Abstract
This chapter identifies a class of worksites characterizable in terms of participants’ ongoing orientation to problems of space and time, involving the deployment of people and equipment across distances according either to a timetable or to the emergent requirements of a time-critical situation. To meet simultaneous requirements of mobility and control, centers of coordination must function as centers to which participants distributed in space can orient, and which at any given moment they know how to find. At the same time, to coordinate activities distributed in space and time, personnel within the site must somehow have access to the situation of co-workers in other locations. One job of technologies in such settings is to meet these requirements through the reconfiguration of relevant spatial and temporal relations. This general characterization is explored through ethnographic materials from an investigation of the work of airline ground operations at a metropolitan airport on the west coast of the United States.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Atkinson, M., & Heritage, J. (Eds.). (1984). Structures of social action. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Barley, S. (1986). Technology as an occasion for structuring: Evidence from observations of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31, 78–108.
Blomberg, J. (1987). Social interaction and office communication: Effects on user’s evaluation of new technologies. In R. Kraut (Ed.), Technology and the transformation of white collar work (pp. 195–210). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bowers, J. (1994). The work to make a network work. In R. Furuta & C. Neuwirth (Eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 287–298). New York: ACM Press.
Brun-Cottan, F. (1991). Talk in the workplace: Occupational relevance. Research on Language in Social Interaction, 24, 277–295.
Brun-Cottan, F., Forbes, K., Goodwin, C., Goodwin, M., Jordan, B., Suchman, L., & Trigg, R. (1991). The workplace project: Designing for diversity and change (Videotape). Palo Alto, CA: Xerox Research Center.
Clark, A., & Fujimura, J. (Eds.). (1992). The right tools for the job: At work in Twentieth-Century life sciences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dugdale, A., & Fujimura, J. (Eds.). (In prep). Making sex, fabricating bodies: Gender and the construction of knowledge in the biomedical sciences.
Filippi, G., & Theureau, J. (1993). Analyzing cooperative work in an urban traffic control room for the design of a coordination support system. In G. Michelis, C. Simone, & K. Schmidt (Eds.), Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 171–186). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Forsythe, D. (1993). Engineering knowledge: The construction of knowledge in artificial intelligence. Social Studies of Science, 23, 445–77.
Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical actions. In J. McKinney & E. Tiryakian (Eds.), Theoretical Sociology (pp. 337–366). New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.
Goodwin, C. (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press.
Goodwin, C. (1991). Situated literacy in the workplace. Colloquium., University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Applied Linguistics, February 21, 1991.
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633.
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. (1989). Context, activity and participation. In P. Auer & A. diLuzo, (Eds.), The contextualization of language (pp. 77–99). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Goodwin, C., & Goodwin, M. (in press). Formulating planes: Seeing as a situated activity. In Y. Engestrom & Middleton, D. (Eds.), Communication and cognition at work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, M. (1980). Processes of mutual monitoring implicated in the production of description sequences. Sociological Inquiry, 50, 303–317.
Goodwin, M. (1995). Assembling a response. In P. ten Have, & G. Psathas (Eds.), Situated order: Studies in the social organizationn of talk and embodied activities (pp. 173–186). Washington, DC: University Press of America.
Goodwin, M. (in press). Announcements in their environment: Prosody within a multi-activity work setting. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & M. Selting (Eds.), Prosody in conversation: Interactional studies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Harper, R., & Hughes, J. (1993). “What a F-ing System! Send ‘em all to the same place and then expect us to stop ‘em hitting”: Making technology work in air traffic control. In G. Button (Ed.), Technology in working order: Studies in work, interaction and technology (pp. 127–144). London: Routledge.
Harper, R., Hughes, L, Randall, D., Shapiro, D., & Sharrock, W. (in press). Ordering the skies: Sociology, CSCW, and air traffic control. London: Routledge.
Hartland, J. (1993). The use of “intelligent” machines for electrocardiograph interpretation. In G. Button (Ed.), Technology in working order: Studies in work, interaction and technology (pp. 55–80). London: Routledge.
Heath, C. (1986). Body movement and speech in medical interaction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Heath, C., Jirotka, M., Luff, P., & Hindmarsh, J. (1994). Unpacking collaboration: The interactional organization of trading in a city dealing room. Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW, 3(2), 147–165.
Heath, C., & Luff, P. (1992). Collaboration and control: Crisis management and multimedia technology in London Undergound line control rooms. Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 7(1), 69–94.
Heath, C., & Luff, P. (1993). Disembodied conduct: Interactional asymmetries in video-mediated communication. In G. Button (Ed.), Technology in working order: Studies in work, interaction and technology (pp. 35–54). London: Routledge.
Hutchins, E. (1990). The technology of team navigation. In J. Gallagher, R. Kraut, & C. Egido (Eds.), Intellectual teamwork (pp. 191–220). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hutchins, E. (1991). The social organization of distributed cognition. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Le vine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 283–307). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Jordan, B. (1990). Teamwork in an airlines operations room: A skills scenario. In Identifying and describing the skills required by work (pp. A5–A7). Report of The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.
Jordan, B. (1992a). Birth in four cultures: A crosscultural investigation of childbirth in Yucatan, Holland, Sweden and the United States (4th expanded edition, revised by Robbie Davis-Floyd.) Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Jordan, B. (1992b). New research methods for looking at productivity in knowledge- intensive organizations. In H. V. D. Parunak (Eds.), Productivity in knowledge- intensive organizations: Integrating the physical, social, and informational environments (pp. 194–216). Ann Arbor, MI: Industrial Technology Institute.
Jordan, B. (1992c). Technology and social interaction: Notes on the achievement of authoritative knowledge in complex settings (IRL Technical Report No. IRL92 – 0027). Palo Alto, CA: Institute for Research on Learning.
Knorr-Cetina, K., & Mulkay, M. (1983). Science observed. London: Sage.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (1990). Drawing things together. In M. Lynch & S. Woolgar (Eds.), Representation in scientific practice (pp. 19–68). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Luff, P., & Heath, C. (1993). System use and social organization: Observations on human-computer interaction in an architectural practice. In G. Button (Ed.), Technology in working order: Studies in work, interaction and technology (pp. 184–210). London: Routledge.
Lynch, M., Livingston, E., & Garfinkel, H. (1983). Temporal order in laboratory work. In K. Knorr-Cetina & M. Mulkay (Eds.), Science observed (pp. 205–238). London: Sage.
Lynch, M., & Woolgar, S. (Eds.). (1990). Representation in scientific practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Orr, J. (1990). Talking about machines: An ethnography of a modern job. Doctoral Dissertation, Cornell University. (PARC Technical Report SSL-91–07 [P91–00132]). Palo Alto, CA: Xerox PARC.
Pickering, A. (Ed.) (1992). Science as practice and culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schegloff, M. (1972). Notes on a conversational practice: Formulating place. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 75–119). New York: Free Press.
Sharrock, W., & Anderson, B. (1993). Working towards agreement. In G. Button (Ed.), Technology in working order: Studies in work, interaction and technology (pp. 149–161). London: Routledge.
Star, S. L. (1989). Regions of the mind: Brain research and the quest for scientific certainty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1994). Steps towards an ecology of infrastructure. In R. Furuta & C. Neuwirth (Eds.), Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 253–264). New York: ACM Press.
Suchman, L. (1983). Office procedures as practical action: Models of work and system design. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 7(4), 320–328.
Suchman, L. (1987). Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communication. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, L. (1993). Technologies of accountability. In G. Button (Ed.), Technology in working order: Studies of work, interaction and technology (pp. 113–126). London: Routledge.
Suchman, L. (in press). Constituting shared workspaces. In Y. Engestrom & D. Middleton (Eds.), Communication and cognition at work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, L., & Trigg, R. (1991). Understanding practice: Video as a medium for reflection and design. In J. Greenbaum & M. Kyng (Eds.), Design at work: Cooperative design of computer systems (pp. 65–89). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Suchman, L., & Trigg, R. (1993). Artificial intelligence as craftwork. In S. Chaiklin & J. Lave (Eds.), Understanding Practice (pp. 144–178). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Suchman, L., & Whalen, J. (1994, November). Standardizing local events and localizing standard forms. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Social Studies of Science, New Orleans, LA.
Traweek, S. (1988). Beamtimes and lifetimes: The world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Whalen, J. (1992). Technology and the coordination of human activity: Computer- aided dispatch in public safety communications. (Unpublished report). Eugene, OR: University of Oregon, Department of Sociology.
Whalen, J. (1993, August). Accounting for “standard” task performance in the execution of 9–1–1 operations. Paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, Miami, FL.
Whalen, M., & Zimmerman, D. (1990). Describing trouble: Practical epistemology in citizen calls to the police. Language in Society, 19, 465–492.
Yates, J. (1989). Control through communication: The rise of system in American management. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Suchman, L. (1997). Centers of Coordination: A Case and Some Themes. In: Resnick, L.B., Säljö, R., Pontecorvo, C., Burge, B. (eds) Discourse, Tools and Reasoning. NATO ASI Series, vol 160. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03362-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03362-3_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-08337-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-03362-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive