The Emergence of Conventions Within Processes of Integrated Organization and Technology Development

Organizational environments today are characterized by differentiation and dynamics. To handle these environments successfully, organizations have to adapt their products, work processes and work practices permanently. Within these processes of organizational adaptation, the introduction of groupware can play an important role as an enabler for product innovation as well as a catalyzer for organizational change of existing work processes and work practices. In both of these cases, the introduction of groupware will lead to a change in the division of labour, to a modification of the mechanisms for coordination and a change in the individual work practice. But even if groupware is not introduced to support organizational adaptation in handling environmental differentiation and dynamics, its introduction will challenge existing patterns of cooperation. Though the processes of organizational change following the introduction of groupware have not yet been sufficiently discussed within the CSCW community, there exist some case studies, which support this assumption by indicating how work processes and work practice have changed after introducing a networked application (cf. Rodgers 1994, Orlikowski 1995). In this paper we want to focus on how conventions as specific type of mechanisms for coordination are established in processes of organizational change following the introduction of groupware.