Co-constructing globally collaborative spaces: A conceptual study of war room meetings as spaces with placed-based activities

Abstract

This paper presents insights from an ethnographic study investigating how globally distributed Danish and Indian engineers co-construct and reconfigure a shared socio-technical collaborative space for global interaction. The globally collaborative space was not persistent a priori but co-constructed and reconfigured through place-based activities forming the connections between people, artifacts, and activities. Global places are temporal in nature, thus only traces of the places can persist outside the place-based activities. We show how the engineers chose to transfer their globally distributed plan into a locally tangible and persistent artifact that was useful for handling the articulation work of engineering. This move produced new challenges related to the geographical distribution of the engineers because the locally tangible plan was not globally available. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.