Office on the Move

This study, applying social shaping of technology complemented with affordance theory and domestication theory, qualitatively analyses implications of the mobile phone constructed by entrepreneurs in Fujian Province, China. Findings indicate that mobile telephony has significantly transformed the business practice of time and space by Fujian entrepreneurs. It changes time constraints by enabling a 24-hour contact in business operations. It affects the spatial location with a ‘mobile office’. It becomes a platform for staging tricky business performances. It interconnects business and private lives. Consequently it becomes the ‘magic wand’ -- the central axis around which the lives of Fujian entrepreneurs revolve.

The Implementation of Knowledge Management in Service Businesses

Knowledge management is increasingly being mentioned in practice and research as a mechanism for gaining competitive advantage. Not only the high-tech industry needs to put knowledge management to use, but also the service industry. This article presents a conceptual framework to provide insights for managers to implement knowledge management in service businesses. Especially, we provide a four-stage approach in this study that was adopted from the processes of knowledge management proposed by Alavi and Leidner (2001) and we suggest two to four strategies for each process.

Extending Sociotechnical Design to Project Conception

Project management processes offer specific sites for understanding the interplay of the social and the technical. This article focuses on the connection between knowledge and technology through knowledge communication processes, cultural & rhetorical contexts in projects, and the iterative process of project conception rooted in sense-making by designers. The data comes from a Project management course in which the students were asked to design and plan projects to situate a mobile phone game in a social context. The course was taught simultaneously at the Helsinki School of Economics in Finland and the Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus, Denmark. The analysis demonstrates the potential of knowledge communication concepts for social technical design and highlights the cultural context of the designers as a key factor to consider in socio-technical design.

Sociotechnical Uses of Social Web Tools During Disasters

Social web tools are being leveraged by participants to communicate throughout their workday as well as during times of crisis. Using the London Bombings of 7 July 2005 as a case study, this chapter illustrates the need for sociotechnical interventions in systems design. By employing Actor Network Theory the author makes visible the active participants and technologies within the ecosystems of social media tools. Such visibility provides insight to the designer seeking to optimize communication systems in the wake of disaster, as well as providing further generalization to everyday use. Guidelines for improving systems and user interfaces based on disaster scenarios are described.

Before the Internet

Virtual organisations, in which the technology mediates the interactions in the social system, are an emergent form of socio-technical system. This chapter reviews the concepts and techniques of the 50 years of socio-technical systems theory development that preceded the internet to examine their relevance for the study of the virtual organisation. It first examines the socio-technical system concept of work organisation in relation to the quality of working life and relates these issues to contemporary forms of virtual organisation. It then examines work organisations as open systems and explores the implications of task interdependencies for the delivery of operational work. It questions whether socio-technical concepts are appropriate for emergent forms of virtual social community and concludes that many socio-technical characteristics are also likely to be found in these forms of organisation. The chapter then examines the implications of a technology that mediates communications between people in the social system. It concludes with a plea that we go beyond the design of technical systems to support virtual organisations and, in the tradition of socio-technical systems research, concern ourselves with the joint design of the social and technical components of virtual organisations.

Externalized Design

In this chapter, the author presents a conceptual framework for early-stage interaction design (EDOS) together with a method for embedding conceptual artifacts in user interfaces. The notion of ‘externalized design’ from postmodern architecture is used as an analogy for how to incorporate conceptual artifacts like social ideas in user interfaces. This is proposed as a new approach to theory-based design in human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). The framework is applied to the retrospective analysis of two interactive systems the author has been involved in designing over a number of years. These systems were stimulated by two concepts associated with American pragmatism (generalized other, reflection-in-action). A multistage process for expressing the concepts in user interfaces is presented. The chapter ends by discussing the strengths and limitations of the EDOS framework, comparing it with related work, and suggesting directions for further work.

Socially-Aware Design

In this article we discuss ‘slanty design’, which incorporate three new principles into a conventional user-centered design process. These are designing for non-goals (things you wish the user not to be able to do); creating anti-usability (designing so that it is difficult to achieve the non-goals); and clean design (solutions without unwanted side-effects that then have to have solutions designed for them). Slanty design incorporates many of the concepts of socio-technical approaches, and is explained using a variety of examples, including an airport baggage carousel, and the remaining challenges outstanding are described.

The Technopolitics of the Ethiopian Nation

This chapter addresses how state actors in the developing world have influenced technology adoption and favoured the diffusion of certain uses of ICTs while discouraging others. Drawing upon extensive field research and looking at the evolution of ICTs in Ethiopia, it examines how a semi-authoritarian, yet developmentally oriented regime, has actively sought to mediate the – either real or imagined – destabilising aspects of ICTs while embracing them as a tool for nation-building. A constructivist framework as developed in international relations and history of technology is employed to understand how the introduction of the new ICT framework as promoted by international organizations has been mediated both by the results of the socialization of earlier technologies in Ethiopia and by the national project pursued by the local political elite.

Commentary

The primary concern for this commentary is to examine and assess the current state of the research performed in the domain of knowledge flow theory and the relationship between these activities and the ways they are affected within different cultures and generations. We observe little research on the relationship between knowledge flow, cross-cultural factors, and stage of life. We feel that more research is needed in order to deal with cross-cultural generational knowledge flows in organizations.

Socio-Technical Issues of Participatory Design in the Developing World

This article describes how the VeSeL project which involves a distributed team of technologists and users from different cultural backgrounds is attempting to manage the process of user involvement and participation. In this case the developers are distributed but linked by a number of communication technologies while the users have very few technological means of communicating with the developers. It describes how the contrasting social and community issues of both the developers and the users can be understood and managed.