Joacim Jeppesen: Bottom-up stabilization: The development and use of artifacts in a dynamic organization. - Master Thesis in Danish [Stabilisering fra neden: Udvikling og brugen af artefakter i en dynamisk organisation], IT University of Copenhagen, 2003.- Download thesis.
The starting point of this thesis is the argument that CSCW researchers have largely abandoned the study of cooperative activities in dynamic organisations. Considering that a large amount of cooperative work is, and will be conducted within such dynamic settings this abandonment might not be a fruitful future approach for the field. The thesis presents an empirical study of the development and use of two artifacts within an organisation, which is characterised by a loosely coupled and dynamic organisational structure. The study clearly shows how these artifacts are developed, used, and modified by the actors to meet their existing needs, especially in relation to articulating their cooperative activities. I argue that the artifacts thereby constitute a bottom-up stabilisation process of the cooperative activities in which they are deployed, as well as the organisational setting. In the last part of the thesis the findings are transformed into key challenges to the development of supportive computational artifacts for such dynamic settings. They amount to: The ability to support cooperative work activities; the possibility of being developed and instantiated by the cooperating actors themselves to support their particular needs; be flexible in the sense that they can, on a continuous basis, be configured and re-aligned with the changes in the organisational setting and needs of the actors.