Casey Pierce

Offshoring Digital Work, but Not Physical Output: Differential Access to Task Objects and Coordination in Globally Distributed Automotive Engineering and Graphic Design Work

When scholars and practitioners consider the implications of off shoring work, their primary concern is often the impact off shoring has on communication between people at different sites. When time zones and geographic boundaries separate employees, communication is limited, making it difficult for remote colleagues to form trusting and familiar relationships with one another. However, off shoring not only obstructs person-to-person interactions, it also impedes person-to-object interactions. This is potentially problematic as many organizations today still produce physical products, such as printed marketing collaterals, computers, home decor, or automobiles. Though organizations that create physical outputs may engage in digital work processes, people at these organizations may still rely on interactions with the physical objects that they produce in order to complete tasks. In this paper we investigate impeded person-to-object interactions at two offshore work sites representing two different occupations: automotive engineering and graphic design.

Computer-Supported Health and Well-Being Services: A Systems Approach to Telehealth and Coaching Systems

With an aging population and shortage of primary care providers in the U.S., practitioners and researchers have begun to rethink traditional approaches to healthcare delivery for older adults. Telehealth -- the use of technologies to provide clinical services over distance -- offers new ways for clinicians to deliver care while allowing older adult patients to remain in their homes. However, much of the work on telehealth focuses on single technology modalities (e.g., tablet or computer) and is also primarily patient-centered focused at the expense of excluding important stakeholders (e.g., community centers) who can play a role in the delivery of health and wellness resources. While there are opportunities to extend sites of care to local community organizations using telehealth coaching services, current telehealth research is understudied in this regard. We expand upon existing work to propose a systems perspective of computer-supported health and well-being services in order to improve mental health and well-being of low resource older adults. We conclude with open questions for future work.

Conceptualizing Organizational Policy in Principle and Practice

Recent large-scale changes prompted by the U.S. Affordable Care Act (ACA) have required many healthcare organizations to implement new information technology (IT) platforms as a means to effectively manage and adhere to the compliance mandates. In this paper I posit that policy implementation requires two types of artifacts: policy text documents dictating the federal mandates and technology tools through which people can actually perform a policy. To this point, I conceptualize policy implementation in organizations as a process of translation that constitutes both policy text and technology that are constitutively entangled. In the study, I observe how management translates a federally initiated policy into organizational policies and subsequently designs a new technology to support compliance with those policies. Taken together, the findings illustrate how technology and policy artifacts are shaped through communication.