To inform the design of groupware technologies such as those for cooperative buildings, we investigated the work habits of teams that collaborate in dedicated project rooms. We conducted field work that included interviews of teams in 9 U.S. companies who had dedicated project rooms and a 6 week observation of one site. In our study, team members using dedicated project rooms reported clear adv...

Empowerment is an important and desirable state for employees within business enterprises around the world. Yet, the pursuit of empowerment across national boundaries may vary due to innate diferences within cultures. This may be particularly true with respect to choice of technologies for achieving empowerment. Using an interpretive field study of Fellows within the Japanese MITI and U.S. Depa...

Movement time in Fitts’ law is usually considered through the ambiguous notion of the average of minimum movement times. In this paper, we argue that using two distinct metrics, one relating to minimum time and the other relating to average time can be advantageous. Both metrics have a lot of support from theoretical and empirical perspectives. We also give two examples, one in a controlled exp...

Chiropractic is a popular health care choice in Australia and yet major gaps in our empirical understanding of this area of practice remain. Furthermore, while some research excellence exists, a largely uncoordinated approach to research activity and development has in effect led to silos of interest and a lack of strategic 'big-picture' planning essential to producing a sustainable research cu...

Based on an exploratory, on-going field study we suggest in this paper a conceptual, two dimensional framework for the classification of projects and systems, and show how this framework can be used to distinguish among management styles and practices for various types of engineering projects. The paper provides empirical evidence of the differences found among various kinds of projects and sug...

Fieldwork, including site inspection, sample collection and, in most programmes, some on-site analysis, determines to a large extent the quality of information obtained and represents a significant proportion of the total cost of a cyanobacteria or cyanotoxin monitoring programme. A well-designed and implemented fieldwork programme enhances the quality of the data obtained and may assist greatl...

Group Support Systems (GSS) technology is still in the early stages of its diffusion process. There are several thousand GSS installations worldwide, and that number is growing, but GSS have not yet achieved a mass market. It may be that studying adoption and diffusion of GSS within a single organization could yield insights that would help speed the process elsewhere. This paper presents an 18...

Social movements need to coordinate their political activities. They are often characterized by a fragile organization structure and sparse personnel, financial, and technical resources. In this paper we describe how a transnational networks of social activists, the European Social Forum (ESF), uses a central mailing list as a major communication tool. By means of a long-term field study, we an...

Although a common organizational intervention, research investigating the impact of compensation system implementation on employee outcomes is limited. As one type of intervention, job evaluation usually includes substantial employee participation in order to improve employee pay satisfaction. This assumption, however, is rarely validated. To address this weakness, the present study examines, i...