Groups, Adaptation, Coordination and Translation (GACT): Digital Documents and the Organizational Genome

Research agendas in different disciplines have addressed ways in which groups adapt to their environments, coordinate interactions, and translate such activities into practices which can be shared by other groups.This paper incorporates research on digital environments from a number of disciplinary perspectives, and presents an extended analogy: documentary/digital genres are like genes, and the genres that characterize a workgroup may be treated as a ‘group genotype’. It is intended to provoke discussion of a ‘common core’ for a research front that addresses the ‘organizational genome’, that is documentary elements and‘sequences’ that shape organizational practices in different sectors and contribute to organizational phenotypes.