constituting particular social orders (Hutchins 1995, Lave 1988, Suchman 1987).

emporal structures here are under­stood as both shaping and being shaped by ongoing hu­man action, and thus as neither independent of human action (because shaped in action), nor fully determined by human action (because shaping that action). Such a view allows us to bridge the gap between objective and subjective understandings of time by recognizing the ac­tive role of people in shaping the temporal contours of their lives, while also acknowledging the way in which people's actions are shaped by structural conditions out­side their immediate control.

In contrast, activities of invention almost always progress towards the creation of new or better things but not necessarily through refi nement. Normally we invent by combining a set of things we already understand how to create into larger, more complex, or more capable things that did not previously exist.

Activities of discovery can have a variety of aims, including generating rich, empirically based descriptions, and creating new theoretical understandings

Another way of understanding technical HCI research is by contrasting it with other types of technical work that is not research. For our purposes, research can be seen as having the creation of reusable knowledge at its core. More specifi cally technical HCI research emphasizes knowledge about how to create something (invention) but also knowledge that might be reused to assist in the creation of a whole class of similar things or even multiple types of different things.

In an interdisciplinary setting such as HCI, we often shift between disciplines that have stable and functional but potentially con-tradictory world views. In doing so, we are confronted with the need to select and use (or at least appreciate, understand, and evaluate) a wide range of methods and with them a wide range of expectations and values.

Technical HCI focuses on the technology and improvement aspects of this task—it seeks to use technology to solve human problems and improve the world. To accom-plish this, the fundamental activity of technical HCI is one of invention —we seek to use technology to expand what can be done or to fi nd how best to do things that can already be done.