8 Reach, Bracket, and the Limits of Rationalized Coordination: Some Challenges for CSCW

protocols thus permit many different sorts of systems to coordinate in ways that were previously impractical. For example, nobody ever actually wrote software to tie information about any hotel’s room inventory to every airline’s flight schedules. Yet every hotel now can do this. This same abstraction and generality also mean that many previously difficult local problems can now be solved easily. At the airport, for example, it is now much easier (in principle) for drivers and passengers to meet reliably despite bad weather, flight delays, traffic jams, and not knowing one another. Drivers and arriving passengers can now exchange photos and detailed directions for meeting via cell phone as passengers disembark. These abstract protocols can be combined fairly easily to create applications (i.e., brackets) that did not exist before. This increase in standardized mix-and-match capacity means that people can come up with new arrangements that work across organizational boundaries, without the prior approval or even knowledge of their managements. Moreover, their innovations aren’t confined to a single organization; often, new arrangements readily become available to everyone. This can have unexpected consequences on a large scale, as when the increased reach created this way forces changes on an entire industry. The clearest example of this to date is the emergence of peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing and its effect on the music recording industry. For the most part, the new brackets enabled by protocols depend on the same computing innovations that are giving rise to increasing reach. Instead of relying on the close integration of local circumstances, as articulation arrangements have traditionally done, they tend to be abstract and standardized. They also tend to rely on metawork rather than local articulation work. But the local articulation work must still be done. 8.5 Local Articulation and the Limits of Rationalization It’s often difficult to rationalize (or even change) some local arrangements. Local problems are typically solved opportunistically. Casual improvisation over time becomes entrenched as local conventions, which are typically organized around the skills and tastes of particular people. As a result, local articulation arrangements are typically fine-tuned to particular situations and are dependent upon particular individuals and circumstances. Over time, new arrangements are added, each making use of idiosyncratic local conventions and further entrenching them. For this Reach, Bracket, and the Limits of Rationalized Coordination 203 reason, local arrangements can be extremely effective, but it can be very difficult to understand or modify them.3 Local circumstances always have complexities that cannot be captured in a formal system, no matter how elaborate or forgiving it is. Hence, even as brackets are built to support local articulation work, there is always some articulation work beyond their reach. Well-designed information systems can help with these problems, but they can’t eliminate them. That is: You can’t build a repair kit that can anticipate all possible failures, and even if you could, you can’t guarantee that it won’t break just when it’s needed. An important challenge for CSCW then is understanding the nature of these limits. The difficulties of doing so are greatly exacerbated by increasing reach, which forces a significant change in the notion of “local.” Traditionally, “local” referred to a particular organizational and/or geographic setting. With increasing reach, however, it is now necessary to consider the joint performance of single activities or workflows as “local” even though cooperating participants might be geographically and/or organizationally distributed. That is, “local articulation” (including “task-local” as well as “place-local” and “office-local”) should refer to all the activities that require attention if a given task is to be carried out properly. Increasing reach means that colleagues may be interacting in different times of their daily cycles, or in different climates, or with different cultures, or under different organizational policies or even legal systems. Moreover, they will be supported by different administrative services: computing, food, security, medical, janitorial, etc. Indeed, these local contexts might be changing as participants move between office and home, or from office to limousine to airport to plane and back. With “local” more complicated than it used to be, analyzing and supporting articulation work has acquired new contingencies. Can brackets to support local articulation be built? What limits are there on doing so? In order to deal with these issues, it’s necessary to refine the idea of local articulation work. Analytically, local articulation is really several different kinds of problem. I’ll discuss two of them here: customization, which accommodates the particular and local to the general and global; and reconciliation, which accommodates the demands of different local stakeholders. 3 Becker (1982) provides a sociological analysis of entrenched practices. The philosophical foundations are discussed by Wimsatt (1986, 2001).