William C. Barley

Where should i turn: moving from individual to collaborative navigation strategies to inform the interaction design of future navigation systems

The design of in-vehicle navigation systems fails to take into account the social nature of driving and automobile navigation. In this paper, we consider navigation as a social activity among drivers and navigators to improve design of such systems. We explore the implications of moving from a map-centered, individually-focused design paradigm to one based upon collaborative human interaction during the navigation task. We conducted a qualitative interaction design study of navigation among three types of teams: parents and their teenage children, couples, and unacquainted individuals. We found that collaboration varied among these different teams, and was influenced by social role, as well as the task role of driver or navigator. We also found that patterns of prompts, maneuvers, and confirmations varied among the three teams. We identify overarching practices that differ greatly from the literature on individual navigation. From these discoveries, we present design implications that can be used to inform future navigation systems.

Anticipatory Work: How the Need to Represent Knowledge Across Boundaries Shapes Work Practices Within Them

Representations, such as graphs and images, have been shown to help facilitate communication and coordination across knowledge boundaries. Many studies examine representations’ effects during and after interaction, characterizing them as tools that help communicate local understandings with individuals who have differing knowledge. This study explores whether the anticipation of building representations to communicate across knowledge boundaries significantly shapes a community’s work. To explore this question, the study develops a theoretical framework that extends the concept of performativity and then presents ethnographic data from four weather research teams collaborating with different organizations to develop tailored forecasting technologies. Analysis reveals that researchers’ need to represent weather model outputs to their partners shaped the practices they used to produce those models. By uncovering the presence and influence of “anticipatory work,” the findings paint representations not as pas...

The work gap: a structured review of collaborative teamwork research from 2005 to 2015

ABSTRACT Celebrations of the benefits of collaborative teams have become commonplace in contemporary organizations. Scholarship on this topic remains fragmented. Scholars in different sub-fields use distinct approaches to study this phenomenon. We provide an operational definition of this concept and introduce a conceptual framework designed to facilitate integration. Next, we review research on collaborative teams published in 17 communication and management studies journals from 2005 to 2015. Our analysis reveals three dominant approaches to studying collaborative teamwork: black-boxes, interactional studies, and work-oriented studies. Articles published in communication journals emphasize the study of isolated interactions over other aspects of collaborative team work. By comparing these approaches, we show how organizational communication is positioned to contribute by broadening its scope to cross these analytic divides.