Communication in boundary practices : from media choice to interaction negotiation?

• The research presented in this paper is an initial analysis of an ongoing project build on work in, what we call, boundary practices. These new professional roles emerge in the border lands between existing practice communities. This change effect knowledge production, decision making, collaboration and a range of other aspects in work. However, the study at hand focus how work is conducted and coordinated through and with new media technologies, and in particular how media are put to use. We have conducted ethnographical studies within a global automotive manufacturing company. The organization has recently introduced a new role, subsystem manager, i.e. a technical expert that is given strategic responsibilities for shared parts and platforms within the organization. The subsystem manager is to participate in a number of global meetings with other experts within the subsystem or with other managers for closely related or integrated subsystems. Three different global meetings have been observed and preliminary findings indicate that some of the fundamental assumptions built into the concept of media choice and media richness might be problematic as an analytical perspective used on our empirical context. The work we have studied is characterized by negotiations, not only concerning how to solve a task, but also concerning what the task actually is. The choice of media is in itself is a matter of negotiations. Practitioners are adding new media to ongoing interactions, rather than using media in sequence and one medium is not used exclusively. Rather a number of media are used in parallel.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Informatics

Informatik

Informatik

Informatics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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