Does distance still matter? Revisiting the CSCW fundamentals on distributed collaboration

Pernille Bjørn; Morten Esbensen; Rasmus Eskild Jensen; Stina Matthiesen

doi:10.1145/2670534

Does distance still matter? Revisiting the CSCW fundamentals on distributed collaboration

Pernille Bjørn, Morten Esbensen, Rasmus Eskild Jensen, Stina Matthiesen

Department of Computer Science

50 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Does distance still matter? Reporting on a comparative analysis of four ethnographic studies of global software development, this article analyzes the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper "Distance Matters." The results suggest that, although while common ground, collaboration readiness, and organizational management are still important aspects for distributed collaboration, the arguments concerning coupling of work and collaboration technology readiness need to be refined. We argue that in working remotely, closely coupled work tasks encourage remote workers to spend the extra effort required in articulation of work to make the collaboration function. Also we find that people in distributed software development have already made collaborative technologies part of their work, and individuals are comfortable with them; thus, collaboration technology readiness takes a different shape in this setting.

Original language	English
Article number	27
Journal	ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Volume	21
Issue number	5
ISSN	1073-0516
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/2670534
Publication status	Published - 1 Nov 2014

Keywords

Closely coupled work
Collaboration readiness
Collaboration technology readiness
Common ground
Coupling of work

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10.1145/2670534

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Does distance still matter? Revisiting the CSCW fundamentals on distributed collaboration

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Keywords

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