Enacting new temporal boundaries: the role of mobile phones

This paper examines how the use of mobile phones influences the temporal boundaries that people enact in order to regulate and coordinate their work and non-work activities. We investigate both the structural and interpretive aspects of socio-temporal order, so as to gain a fuller appreciation of the changes induced by the use of mobile phones. With specific reference to professionals working in traditional, physically based and hierarchically structured organizations, we found that mobile phone users are becoming more vulnerable to organizational claims and that as a result ‘the office’ is always present as professionals, because of the use of mobile phones, become available ‘anytime’. This is enabled by the characteristics of the technology itself but also by users’ own behaviour. In the paper, we discuss the properties of the emerging socio-temporal order and show how mobile phones may render the management of the social spheres in which professionals participate more challenging.     

Bridging the reality gap between the Webots simulator and e-puck robots

This work presents a set of techniques to improve the cross-compatibility between the Webots simulator and the educational e-puck mobile robot. The work is motivated by the need of a realistic simulation environment, especially designed to consider the unique challenges associated to multi-robot systems (MRS), such as the robot–robot interaction (RRI). This article starts by proposing a new Webots programming architecture that provides full control of the e-puck’s firmware. By doing so, one can easily improve the already existing e-puck’s functionalities on Webots, as well as adding new functionalities required by most MRS applications. Among the range of new possible functionalities, this article describes the successful implementation of the microphone, the speaker, and the Bluetooth for robot–robot communication. Due to the limitations of the e-puck’s Bluetooth modules, this work goes even further by bringing some insights about the Gumstix Overo COM turret and how robot–robot communication may be achieved using WiFi technology. The outcomes provided by the experiments conducted using both virtual and real e-pucks under the Webots framework open new doors for low-cost multi-robot applications.     

Knowledge transfer,translation and transformation in the work of information technology architects

ContextInformation Technology (IT) architects are the professionals responsible for designing the information systems for an organization. In order to do that, they take into account many aspects and stakeholders, including customers, software developers, the organization’s business, and its current IT infrastructure. Therefore, different aspects influence their work.ObjectiveThis paper presents results of research into how IT architects perform their work in practice and how different aspects are taken into account when an information system is developed. An understanding of IT architects’ activities allows us to better support their work. This paper extends our own previous work (Figueiredo et al., 2012) [30] by discussing aspects of knowledge management and tool support.MethodA qualitative study was conducted using semi-structured interviews for data collection and grounded theory methods (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) [5] for data analysis. Twenty-seven interviews were conducted with twenty-two interviewees from nine different companies through four cycles of data collection and analysis.ResultsCompanies divide IT architecture activities among different roles. Although these roles receive different names in different organizations, all organizations follow a similar pattern based on 3 roles: enterprise, solutions and software architects. These architects perform both the technical activities related to the IT architecture and the social activities regarding the communication and coordination with other stakeholders and among themselves. Furthermore, current tools used by IT architects lack adequate support for all these aspects.ConclusionThe activities of the different IT architects are highly interconnected and have a huge influence in the way the requirements are handled in every phase of the development of an information system. The activities of IT architects are also important for knowledge transfer, translation and transformation, since they receive from and spread information to different groups of stakeholders. We also conclude that they lack appropriate tool support, especially regarding support for their collaborative work.     

History of technology transfer at BBN

BBN's basic business since its founding has been contract consulting, research, and development. This article describes BBN's activities from 1948-1989 to transfer technology and intellectual property from its basic sponsored consulting, research, and development business into a variety of commercial and other products and services. This article was intended to give a sense of the varied technology transfer activities that took place at BBN over the better part of 40 years. Although the push to commercialize technology was certainly driven by BBN's board of directors and corporate management, many members of the technical staff also considered it extremely important that their ideas and invention be brought to market. Further, key members of the management and technical leadership teams that compromised BBN's commercial subsidiaries were often drawn from the company's professional services divisions. Finally, management always paid great attention to share in any financial benefit derived from commercial applications of their work.     

Doing ‘organizational work’: Expanding the conception of professional practice in ergonomics

Literature on ergonomic practice contains many discussions of how ergonomists should work but far less attention has been paid to how they do work and the factors that influence their practice. In an effort to improve our understanding of ergonomic practice as it occurs and how it is conditioned by broader contexts, we conducted an interview study with 21 ergonomists in Canada. We were particularly interested to understand the different kinds of activities study participants engaged in during the course of their work, the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed for facing these challenges. Findings indicate that in the course of their professional practice ergonomists engage in a variety of types of activities. This includes consulting on risk factors as well as a proactive role of fostering the application of ergonomics in organizations. The process of advocating for ergonomics brought study participants into a variety of interactions and collaborations with workplace parties in a type of activity we have called “organizational work”. In the course of doing organizational work, ergonomists utilize different strategies, including “political manoeuvring”, tailoring data collection and report presentations to clients’ concerns and ‘goal hooking’ in order to make the case for implementing ergonomics in workplaces. The article concludes with a list of “tips” for practicing ergonomists that are suggested by the analysis.     

Mobile information systems and organisational control: beyond the panopticon metaphor?

With their ubiquity, mobile information systems (IS) may be used in ways that challenge the dynamics of organisational control, forcing IS scholars to revisit the panopticon metaphor and possibly offer new conceptual tools for theorising about information technology (IT)-based organisational control. Yet little IS research has offered critical reflections on the use of the panopticon to represent the control potential of mobile IS. This study investigates whether the way mobile IS are engaged in the workplace reinforce panoptic control systems or generate other types of control logics, requiring another conceptual lens. A qualitative exploratory case study investigated a consulting company whose professionals equipped themselves with mobile IS. The study reveals the emergence of a subtle, invisible form of ‘free control’ through mobile IS. Although consultants are mobile, flexible, and autonomous, a powerful communication and information network keeps them in a position of ‘allowed subjection’. Free control is characterised by a shift in the location of authority, a time-related discipline, a deep sense of trust, and adherence to organisational norms that the professionals themselves co-construct. These characteristics, which render such control even more pernicious than panoptic arrangements, deserve more attention in further IS research.     

Career transition antecedents in the information technology area

The more organizations invest in information technology (IT), the more the concern with IT personnel management has increased, namely the hiring, training and retaining of IT professionals needed to deal with such investments. In this context, two issues related to these professionals have often been observed, namely ‘turnover’ – in which the IT professional changes job but still remains in the IT area – and ‘turnaway’ – in which the IT professional abandons the IT area and assumes a job in another area in the same organization or another, usually rising to a managerial position. This work addresses the turnaway of IT professionals in Brazil. The relevance of this research is supported by the shortage of adequately trained IT professionals to work in the productive sector in this country. Therefore, by using and adapting the extant scientific literature, research hypotheses associated with the IT professional turnaway phenomenon are developed and tested via structural equation modelling. It was then concluded that exhaustion with work in the IT area, job dissatisfaction, the need to acquire further experience to remain attractive in the job market, the need for professional growth and prior and conscious managerial capacity development for career transition are the main antecedents of the career transition of IT professionals to other functional areas.     

Understanding and measuring formal communication quality for technology implementation: A test during the anticipation stage

Successfully introducing new technologies to employees remains a critical and challenging task for managers. Practitioner and academic research points to the crucial role of formal communication in the success of technology implementation. We developed a scale for measuring formal communication quality and assessed its influence using three samples of working professionals who were anticipating new technologies at work. Informed by the coping model of user adaptation, we examined the direct and indirect effects of formal communication quality during the anticipation stage of a technology implementation project on employees’ cognitions, emotions and intention to connect with colleagues in order to prepare themselves for the new technologies. The results validate our conceptualization of formal communication as a second-order formative construct with information quality in four content areas (i.e., what, how, why and when) as the first-order dimensions. Our findings affirm the role of formal communication as a managerial influence mechanism that positively affects an employee’s preliminary evaluation of a new IT during the anticipation stage. The evaluation of the new IT triggered emotions, and the emotions in turn motivated employees to seek opinions and camaraderie from others as a means of adapting to the new IT. Our post hoc analyses illustrate the dynamic nature of the relationship among formal communication quality, beliefs, emotions and coping intentions as the implementation unfolds. Our work contributes to the literature by improving the operationalization of formal communication quality, expanding the current understanding of seeking social support and revealing new insight about the temporal dynamics of the relationships in the nomological network during the anticipation stage. The validated scale of formal communication can be a useful tool for managers who wish to evaluate the effectiveness of their communication and to assess its impact on employees’ adaptation.     

Turking in a Global Labour Market

This paper examines how working in the global labour market of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) impacts upon and is understood by two different groups of workers. To do this we report on two qualitative studies; one of US and another of Indian crowdworkers (or ‘Turkers’) that we analysed from an ethnomethodological orientation. Our data is naturalistic and comes from a variety of sources—interviews, observations and forum posts—where Turkers describe their work, and their understandings of that work and of the transnational market they work in. We compare and contrast their situations, their reflections on the marketplace and its global reach, and we take a look at their understandings of one another. Our focus is on ‘the work to making turking work’ (Martin et al. 2014). That is, the work that turkers do to organise and make sense of their work as they operate in the AMT marketplace, such that they can do so effectively. AMT is a technologically mediated marketplace—that is the distribution, completion and payment of work is done online, almost completely through the AMT platform. The design of the platform has important consequences for how Turkers experience and understand the market (including its global or transnational nature). We discuss how our findings relate to a variety of CSCW issues and provide an initial examination of how they relate to globalisation both as a mundanely experienced phenomenon and as a topic of academic interest. We finish the article by drawing on our own experiences in research and design to look at how technology can be used to intervene in a market like this to try to address imbalances in power and agency between employers and workers.     

Science studies,situatedness, and instructional design in science education: A summary and critique of the promise

Abstract

This article critically examines the claim that findings from the sociology of science (or science studies) literature may be used as benchmarks in designing authentic school science curricula. First, it argues that such instructional design claims are based on erroneous understandings of the concepts of situated learning and authenticity, which result from the historically evaluative orientation of education research. Second, it considers several specific claims about the success of designed environments from the science education literature (Roth & McGinn, 1998), and contrasts those claims with an alternative way of viewing students’ work in school science. The article concludes that science education could productively consider situated actions in school science settings as interesting and authentic phenomena in their own right, apart from measuring them against professional scientific activities.     

Attitude Toward Mobile Text Messaging: An Expectancy‐Based Perspective

Mobile text messaging is one of the world’s most popular asynchronous communication tools, but few empirical studies have examined users’ abilities and attitudes toward such technologies. The study employs 2 distinct, yet complementary, expectancy‐based constructs (i.e., self‐efficacy and locus of control) to predict anxiety and attitude valence toward mobile text messaging. Survey data collected from text messaging users show that the attitude toward text messaging behaviors can be examined through their beliefs in their competence and sense of control. Results indicate that enhancing users’ ability and their sense of personal control can further the use of future mobile text‐based applications and services. These findings suggest that future research should consider incorporating these variables into existing information technology adoption frameworks.     

绍兴轻纺集团移动信息系统的设计

移动信息系统是专门针对绍兴轻纺集团推出移动办公的信息系统。系统通过智能终端用无线通讯网络连接到业务系统,完成移动办公、移动管理等功能,根据不同的功能可以划分为电信接入层、信息交换层、业务服务层、增值服务层四个模块。     

SleepExplorer: a visualization tool to make sense of correlations between personal sleep data and contextual factors

Getting enough quality sleep is a key part of a healthy lifestyle. Many people are tracking their sleep through mobile and wearable technology, together with contextual information that may influence sleep quality, like exercise, diet, and stress. However, there is limited support to help people make sense of this wealth of data, i.e., to explore the relationship between sleep data and contextual data. We strive to bridge this gap between sleep-tracking and sense-making through the design of SleepExplorer, a web-based tool that helps individuals understand sleep quality through multi-dimensional sleep structure and explore correlations between sleep data and contextual information. Based on a two-week field study with 12 participants, this paper offers a rich understanding on how technology can support sense-making on personal sleep data: SleepExplorer organizes a flux of sleep data into sleep structure, guides sleep-tracking activities, highlights connections between sleep and contributing factors, and supports individuals in taking actions. We discuss challenges and opportunities to inform the work of researchers and designers creating data-driven health and well-being applications.     

‘Adaptive’ and ‘Cooperative’ computer systems — A challenge for sociological research

The vision of the new generation of office systems is based on the hypothesis that an automatic support system is all the more useful and acceptable, the more systems behaviour and performance are in accordance with features ofhuman behaviour. Consequently recent development activities are influenced by the paradigm of the computer as man's “cooperative assistant”. The metaphors ofassistance andcooperation illustrate some major requirements to be met by new office systems. Cooperative office systems will raise a set of new questions about the future of human work, human-machine interaction, the forms of individual control of work, the scope of action and the development of competence in the frame of AI-supported cooperative work, the relative benefits of different types of organizations, etc. With increasing autonomy of the computer in task accomplishment, research should also be concerned with the question of the limits of such a development. In AI-research and development there is much discussion of the intended performance of that new technology. Perhaps this will provide insights into, how these new machines should support numerous aspects of individual or cooperative work. But we find fewer ideas about the future ofhuman work. What will the role of thehuman actor be in future AI-supported cooperative work? What kind of work do we want to support with AI-machines? In the following article I will try to identify some questions for further sociological research activities. I will base my considerations on some theoretical aspects ofunderstanding andmeaning. Regarding identical and non-identical aspects in communication behaviour of human and machines, I will focus on some questions to be investigated. Finally some methodological problems of sociological research in the field of Artificial Intelligence will be discussed, especially the so-called “Time-Dilemma” of sociological research in technology.     

Doing ‘organizational work’: Expanding the conception of professional practice in ergonomics

Literature on ergonomic practice contains many discussions of how ergonomists should work but far less attention has been paid to how they do work and the factors that influence their practice. In an effort to improve our understanding of ergonomic practice as it occurs and how it is conditioned by broader contexts, we conducted an interview study with 21 ergonomists in Canada. We were particularly interested to understand the different kinds of activities study participants engaged in during the course of their work, the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed for facing these challenges. Findings indicate that in the course of their professional practice ergonomists engage in a variety of types of activities. This includes consulting on risk factors as well as a proactive role of fostering the application of ergonomics in organizations. The process of advocating for ergonomics brought study participants into a variety of interactions and collaborations with workplace parties in a type of activity we have called “organizational work”. In the course of doing organizational work, ergonomists utilize different strategies, including “political manoeuvring”, tailoring data collection and report presentations to clients’ concerns and ‘goal hooking’ in order to make the case for implementing ergonomics in workplaces. The article concludes with a list of “tips” for practicing ergonomists that are suggested by the analysis.     

Procurement Fraud Vulnerability: A Case Study

Abstract

In today’s digital dependent world, organizations struggle to mitigate a stealthy, well-resourced, and tenacious advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks by nefarious actors, organizations, and even nation-states with intent on gaining a foothold into an organization’s IT infrastructure. This onslaught of advanced attacks requires far more than baseline security practices. While most security professionals are APT-aware, many lack the experience, requisite skills, and the ability to integrate technology to counter APT attacks. The problem is exacerbated by a widening cybersecurity skills gap. Recent research by ISACA, the world’s largest information security professional association, reported more than 60% of applicants for entry level cybersecurity positions lack the skill and ability to perform the tasks associated with their potential new roles. Success against the APT is predicated on insight into APT attack stages and the integration of technology to enable organizational resilience; however, this is not possible in organizations do not have the workforce with the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the technical tasks related to their functional roles. This article addresses a customized response strategy executed by a skilled workforce that mitigates and even counters attacks. The strategy recommends that a coordinated response based on organization risk management policies be implemented. In addition, it requires organizational insight into their information assets, control of administrator privileges, implementation of sound network segregation architecture, and a commitment to a balanced vulnerability management program. It is critical that a further discussion occur to outline skills acquisition based on skills-based training and performance-based assessments.     

Reflection-through-performance: personal implications of documenting health behaviors for the collective

Previous work has examined how technology can support health behavior monitoring in social contexts. These tools incentivize behavior documentation through the promise of virtual rewards, rich visualizations, and improved co-management of disease. Social influence is leveraged to motivate improved behaviors through friendly competition and the sharing of emotional and informational support. Prior work has described how by documenting and sharing behaviors in these tools, people engage in performances of the self. This performance happens as users selectively determine what information to share and hide, crafting a particular portrayal of their identity. Much of the prior work in this area has examined the implications of systems that encourage people to share their behaviors with friends, family, and geographically distributed strangers. In this paper, we report upon the performative nature of behavior sharing in a system created for a different social group: the local neighborhood. We designed Community Mosaic (CM), a system with a collectivistic focus: this tool asks users to document their behaviors using photographs and text, but not for their own benefit—for the benefit of others in their community. Through a 6-week deployment of CM, we evaluated the nature of behavior sharing in this system, including participants’ motivations for sharing, the way in which this sharing happened, and the reflexive impact of sharing. Our findings highlight the performative aspects of photograph staging and textual narration and how sharing this content led participants to become more aware and evaluative of their behaviors, and led them to try to eat more healthfully. We conclude with recommendations for behavior monitoring tools, specifically examining the implications of users’ perceived audience and automated behavioral tracking on opportunities for reflection-through-performance.     

The journey as concept for digital museum design

Abstract

This article discusses The Journey as a metaphor for design and development of the app Kunstporten (Art gate) for mobile and iPod. The goal of the project was to go beyond traditional mobile guides and support young visitors' various and contiguous experiences with art. The project involved seven Norwegian art museums over the period 2012–2013. The article focuses on the choices and challenges we as museum professionals met during the design of the app. It reports on how the dialogic concept of museum communication, integrated in the metaphor of The Journey, was shaped and adjusted in the design, planning and development of modules, multimedia content and procedural structure that may support art experience as a journey. The article describes considerations undertaken by museum practitioners in processes of creating museum communication that goes across multiple mediational platforms.