The paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational theory from the point of view of cooperative work. The paper posits that the formal conception of organization – organization conceived of in terms of ‘common ownership ’ – is inadequate as a conceptual foundation for embedding CSCW systems in a wider organizational context. The design of CSCW systems for real-world application must move beyond the bounds of organizational forms conceived of in terms of ‘common ownership’. THE PROBLEM The current comprehensive transformation of the political

While there is no question that workplace studies play a prominent role in computer-supported cooperative work or CSCW, the exact nature of this role has been a subject of much reflection and debate over the years. So far, the deliberation has been inconclusive, and, moreover, in the last few years a certain sense of disillusionment and even skepticism has arisen concerning the ways in which and the extent to which such studies in fact contribute to CSCW systems design. Plowman, Rogers, and Ramage (1995), for example, have raised the question ‘what are workplace studies for? ’ To investigate this issue they undertook a survey of a large part of the workplace studies published in the area of CSCW — altogether 75 papers — and found what they called a ‘paucity of papers detailing specific design guidelines ’ (p. 313). While they hesitated to conclude that ‘workplace studies do not produce specific design guidelines’, they did feel confident that the observed paucity ‘can be attributed to the lack of reported research which has developed to the stage of a system prototype ’ (ibid.).

The paper examines the relationship between cooperative work and the wider organizational context. The purpose of the exploration is not to contribute to organizational theory in general, but to critique the transaction cost approach to organizational theory from the point of view of cooperative work. The paper posits that the formal conception of organization -- organization conceived of in terms of `common ownership' -- is inadequate as a conceptual foundation for embedding CSCW systems in a wider organizational context. The design of CSCW systems for real-world application must move beyond the bounds of organizational forms conceived of in terms of `common ownership'.

Task modeling plays an important role during the first phases of design. GTA [Veer96] provides a method for task modeling. The method makes a distinction between a model of a current work situation (Task model 1, TM1) and a model of the future work situation when the technology to be designed will be implemented and installed (task model 2, TM2). Both TM1 and TM2 describe the work situation in terms of different views: (a) the agents (people, organization, machine agents, roles); (b) the work (goals, tasks, actions, procedures); and (c) the situation (objects, environment, history of the situation). Each of these views allows representation of relations between different concepts that describe the task world and work situation. GTA is developed based on a conceptual framework that has been described before, but which is still being elaborated and expanded. In our paper we intend to focus on the relation of the work situation to high-level business goals. This is of major importance when the design is proceeding from TM1 (and analysis and description of the current world) to TM2 (the envisioning and early specification of the New World where the technology-to-be-designed will be incorporated).

Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelig universitet

Functions which control the access to data in groupware should be flexibly designed by offering different options to the end users. However, conflicts might arise among different end users in the process of selecting one of these options. To support users in finding a consentaneous solution for these conflicts, we propose a metafunction called "negotiability". We propose to define and explore the concept of "negotiability", and discuss its application to access control, concurrency control and consistency control. We assume that negotiability can play an important role in tailoring these mechanisms and supporting a cooperative use of system's flexibility.