Understanding Technology Appropriation in Intercultural Global Work

了解跨文化全球工作中的技术挪用

• 批准号: 1219869
• 负责人: Pamela Hinds
• 金额: $ 40万
• 依托单位: Stanford University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2018-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1219869&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Understanding; Technology; Appropriation; Intercultural; Global

The relationship between the design and use of collaborative technologies for global work is understudied. Although we know that cultural contexts shape how people perceive and use technologies, technologies that facilitate coordination and collaboration across national boundaries seem to demand that workers use the technologies in compatible, if not similar ways. The goal of our study is to build theory of how people appropriate a technology in different cultural contexts and how different ways of appropriating a technology affect collaboration across national boundaries. The research pivots on a quantitative and qualitative longitudinal field study of a knowledge sharing system in close collaboration with an architecture and design firm that is designing and deploying a knowledge sharing system across 17 locations in 10 countries. We will interview and observe workers in three countries as they use this new knowledge sharing system. In six additional locations we will also use diaries, surveys and digital traces automatically generated by the system to document usage patterns and workers' evolving attitudes toward and appropriation of the technology. The project will advance our understanding of the possibilities and problems that arise when deploying collaboration technology for global use. It will extend knowledge of how work practices, particularly those intertwined with technology use, converge or diverge when workers span national boundaries and cultural contexts. It will also advance our understanding of and, therefore, enable theory development about the factors that promote convergence or divergence of use and how these are interwoven with differences in cultural expectations about and understandings of productivity and client satisfaction. Little is currently known about how to best structure and manage globally distributed work. The default has generally been to impose "best practices" across locations, but this has met with limited success because "best" does not necessarily translate across cultural contexts. Our research will provide guidance so that organizations can make more principled decisions regarding the organization and management of global work and, as a result, sustain higher performance. This work will also contribute to public and student awareness of the opportunities and challenges in global work.

设计和使用协作技术在全球工作中的关系进行了研究。 尽管我们知道文化背景会影响人们如何感知和使用技术，但促进跨民族边界协调和协作的技术似乎要求工人以兼容的方式使用这些技术，即使不是相似的方式。我们研究的目的是建立理论，即人们如何在不同的文化背景下适合技术，以及采用技术的不同方式如何影响跨民族边界的协作。该研究对知识共享系统的定​​量和定性纵向领域研究进行了关注，该研究与一家建筑和设计公司密切合作，该公司正在设计和部署10个国家 /地区17个地点的知识共享系统。我们将在三个国家使用这种新知识共享系统时采访并观察工人。在其他六个位置，我们还将使用系统自动生成的日记，调查和数字痕迹来记录使用模式以及工人对技术的不断发展的态度。该项目将促进我们对部署协作技术以供全球使用时出现的可能性和问题的理解。 它将扩展了解工作实践，尤其是那些与技术使用，融合或分歧交织的工作实践的知识，当工人跨越了国家边界和文化背景时。 这也将提高我们对促进使用或使用差异的因素以及如何与生产力和客户满意度的文化期望和理解之间的差异与这些因素以及如何交织在一起的因素的理论发展。目前，关于如何最好地结构和管理全球分布式工作知之甚少。违约通常是在整个地方强加“最佳实践”，但这取得了有限的成功，因为“最佳”不一定会在文化背景下转化。 我们的研究将提供指导，以便组织可以就全球工作的组织和管理做出更有原则的决策，从而维持更高的绩效。 这项工作还将有助于公众和学生对全球工作的机遇和挑战的认识。