Work, Locales and Distributed Social Worlds

Efforts to build systems to support the complex social reality of cooperative work need both a grounding in the social i.e., a rich abstract basis for understanding work, and a bridging link between the social and the technical to provide new insights into how to approach designing systems based on this understanding. We propose Anselm Strauss’ (1993) Theory of Action as a candidate from which to evolve a framework to ground an understanding of work. Insights from Strauss’ work on the importance of structural conditions for social world (cooperative ensemble) interactions can help us to view support systems in a new role as setting/locale for cooperative work interaction, thus providing a bridge between the social and the technical. We briefly overview a locales-based environment called WORLDS we are building concurrent with our theoretical exploration.