Book Review

Excerpt

There are many ways to read, ‘Cooperative Work and Coordinative Practices: Contributions to the Conceptual Foundations of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)’. Schmidt defines his book as a presentation of a research program, but it can also be read as a polemic for ‘traditional’ work-oriented CSCW research, as a book dealing with the history of CSCW and technological development, as a presentation of research results on cooperative work and technology use, as a textbook for CSCW courses, and in numerous other ways. It is inevitable that some sections will prove more interesting than others to the individual reader: in this review I deal with issues that I find especially compelling, which are the role of plans, a contemporary definition of work, and the role of social media in CSCW. One of the book’s central themes relates to the ongoing debate within the field of CSCW on how to understand and interpret ‘work’ for the future of our field. Schmidt’s point of view is that we need to remain focused on work-related collaboration and not get caught up in recent trends relating to more general issues such as ‘social media’. …