The relationship between the design and use of collaborative technologies for global work is understudied. Although we know that cultural contexts shape how people perceive and use technologies, technologies that facilitate coordination and collaboration across national boundaries seem to demand that workers use the technologies in compatible, if not similar ways. The goal of our study is to build theory of how people appropriate a technology in different cultural contexts and how different ways of appropriating a technology affect collaboration across national boundaries.
The research pivots on a quantitative and qualitative longitudinal field study of a knowledge sharing system in close collaboration with an architecture and design firm that is designing and deploying a knowledge sharing system across 17 locations in 10 countries. We will interview and observe workers in three countries as they use this new knowledge sharing system. In six additional locations we will also use diaries, surveys and digital traces automatically generated by the system to document usage patterns and workers' evolving attitudes toward and appropriation of the technology. The project will advance our understanding of the possibilities and problems that arise when deploying collaboration technology for global use. It will extend knowledge of how work practices, particularly those intertwined with technology use, converge or diverge when workers span national boundaries and cultural contexts. It will also advance our understanding of and, therefore, enable theory development about the factors that promote convergence or divergence of use and how these are interwoven with differences in cultural expectations about and understandings of productivity and client satisfaction.
Little is currently known about how to best structure and manage globally distributed work. The default has generally been to impose "best practices" across locations, but this has met with limited success because "best" does not necessarily translate across cultural contexts. Our research will provide guidance so that organizations can make more principled decisions regarding the organization and management of global work and, as a result, sustain higher performance. This work will also contribute to public and student awareness of the opportunities and challenges in global work.
