Editorial Review:
Technological advances and changes in the global economy are increasing the geographic distribution of work in industries as diverse as banking, wine production, and clothing design. Many workers communicate regularly with distant coworkers; some monitor and manipulate tools and objects at a distance. Work teams are spread across different cities or countries. Joint ventures and multiorganizational projects entail work in many locations. Two famous examples--the Hudson Bay Company's seventeenth-century fur trading empire and the electronic community that created the original Linux computer operating system--suggest that distributed work arrangements can be flexible, innovative, and highly successful. At the same time, distributed work complicates workers' professional and personal lives. Distributed work alters how people communicate and how they organize themselves and their work, and it changes the nature of employee-employer relationships.
This book takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of distributed work groups and organizations, the challenges inherent in distributed work, and ways to make distributed work more effective. Specific topics include division of labor, incentives, managing group members, facilitating interaction among distant workers, and monitoring performance. The final chapters focus on distributed work in one domain, collaborative scientific research. The contributors include psychologists, cognitive scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and computer scientists.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Face-to-Face versus On-Line Work 2002-08-06
"The Place of Face-to-Face Communication in Distributed Work"
Bonnie A. Nardi, Agilent Technologies; Steve Whittaker, AT&T Labs-ResearchThis chapter is significant. There is a wealth of knowledge and understanding that can be brought to on-line business collaboration from fields like anthropology. This is particularly important given the notable failure of many on-line collaboration efforts. What intrigues me about the work are the larger questions that emerge - what does this mean for the meaning and quality of business life, the effectiveness of on-line work, work/life balance, alienation/mental health, etc. For example, what will the quality of our ideas be like is we work more and more on-line? If we work in isolated, on-line environments how does this impact our need to "be" as social beings and learn informally with others around the coffee pot? What if the on-line "coffee pot" can never be as rich as the real thing?
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