Understanding Technology Appropriation in Intercultural Global Work

在全球工作中，协作技术的设计和使用之间的关系尚未得到充分研究。虽然我们知道文化背景决定了人们如何看待和使用技术，但促进跨国界协调与合作的技术似乎要求员工以兼容（如果不是相似的话）的方式使用技术。我们研究的目的是建立理论，说明人们如何在不同的文化背景下使用技术，以及使用技术的不同方式如何影响跨国界的合作。该研究的重点是与一家建筑和设计公司密切合作，对知识共享系统进行定量和定性的纵向实地研究，该公司正在10个国家的17个地点设计和部署知识共享系统。我们将采访和观察三个国家的工人使用这个新的知识共享系统的情况。在另外六个地点，我们还将使用由系统自动生成的日记、调查和数字痕迹来记录使用模式和工人对技术的态度演变。该项目将促进我们对部署协作技术用于全球使用时出现的可能性和问题的理解。它将扩展工作实践的知识，特别是那些与技术使用交织在一起的，当工人跨越国界和文化背景时，是如何融合或分化的。它还将促进我们对促进使用趋同或分歧的因素的理解，从而使理论发展成为可能，以及这些因素如何与对生产力和客户满意度的文化期望和理解的差异交织在一起。关于如何最好地组织和管理全球分布式工作，目前所知甚少。默认的做法通常是在不同的地点强加“最佳实践”，但这种做法的成功有限，因为“最佳”不一定能在不同的文化背景下翻译。我们的研究将提供指导，使组织能够在全球工作的组织和管理方面做出更有原则的决策，从而保持更高的绩效。这项工作还将有助于公众和学生认识到全球工作中的机遇和挑战。

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.