This paper examines the use of a groupware technology--Lotus Development Corporation's Notes® --in the context of customer support to understand how the technology was used to enable organizational changes over time. Building on its successful implementation of the technology two years ago, the...

July 1998

This paper explores the introduction of a groupware into an organization to understand the changes in work practices and social interaction facilitated by the technology. The results suggest that people's mental models and organizations' structure and culture significantly influence how...

In this paper, we demonstrate that teams may use genre systems -- sequences of interrelated communicative actions -- strategically or habitually to structure their collaboration. Using data from three teams' use of a collaborative electronic technology, Team Room, over an eight month period, we...

In this paper, we present an alternative way of thinking about technological change in organizations. This alternative approach is motivated by a recognition that traditional models for managing technological change - in which the major steps of the change are defined in advance and the...

A study of a Japanese R&D group using a new electronic medium identified two contrasting patterns of media use: one involving explicit structuring of community genre norms, and one involving implicit structuring of local genre norms. These patterns provide initial explanations for how people...

This paper reports on an empirical investigation into the on-going electronic interaction of a natural distributed group. Prior organizational research into use of electronic media has focused primarily on usage patterns and only occasionally on a few linguistic features, while linguistics...

Using the genre perspective, we studied the electronic communication of knowledge workers collaborating on a multi-year project and found that their work and interactions were mediated by the use of four genres (or shared types) of communication. Drawing on these findings, we develop the concept...

In this paper we suggest that the use of computer-mediated communication technologies in new and fluid organizations can be facilitated by the explicit and ongoing adapting of those technologies to changing contexts of use. In an exploratory study on the use of a computer conferencing system in...