Cooperative work

Although a considerable body of knowledge regarding cooperative work already exists, agreement on the subject is hard to find. The wide range of views concerning cooperative work make it an interesting subject to review though.

Cooperative, collaborative, collective, coordinated, or group work?

According to Bannon et. al. [1991], terms like cooperative work, collaborative work, collective work, and group work are not well established in the CSCW community. They present a variety of viewpoints which are meant to explain the differences between these phrases. For example, one might perceive all work as essentially cooperative because it depends upon others for its succesful performance. This would make the addition of the adjective cooperative to the noun work rather useless. From another perspective the term cooperative work is said to be an inappropriate label for the realities of everyday work situations. The phrase collective work would be more appropriate.

The expression coordinated work is a flag that does more than cover the cargo I want to describe. Coordination is defined by Malone [1990] as

a body of principles about how activities can be coordinated, that is, about how actors can work together harmoniously.

To collaborate is to work together or with someone else, whereas to cooperate is to work or act together for a shared purpose (Sørgaard [1987], discussion on comp.groupware, 20 may - 23 may 1994). This distinction is essential, and will return in the discussion on computer support for cooperative work. Still you may frequently come across the phrase collaborative in this work, used in the context of Computer Supported Collaborative Writing.

Apparently, replacing the term cooperative work with that of group work does not help much. Although examples of groups include interaction among workers, the term group is often used to designate any kind of social interaction. Besides, judged by McGrath's circumplex model of group task types, group work is not always cooperative.

Citing Bannon et. al. [1991],

cooperative work is the general and neutral designation of multiple persons working together to produce a product or service.

Characteristics of cooperative work

Cooperation exists in a working environment because it is merely technically necessary, economically beneficial or required in an educational setting. Sørgaard [1987] states a number of criteria for a work situation to be cooperative. They are complemented with remarks from Bannon et. al. [1991].

• Cooperative work is found where individuals work together due to the nature of their task. The group task must be cooperative in nature. Regarding group tasks, McGrath [1984] has combined the work of others into a typology of tasks, a circumplex model of group task types.
• People involved in cooperative work share the same goals, part of which is the fulfilment of their shared task. Therefore cooperative work is clearly non-competitive. Moreover, all individuals share the same responsibilities with regard to the outcome of the work process.
• Cooperative work is done in an informal, normally flat organisation. The work is usually performed in small groups, typically project groups. The group members make extensive use of horizontal communication. The boundaries of cooperative work are not necessarily congruent with the boundaries of formal organisations; indeed, a cooperative work process may involve partners at different sites.
• Horizontal communication may take place in indirect as well as direct and either distributed or non-distributed modes of interaction. A non-distributed manner of interacting can be called collective, but due to what I have stated earlier regarding collective work I stick to the former term.
• Cooperative work is relatively autonomous. External influences on work tasks (e.g. external planning and control) reduce the cooperative nature of the work. However, this does not mean that cooperative work is not planned or rather premeditated. Recall my earlier remark on coordinated work which emphasizes this aspect. Division of work is normally present, but will be established within the group. Distribution of the tasks is typically flexible and does not imply a particular degree of participation each worker has to live up to.

Cooperative work as defined here may be hard to find as the definition applies to an ideal or prototypical situation. For example, the environment that inevitably marshals and constrains cooperative work tasks, has been knowingly and willingly left out. This way I can concentrate on describing support for a specific task, without concern for the influence of context characteristics, like organisational culture, evaluative tone (e.g., critical or supportive), and the reward structure (Nunamaker et.al. [1991]).