The Role of Negotiation Objects in Managing Meaning Across e-Collaboration Systems

This paper examines the ways in which negotiation objects – objects used for boundaryspanning, bridging, or brokering purposes – mediate productive breakdowns in collaboration across distributed organizational workgroups. Objects are increasingly displacing direct social relations in the mediation of distributed work. When collaboration between organizational groups is virtually-mediated, the "management of meaning" that used to be centralized in strategic managers is distributed. In collaborating around virtually-mediated knowledge objects, various groups compete to define the meanings attached to those objects, in order to define the importance and legitimacy of various forms of organizational knowledge and thus control organizational roles, structures, and processes. This study analyzes how representational, technical, and organizational resources provide a mediation of knowledge and influence between different work-groups and how different forms of negotiated mediation lead to the adaptation of the information systems that collaborating workgroups define and use in common. It examines the mediating role played by various forms of "negotiation object," to reach a new understanding of how e-collaboration systems evolve in practice.