6 - The critical role of workplace studies in CSCW

Summary

While there is no question that workplace studies play a prominent role in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, the exact nature of this role has been a subject of much reflection and debate over the years. So far, the deliberation has been inconclusive, and, moreover, in the last few years a certain sense of disillusionment and even scepticism has arisen concerning the ways in which and the extent to which such studies in fact contribute to CSCW systems design.

Plowman et al. (1995), for example, have raised the question ‘what are workplace studies for?’ To investigate this issue they undertook a survey of a large part of the workplace studies published in the area of CSCW – altogether seventy-five papers – and found what they called a ‘paucity of papers detailing specific design guidelines’ (Plowman et al., 1995: 313). While they hesitated to conclude that ‘workplace studies do not produce specific design guidelines’, they did feel confident that the observed paucity ‘can be attributed to the lack of reported research which has developed to the stage of a system prototype’ (Plowman et al., 1995: 313). Discussing these observations, Plowman et al. (1995: 321) surmised that the reason for the apparent failure to bridge the gap is ‘a big discrepancy between accounts of sociality generated by field studies and the way information can be of practical use to system developers’.