Collaboration in the Digital Age

Collaborative work practices are being transformed through the growth of co-working in urban third spaces, makerspaces, fab labs, incubators, accelerators and digital labs. This paper is based on a 2-year project carried out by a network of academics and practitioners interested in new work practices in the collaborative economy, focusing particularly on collaborative workspaces. We concentrate on the relationships between collaboration and these new work practices according to three levels, individual, community and societal, highlighting their spatial and temporal dimensions. Our results indicate that: boundaries between waged employment and entrepreneurship are not rigid; individuals not only suffer from stress in traditional organisations but also of boredom; new collaborative practices imply rethinking their own competences and prospects, often leading to fundamental life changes; co-working communities can provide collective meaning, crucial to supporting these transformations; they can be orientated towards practice, professional identity, and emotional support to address loneliness and sense-making; public discourses about entrepreneurship and innovation and territorial policies are not clearly linked to innovative practices in collaborative spaces. We conclude that there is need for better coordination between public actors and collaborative communities which should be seen at the heart of economic, educational, industrial and cultural policies targeting the city, aiming at collaborating and sharing.

The last 10 years have seen the implementation of a new kind of collaboration software in companies that contains “social” features and is opening up new possibilities for employees to be connected (i.e. to form Enterprise Social Networks) and to exchange information, ideas and documents with each other. The introduction and adoption of this new kind of software is challenging and requires changes both in the company culture and in the ways that people work together. In this chapter, I present the findings from a longitudinal research project on the implementation and adoption of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). Over the last three years, my research team has accompanied a group of (mostly large) German-speaking companies in their introduction of an integrated, large-scale, socially-enabled ECS. We observed that the introduction of such a system is substantially different from other large-scale software systems (e.g. ERP Systems) due to their malleable nature and their need to be shaped through use. The social features that the latest generation of collaboration software embodies, require employees to develop new skills and forces organisations to develop new capabilities to successfully manage the required change. Our analysis of the collected research data (from interviews, workshops and questionnaires) revealed six archetypes of ECS use. Three of them focus on people and the support of information and knowledge management. The other three are primarily concerned with the support of specific business processes. The archetypes provide us with a useful lens to think about the aims and objectives of collaboration projects and represent the current state of ECS use in an organisation.

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have made inroads into many workplaces demonstrating their usefulness for enabling collaboration, information sharing and new forms of knowledge work. Yet, at the same time many organisations have fallen short of reaping such benefits since ESN, as malleable technologies, require a form of bottom-up sense-making for appropriate use cases and work practices to form and emerge. This runs counter to established, usually top-down implementation techniques. As a result, a new role has been established in many organisations to look after ESN implementation, that of the community manager. As a middle management role, community managers face challenges of mediating between management expectations and worker wants and needs, in addition to looking after the emerging ESN community. In this paper we study an inter-organisational ESN platform that offers a place for community managers from different organisations to engage in collaborative work to come to grips with their role and devise strategies for successful ESN adoption and use in their respective organisations. By employing Ervin Goffman’s theatre lens, we come to understand this ESN as a backstage channel that allows community managers to ‘share secrets’ and foster ‘collegiality’ as a way to cope with the demands of their role. We provide practical implications for stakeholders involved in malleable technology implementation and outline future research directions.

People working in teams must maintain awareness of each other’s activities in order to coordinate their activities and improve team performance. Members of virtual teams find it difficult to develop cohesively because members are unable to directly observe each other. In this paper, we report the results of a case study in which we explored how distributed team members used computer mediated communication to maintain awareness of each other’s activities. The consequences of providing awareness of one’s activities went beyond improving coordination and had effects on connectedness and social motivation. Based on these results, we hypothesized that awareness would have a significant impact on social motivation through feelings of connectedness. This was confirmed via a laboratory experiment. Thus, organizations that implement computer mediated communication technologies are advised to consider the social motivation effects of their use. Designers and users of mediated communication technology are similarly advised to consider latent social motivation effects that might occur in organizational teams as a result of their use in practices for maintaining awareness.

Virtual collaboration involves the performance of joint work activities by individuals who are in different geographic locations. In this essay, I argue that that there is significant unseen and unaccounted for effort required to perform work in virtual collaboration. The notions of organizational discontinuity theory (ODT) and articulation work are employed to develop this argument and uncover the invisible work in virtual collaboration. I hypothesize that, while often perceived as unremarkable, this hidden work increases the complexity of collaboration activities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of potential consequences and future research directions.

In this chapter, we offer a performative, praxeological account of a protracted attempt by a UK social housing organisation to cultivate and institutionalise a distinctive kind of coaching culture. Drawing on in-depth, longitudinal fieldwork, we describe the organisation’s efforts to nurture a coaching style of management, which marked a significant departure from the more conventional directive style that foreshadowed it. In so doing, we highlight four important practices (connecting, presencing, nurturing and committing) that formed the bedrock of this new coaching style, and we examine the ways in which these practices helped re-shape broader cultural practices within the organisation. Our analysis draws particular attention to the distinctive ‘felt’ effects of this style of management, and to their role in a broader affective structuration of organisational life.

The advent of big data analytics is creating new opportunities for the reuse of personal health data which are economically and socially desirable. Yet the way the reuse of personal data is organized impacts not only the types of benefits but also the way those benefits are distributed among subjects, holders and consumers of data and society in general. This paper analyses and compares three dominant approaches to organizing personal data reuse reported in the literature: healthcare system-centric, for-profit data-driven, and individual-centric. This analysis reveals a challenge of existing approaches: they do not guarantee that data subjects have a say over how their personal data is reused while at the same time ensuring that data consumers see value in reusing that data. This chapter suggest that an emergent organizational form that addresses this challenge is that of data cooperatives (DCs). DCs represent a new logic of cooperation of data subjects who voluntary pool their personal data and participate in the governance of its reuse. To illustrate the working of DCs, this chapter conducts a case study of a DC in healthcare.

Airbnb and Uber are two outstanding examples of the sharing economy, a recently observed tendency that people are willing to share their property or to rent property instead of owning it. There is a vast literature on the prospects of the sharing economy and on the economics of platforms, which enable the sharing economy. Less research is found on the reasons for this development and on the question whether these new types of transactions require new governance frameworks. In this paper we will show, what explains the individual ownership decision and how changing preferences and changing transaction costs may lead to the sharing economy. Platforms play a crucial role in lowering the transaction costs, but they come along with new dependencies because they tend to become monopolies over time. Thus, platforms may start to exploit their dominant position at the expense of platform users. We will show that the—up to now purely fictitious—idea of a platform operated as a cooperative, i.e. a platform that is owned by its users, would significantly mitigate the users’ exploitability and reduce their dependency costs. We will distinguish different types of platform cooperatives and we will classify them according to applicability in the sharing economy.

This paper addresses collaboration and digitization as two omnipresent phenomena in the specific context of large project business (LPB). In order to understand the necessary change processes, we first give deeper insights into the characteristics of LPB and the drivers due to which collaboration has become a key issue in this industry. Subsequently, we analyze the joint effect that collaboration and digitization have on the LPB business model. Contrary to common misperceptions claiming these trends to be relevant only for B2C industries, we show that there are just as strong and fast consequences in the B2B sector, especially in LPB.

The Beer Living Lab was the first of a series of living labs established to analyse and improve complex cross-border trade and logistics challenges using innovative information technology. Unlike stable inter-firm networks where roles are formal and explicit, role taking and role assigning in the Beer Living Lab was highly dynamic. Although project deliverables were formally assigned, in practice responsibilities emerged as a result of actors’ own initiative or as a result of negotiation and sense-making. Even leadership behaviour shifted throughout the various stages of the initiative. The practice of knowledge broking and cultivating a close working relationship with the operational manager emerged as crucial for creating and sustaining the social network which in turn stabilised the hybrid network organisation. We discover (yet again) the key practices of knowledge brokers and the necessity for social involvement in overcoming discontinuities within organisation networks.

Infrastructure is widely regarded merely as a material (lifeless) system that brings together the activities of diverse practices. In contrast to this view, we propose that when infrastructure provides a site where practices are held at once both near and apart, life under the influence of these practices is ‘lived to the full’. We call the resultant whole ‘living infrastructure’ to denote that it is both infrastructure for living and infrastructure that ‘lives’. The key idea is that a living infrastructure becomes the site where an opening between certain regions of life, which share some concern, happens. We will argue that such infrastructure is an on-going achievement of becoming, which requires nurturing and vigilance to maintain its continued productivity: otherwise it will cease to ‘live’. We present an empirical case from the German healthcare environment—the Federal Unified Medication Plan for medication therapy safety. We argue in detail that this is a nascent living infrastructure providing a site where a productive opening ‘happens’ between multiple practices involved in medication therapy safety. We analyse this ‘happening’ to establish how this opening took hold, how it was kept open, and how it was kept productive.

Consumer search behaviour is a central process in the functioning of markets because it determines how customers find and evaluate information about competing suppliers and therefore determines to a large extent buying behaviour. A review of the empirical evidence of search behaviour based on the theoretical constructs of consideration set and time is used as the basis for evaluating competing theories from Information Systems, economics, decision-making theory and marketing that seek to explain and predict consumer search patterns. A multi-disciplinary bricolage search model is proposed that incorporates elements from previous theories but differs from established theory by acknowledging that search may best be described as rummaging to build an information mosaic and therefore appears more random than was previously thought. A bricolage model may help explain a range of different search behaviours, for example iterative and sometimes seemingly chaotic search patterns, narrow search behaviour, haphazard search behaviour, heuristic approaches and relatively small amounts of attention paid on evaluating different options. The theoretical and managerial implications of the ideas are outlined, which indicate areas for further research.

The rise of e-commerce and lately m-commerce, and the ongoing digitization have a significant impact on traditional high street retailers, who often are not able to match the prices, variety of products, and services provided online. To prevent the looming decline of high streets, retailers need to catch up and start to engage the new digital customer. This article illuminates the interplay of diverse, digital interfaces, resources and actors in the co-creation of value in high street retail. Alliances and a digital platform ecosystem are presented as forms of cooperation, where retailers join forces to provide digital touchpoints and boundary-spanning service to the customer, and also actively use customer-generated data to improve their service and strengthen the overall attractiveness of their high streets. We tell a tale of two cities—Burnsley and Beckinsdale—set in the not so distant future, where retailers have taken very different approaches to respond to the digital age.