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Information technology has for decades been used for organisational purposes such as accounting, but is increasingly being applied to the activities of multiple users in complex professional environments. This book covers the latest systems design parameters.

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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.

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Preface.- Part I: Progress Report.- Cooperative work and coordinative practices.- Part II: Surveying the connections.- Riding a tiger, or CSCW(1991).- Taking CSCW seriously (1992).- The organisation of cooperative work (1994).- Coordination mechanisms (1996).- Of maps and scripts (1997).- The critical role of workplace studies in CSCW (2000).- The problem with ´awareness´ (2002).- Remarks on the complexity of cooperative work (2002).- Ordering systems (2004).- Part III: CSCW reconsidered.- Formation and Fragmentation.- Frail foundations.- Dispelling the mythology of computational artifacts.- References.- Index

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From the reviews:
"A book dealing with the history of CSCW and technological development ... . This is a valuable and informative piece of work. ... this book contributes with a number of very interesting and thought-provoking discussions that force the reader to reflect and examine one´s own position. ... I very much appreciate the extensive work that Schmidt has done on collaborative work, both empirically and theoretically, which I find fundamental and a must-read to researchers in the CSCW area." (Maria Normark, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Vol. 21, 2012)

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