On wednesday, 26th, the main conference started. The first talk was an invited talk by Stephen Ackroyd on “Conviviality: A System Requirement”.
At first the content seemed a little “far away” from CSCW … Stephen is a sociologist and researches economic transformation. So, in the largest part of his talk he presented how companies have been changing in the last ten years. He summarized the change in four points:
- distributed organisational design
- continous reconstruction
- strategic manoeuvring
- controlling market relations
The interesting points, bringing him back to CSCW than were that
- the emerging (company) structures do not have the properties of developed networks – there is low network density – similar to bureaucracies
- it is not management information systems (MIS) giving these constructs their flexibility (“large organizations today are electronic systems augmented by human capacities”
- it is conviviality (social networks, social networking) that gives the constructs their flexibility
He concluded that “new corporate forms are very demanding of social capabilities, and this is often overlooked”. My conclusion: Companies should invest in social networking (services) and not in management information systems (management dashboards) …