|
|
|
|
|
|
|
From Articulation Work to Categorical Work |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What is the name for this work of managing the overheads and anomalies caused by multiple memberships on the one hand and multiply naturalized objects on the other? Certainly, it is invisible. Most certainly, it is methodological, in the sense of reflecting on differences between methods and techniques. At first glance, it resembles articulation work, that is, work done in real time to manage contingencies; work that gets things back on track in the face of the unexpected, that modifies action to accommodate unanticipated contingencies. Within both symbolic interactionism and the field of computer-supported cooperative work, the term articulation work has been used to talk about some forms of this invisible juggling work (Schmidt and Bannon 1992, Gerson and Star 1986). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Articulation work is richly found for instance in the work of head nurses, secretaries, homeless people, parents, and air traffic controllers, although of course all of us do articulation work to keep our work going. Modeling articulation work is one of the key challenges in the design of cooperative and complex computers and information systems. This is because real-time contingencies, or in Suchman's (1987) terms, situated actions, always change the use of any technology (for example, when the host of a talk forgets to order a computer projector, can one quickly print out and assemble a handout?) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other aspects of cooperative work concern novelty and the ways in which one person's routine may be another's emergency or anomaly (Hughes 1970), or in the words of Schmidt and Simone (1996) both the consequences and the division of labor of cooperative work. The act of cooperation is the interleaving of distributed tasks; articulation work manages the consequences of this distributed aspect of the work.
57 Schmidt and Simone note the highly complex dynamic and recursive relationship between the twomanaging articulation work can itself become articulation work and vice versa, ad infinitum. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The consequences of the distribution of work, and its different meanings in different communities, must be managed for cooperation to occur. The juggling of meanings (memberships and naturalizations), is what we term categorical work. For example, what happens when one clerk, User A, entering data into a large database does not think of abortion as a medical matter, but as a crime; while another, User B, thinks of it as a routine medical procedure? User A's definition excludes abortion from the medical database, User B's includes it. The |
|
|
|
|
|