The emergence of network facilities and the increased availability of personal computer systems over the last decade has seen the development of interest in the use of computers to support cooperative work. This volume presents the proceedings of the fifth European conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). This is a multidisciplinary area which embraces both the development of new technologies and an understanding of the relationship between technology and society. This volume contains a collection of papers that encompass activities in the field. It includes papers addressing distribute virtual environments, the use of the Internet, studies of work and emerging models, theories and techniques to support the development of cooperative applications. The papers present emerging technologies alongside new methods and approaches to the development of this important class of applications. The work in this volume represents the best of the current research and practice within CSCW. The collection of papers presented here will appeal to both researchers and practitioners alike, as they combine an understanding of the nature of work with the possibilities offered by new technologies.

"This paper aims at contributing to a reflection about the legacy of Harold Garfinkel and the relations between ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), by focusing on a common concern for both programs: the study of action as methodic (the term is used here in line with the sense of ethnomethodology), i.e. ordered, accountable, recognizable, and reproducible. Both approaches seek to describe the members' (term favored in ethnomethodology) or coparticipants' (term favored in conversation analysis) production, recognition, and reproduction of actions understood as locally situated social achievements. Within this framework, the chapter discusses two key dimensions of methodically produced actions - their situatedness and orderliness - and attempts to show the importance of considering both of them together. This discussion is developed in relation to a more recent trend in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, based on the use of video materials documenting naturally occurring social interactions, permitting the fine-grained scrutinity of the multimodal details of action. Multimodal analysis generates new insights into both the situated and the ordered dimensions of the organization of social action"--

Includes contributions by some leading authorities in the field of Awareness Systems

Information technology has been used in organisational settings and for organisational purposes such as accounting, for a half century, but IT is now increasingly being used for the purposes of mediating and regulating complex activities in which multiple professional users are involved, such as in factories, hospitals, architectural offices, and so on. The economic importance of such coordination systems is enormous but their design often inadequate. The problem is that our understanding of the coordinative practices for which these systems are developed is deficient, leaving systems developers and software engineers to base their designs on commonsensical requirements analyses. The research reflected in this book addresses these very problems. It is a collection of articles which establish a conceptual foundation for the research area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work.

Features the latest research findings dealing with end user computing concepts, issues and trends. Empirical and theoretical research concerned with all aspects of end user computing including development, utilization and management are included.

The main assumption behind the COOP conferences is that co-operative systems design requires a deep understanding of the co-operative work of dyads, groups and organizations, involving both artefacts and social conventions. The key topic of COOP'2000 was The Use of Theories and Models in Designing Cooperative Systems. Two opposite methodological approaches to co-operative system design can be clearly identified - a pragmatic approach or an approach based on theories and models. Objectives of the COOP'2000 Conference included: clarifying the reasons why one needs or does not need to use a theory or a model for design, comparing the pragmatic and the theory/model-based approaches, and identifying possible joint points between them, discussing the relevance of the theories/models with respect to the design of co-operative systems, to better delimit the respective application fields of the various theories/models, and to identify their possible joint points.

Participatory Design is about the direct involvement of people in the co-design of the technologies they use. Embracing a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs, this is a state-of-the-art reference handbook for the subject. The Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design brings together a multidisciplinary and international group of experts to discuss the pivotal issues in participatory design.

So much technology works, not by good design or by being a good fit to purpose, but because people make it work because they have to for some reason. We humans are incredibly creative and resourceful when it comes to getting something done. There are numerous stories we could all tell of the ingenious work-arounds we've developed to make something do what we want it to; or the enormous amount of time we've spent trying to find out how to make some technology work as we want, e.g., trying to find out how to turn off auto-editing commands in a word processing package when all we want is for it to 'do what we tell it'. A good example of this principle was what motivated me to switch from neural networks to the area of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) for my PhD research. I had undertaken a case study looking at the deployment of a multi-million dollar health information system throughout a hospital network.

Business processes are among today's hottest topics in the science and practice of information systems. Business processes and workflow management systems attract a lot of attention from R&D professionals in software engineering, information systems, business-oriented computer science, and management sciences. The carefully reviewed chapters contributed to this state-of-the-art survey by internationally leading scientists consolidate work presented at various workshops on the topic organized by the editors of the book in the past few years. The book spans the whole spectrum of business process management ranging from theoretical aspects, conceptual models, and application scenarios to implementation issues. It will become a valuable source of reference and information for R&D professionals active in the fascinating interdisciplinary area of business process management and for ambitious practitioners.