... This article presents Answer Garden, a system for growing organizational memory. The article describes the system and its underlying implementation. It then presents findings from a field study of Answer Garden. The article discusses the usage data and qualitative evaluations from the field study, and then draws a set of lessons for next-generation organizational memory systems.

Over the last 10 years, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has identified a base set of findings. These findings are taken almost as assumptions within the field. In summary, they argue that human activity is highly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized and that computational entities such as information transfer, roles, and policies need to be similarly flexible, nuanced, and contextualized. However, current systems cannot fully support the social world uncovered by these findings. This paper argues that there is an inherent gap between the social requirements of CSCW and its technical mechanisms. The social-technical gap is the divide between what we know we must support socially and what we can support technically. Exploring, understanding, and hopefully ameliorating this social-technical gap is the central challenge for CSCW as a field and one of the central problems for HCI. Indeed, merely attesting the continued centrality of this gap could be one of the important intellectual contributions of CSCW. This paper also argues that the challenge of the social-technical gap creates an opportunity to refocus CSCW as a Simonian science of the artificial. To be published in Human-Computer Interaction Preprint- Ackerman- Challenge of CSCW 1 1.

Sociological investigations of economic exchange reveal how institutions and social structures shape transaction patterns among economic actors. This article explores how interfirm networks in the U.S. venture capital (VC) market affect spatial patterns of exchange. Evidence suggests that information about potential investment opportunities generally circulates within geographic and industry spaces. In turn, the circumscribed flow of information within these spaces contributes to the geographic- and industry-localization of VC investments. Empirical analyses demonstrate that the social networks in the VC community—built up through the industry’s extensive use of syndicated investing—diffuse information across boundaries and therefore expand the spatial radius of exchange. Venture capitalists that build axial positions in the industry’s coinvestment network invest more frequently in spatially distant companies. Thus, variation in actors ’ positioning within the structure of the market appears to differentiate market participants ’ ability to overcome boundaries that otherwise would curtail exchange.

... of the leaders in the formalist branch of the New Institutional Economics, made the following observation. ”The incentive based transaction costs theory has been made to carry too much of the weight of explanation in the theory of organizations. We expect competing and complementary theories to emerge- theories that are founded on economizing on bounded rationality and that pay more attention to changing technology and to evolutionary considerations. ” This paper argues that such theories are now emerging. We survey and synthesize a developing perspective that we label the ”capabilities ” view. We argue that this view complements incentive-based theory (1) by considering the problems of imperfect knowledge in production as well as in governance and (2) by considering issues not only of incentive alignment but also of qualitative coordination among holders of specialized, distributed, and often tacit knowledge. Also, focusing on capabilities brings to the fore the idea that routines and similar rule-based forms of institutionalized knowledge may be important building blocks of economic organization. As a result, the capabilities approach arguably connects more fully with the New Institutional

This paper reports and extends discussions carried out during a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in August 1995 by the authors. It treats eight major topics: (i) the importance of carefully examining research on routine, (it) the concept of 'action patterns ' in general and in terms of routine, (Hi) the useful categorization of routines and other recurring patterns, (iv) the research implications of recent cognitive results, (v) the relation of evolution to action patterns, (vi) the contributions of simulation modeling for theory in this area, (vii) examples of various approaches to empirical jj; research that reveal key problems, and (viii) a possible definition of 'routine'. An m extended appendix by Massimo Egidi provides a lexicon of synonyms and opposites ji covering use of the word 'routine ' in such areas as economics, organization theory and z artificial intelligence. 6

The use of information technology (IT) as a competitive weapon has become a popular clich; but there is still a marked lack of understanding of the issues that determine the influence of information technology on a particular organization and the processes that will allow a smooth coordination of technology and corporate strategy. This article surveys the major efforts to arrive at a relevant framework and attempts to integrate them in a more comprehensive viewpoint. The focus then turns to the major research issues in understanding the impact of information technology on competitive strategy. Copyright 1986 Yannis Bakos and Michael Treacy Keywords: information technology and corporate strategy, information systems applications, management of information systems, competitive information systems. ACM Categories: H.4, H.4.0, H.4.2, K.6, K.6.0

This paper seeks to uncover dominant configurations of inter-organizational relationships across the USA and Japan in the automotive industry. We integrate relevant theoretical concepts from transaction cost economics, organization theory and political economy to develop a conceptual model of inter-organizational relationships based on the fit between information processing needs and information processing capabilities. This model is employed to collect data on 447 buyer-supplier relationships in these two countries. We empirically uncover a set of five naturally occurring patterns of inter-organizational relationships. These configurations provide rich explanations of the complexity of interorganizational relationships as well as offer differential insights across US and Japan. We discuss implications for further research pertaining to the logic and development of configurations.

This paper presents a learning theory pertinent to dynamic decision making (DDM) called instancebased learning theory (IBLT). IBLT proposes five learning mechanisms in the context of a decision-making process: instance-based knowledge, recognition-based retrieval, adaptive strategies, necessity-based choice, and feedback updates. IBLT suggests in DDM people learn with the accumulation and refinement of instances, containing the decision-making situation, action, and utility of decisions. As decision makers interact with a dynamic task, they recognize a situation according to its similarity to past instances, adapt their judgment strategies from heuristic-based to instance-based, and refine the accumulated knowledge according to feedback on the result of their actions. The IBLT’s learning mechanisms have been implemented in an ACT-R cognitive model. Through a series of experiments, this paper shows how the IBLT’s learning mechanisms closely approximate the relative trend magnitude and performance of human data. Although the cognitive model is bounded within the context of a dynamic task, the IBLT is a general theory of decision making applicable to other dynamic environments.

Research in organizational learning has demonstrated processes and occasionally performance implications of acquisition of declarative (know-what) and procedural (know-how) knowledge. However, considerably less attention has been paid to learned characteristics of relationships that affect the decision to seek information from other people. Based on a review of the social network, information processing, and organizational learning literatures, along with the results of a previous qualitative study, we propose a formal model of information seeking in which the probability of seeking information from another person is a function of (1) knowing what that person knows; (2) valuing what that person knows; (3) being able to gain timely access to that person’s thinking; and (4) perceiving that seeking information from that person would not be too costly. We also hypothesize that the knowing, access, and cost variables mediate the relationship between physical proximity and information seeking. The model is tested using two separate research sites to provide replication. The results indicate strong support for the model and the mediation hypothesis (with the exception of the cost variable). Implications are drawn for the study of both transactive memory and organizational learning, as well as for management practice.

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