Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Issues and Implications for Workers, Organizations, and Human Resource Management

Citation

Lin, A. (2002), "Computer Supported Cooperative Work: Issues and Implications for Workers, Organizations, and Human Resource Management", Information Technology & People, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 269-270. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2002.15.3.269.1

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a research domain, which examines ways of designing systems – people and computer systems – that can have significant implications for the way in which people work together. Although the domain initially emerged from the discipline of computer science it can be argued that the CSCW research domain differs from traditional computer science in that it draws on the contributions of various disciplines including psychology, sociology, organisational management, and anthropology, all of which support the aim of developing computer systems on the basis of people and their working relationships. Since the first CSCW workshop was held in 1984, CSCW, as a research domain, can be considered to have reached some state of maturity.

Coovert and Thompson’s book on Computer Supported Cooperative Work was written with the aim of providing an introduction to CSCW and discussing its implications for organisations, managers and employees who perform various types of collaborative work. The book contains six chapters, including: overview of CSCW, computer support, cooperative work, CSCW now and later, human resource management in a CSCW environment and concluding remarks. The titles of the chapters are self‐explanatory as they reflect the purpose of the chapters.

At the beginning of each chapter some special terms are listed and defined. This is useful for readers who may not be familiar either with the topics or even with information and communication technologies (ICTs). Coovert and Thompson were right to divide computer‐supported and cooperative work into two separate chapters, since it is too often that the discussion overemphasizes one side and fails to provide an overall scope for the topic (CSCW). The discussions presented in the chapters are brief and indeed can be argued to be a little too brief.

This book was published in 2001, 15 years after the first official CSCW conference took place, but its contents and discussions of CSCW somehow fail to reflect the development of the field over the last decade. Coovert and Thompson introduce the topic as if it is a newly‐developed research domain still searching for its identity. The major weakness of the book is that its discussions on CSCW are too broad and partial and many established in‐depth studies related to CSCW concerning organisational behaviour[1] and human resource management have been excluded. Although the book claims that it focuses on the impact of CSCW on human resource management, in Chapter Five (Human Resource Management in a CSCW Environment) the authors fail to use empirical studies to portray the real picture of the way in which CSCW facilitates and affects work in the workplace and make use instead of a fictional case study to describe human resource management in a CSCW environment. The danger of doing so is that a convincing case may not be made to the readers about the current development of CSCW within organisations and the possible roles of CSCW at the workplace.

The book is rather a disappointment, as it fails to provide in‐depth discussion of the issues which it sets out to discuss, and does not make a convincing case as to the future direction of CSCW in human resource management. Most importantly, the book has failed to provide an up‐to‐date overview of current concerns about CSCW in the workplace.

Note

1. 1.

   1. The book is part of Advanced Topics in Organizational Behaviour series.