Reach, Bracket, and the Limits of Rationalized Coordination: Some Challenges for CSCW

Abstract

Cooperative work now routinely spans organizational, geographical and other boundaries. Objects and tasks also increasingly have ready access to one another (increasing reach). These trends pose important problems for analyzing and supporting coordination among tasks. Thinking about coordination has focused on articulation, i.e., making sure that everything needed to accomplish a task is available and functioning. Coordination mechanisms (brackets) are forms and procedures used to reduce the complexity of articulation work; that is, rationalize it by making parts work together smoothly. But increasing reach requires a distinction between metawork (the work of organizing work) and local articulation (the work of making sure that everything needed in the immediate situation is in place). This in turn leads to an additional problem in analyzing coordination. Coordination trades off against standardization and segregation of tasks, because these latter processes reduce opportunities to make use of specialized local circumstances. Hence they make local articulation more problematical. At the same time, they make metawork simpler by making it possible to recombine and superimpose tasks in many ways with abstract protocols such as TCP/IP, XML and the services that rest upon it. In this sense, segregation and standardization potentiate many new ways of coordinating tasks, even as they undercut the old ones. For example, ready availability of airline flight information via the Internet facilitates the work of hotels, car rentals, limousines, and other services that coordinate with airline operations. Local articulation tasks present a different set of coordination problems. Customization in some form is needed to tie abstract protocols to local circumstances. In addition, the lack of authoritative control across organiza2 tional, geographical, and jurisdictional boundaries means that a variety of reconciliation mechanisms are needed to ensure efficiency, efficacy and equity. I discuss three such mechanisms: cross-cutting ties among personal networks, participant review (e.g., elections and peer review), and patronage. The paper concludes by suggesting that CSCW efforts should focus on methods and tools for making customization and reconciliation easier.