Melissa Mazmanian

"Our research examines how knowledge professionals use mobile email devices to get their work done and the implications of such use for their autonomy to control the location, timing, and performance of work. We found that knowledge professionals using mobile email devices to manage their communication were enacting a norm of continual connectivity and accessibility that produced a number of contradictory outcomes. Although individual use of mobile email devices offered these professionals flexibility, peace of mind, and control over interactions in the short term, it also intensified collective expectations of their availability, escalating their engagement and thus reducing their ability to disconnect from work. Choosing to use their mobile email devices to work anywhere/anytime—actions they framed as evidence of their personal autonomy—the professionals were ending up using it everywhere/all the time, thus diminishing their autonomy in practice. This autonomy paradox reflected professionals’  ongoing navigation of the tension between their interests in personal autonomy on the one hand and their professional commitment to colleagues and clients on the other. We further found that this dynamic has important unintended consequences—reaffirming and challenging workers’ sense of themselves as autonomous and responsible professionals while also collectively shifting the norms of how work is and should be performed in the contemporary workplace."

"A three-year qualitative study of the use of mobile e-mail devices in a footwear manufacturer focused on the experience of two occupational functions. Evidence suggests that congruent frames of heterogeneous communication practices enabled one group to develop communication norms that circumvented the trap of constant connectivity, while assumptions of homogeneous communication practices in the other group led to expanded accessibility and erosion of personal time. This study examines how such alternate trajectories of use emerged and discusses the key dimensions of difference between groups—identity, materiality, vulnerability, and visibility—that help account for these differences. In introducing the distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous trajectories of use and explicating how such trajectories emerge, this study offers several theoretical insights: it suggests that there is a distinction between the congruence of technological frames of reference and the content of these frames; it provides an explanation for why groups might enact mobile communication technologies in a manner that does not lead to constant connectivity; and it highlights how shared assumptions of heterogeneity relate to systems of social control."

In taking into account the ways in which material and social realms are constitutively entangled within organizations, it is rhetorically tempting to say that technologies and social structures reconfigure each other.
But what does it mean to reconfigure? How does one “figure” the other and how do we fully embrace a mutually constitutive relationship when examining fluid relations? This paper delves into these questions by exploring how physical, social, material, technological, and organizational arrangements dynamically reconfigure each other in the duration of organizational practice. Using the venue of space exploration, we present three empirical examples from an ethnographic engagement with a NASA mission orbiting an outer planet in the solar system to examine various configurations and sociomaterial relations. In this endeavor, we suggest
that theoretical and empirical traction can be gained by focusing attention on the dynamic reconfigurations between social and material realms. In so doing, we call attention to the ways in which current sociomaterial perspectives have difficulty articulating the shifting, figural, asymmetric and dynamic negotiations between people, social structures, information technologies, and representational objects. This paper contributes to current discussions of sociomaterial relations in information systems research by presenting an empirical
treatment of entangled and shifting reconfigurations and providing language for engaging with this perspective.

Constant connectivity and total availability to clients is the rule rather than the exception in many contemporary workplaces. Enabled by developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), total availability of employees is possible and presumed. Scholars have explored how new technological affordances, cultural shifts, individual personality traits, and/or the development of social expectations that reinforce norms of constant connectivity have led to this state of affairs. We argue that a key factor has been overlooked in current scholarship about stress, intensive work, and constant connectivity. That is, current economic conditions are creating a marketplace in which firms increasing sell the availability of their employees as part of the services offered by the firm. In this paper we use qualitative data to illustrate how total availability is an integral aspect of the ‘product’ offered by professional service firms and is becoming increasingly prevalent in other service industries. We conclude with a discussion of how the HCI community might address this situation as a design challenge. Drawing on the work of Goffman and Perlow, we suggest that designers attend to the ways in which organizations might maintain front stage impressions of total availability while collectively managing individual time to restrict total availability behind the scenes.

As the smartphone proliferates in American society, so too
do stories about its value and impact. In this paper we draw
on advertisements and news articles to analyze cultural discourse
about the smartphone. We highlight two common
tropes: one calling for increased technological integration,
the other urging individuals to dis-integrate the smartphone
from daily life. We examine the idealized subject positions
of these two stories and show how both simplistic tropes call
on the same overarching values to compel individuals to take
opposing actions. We then reflect on the conflicts individuals
experience in trying to align and account for their actions
in relation to multiple contradictory narratives. Finally, we
call for CHI researchers to tell and provoke more complicated
stories of technologies and their relationships with values in
conversations, publications, and future designs.

In this paper, we describe results from fieldwork conducted
at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens’
applications for food and medical assistance submitted via
an e-government system. These results suggest value
tensions that result—not from different stakeholders with
different values—but from differences among how
stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice. In the
remainder of this paper, we unpack the distinct and
conflicting interpretations or logics of three shared values—
efficiency, access, and education. In particular, we analyze
what happens when social services workers have ideas
about what it means to expand access, increase efficiency,
and educate the public that conflict with the logics
embedded in the e-government system. By distinguishing
between overarching values and specific logics, we provide
an analytic framework for exploring value tensions as
values are enacted in practice.

Electronic Medical Records promise to simultaneously
enhance coordination and provide transparency and
accountability in work process. As such, EMR are
purported to benefit both hospitals and patients. In this
paper we use grounded empirical data to explore how this
promise plays out in the everyday tasks of healthcare
providers. Building on the small body of CSCW literature
that suggests that the accounting functions of EMR are
impinging on the ability of medical personnel to coordinate
work, we draw on the theoretical lens of new
institutionalism to outline how certain institutional logics
around safety and accountability are shaping the experience
of EMR systems in situ. We suggest that the institutional
logics that currently characterize U.S. healthcare are
embedded in the EMR design itself, structuring how
institutional values such as “safety” are achieved and
evaluated. Using over one year of ethnographic research in
an obstetrical unit, we find that the institutional logics of
“safety” embedded in the EMR create negative
organizational outcomes, effectively undermining
coordination and necessitating inaccurate accounts of work.
We provide design implications to address these issues in
the current institutional environment and envision how
systems might be designed to promote alternate logics of
safety that are social, dynamic, and cast humans as expert
agents in the system.

"Abstract: Through a confluence of different disciplinary interests and trajectories, questions of the materiality of digital media and information technologies have recently come into relief. There are several different strains of work under this broad umbrella and it is valuable to distinguish between the varied concerns. This paper has two objectives. We begin by teasing apart and describing five related
ways to conceptualize the materiality of digital goods. Our goal in this is to provide a typology for delineating current streams of research and language for analysis. Next, we unpack one of these conceptions, the materiality of information representation, by first taking a historical perspective of the material consequences of representational practices. We then analyze two empirical examples that explore the role of digitization and simulation (or the materiality of digital representation) in order to shed light on how social and organizational
systems respond to, create practices around, and develop delineating logics about digitally rendered data."

Based on an 18-month qualitative study that included the creation and testing of design considerations and a prototype location-based information system (LBIS), this research provides empirical insight into the daily practices of a wide variety of individuals working to address food insecurity in one U.S. county. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that nonprofit organizations in the food assistance ecology engage in location-based information practices that could be enhanced by the design of a LBIS. Two practices that would benefit from a collaborative LBIS are 1) practices of matching in which nonprofit workers help individuals who are seeking assistance to food resources and 2) practices of distribution in which nonprofit workers help organizations access and deliver food resources to clients. In order to support such practices across organizations the cooperative design component of this research suggests that an LIBS should: support the role of intermediaries who engage in practices of matching and distribution; provide interactive mapping tools that match resources to need; enable organizations to control visibility over specific data; and document work and impact. This research further suggests that designers should explore the wide variety of spatial patterns that must align and overlap such that ecologies of nonprofit organizations might synergistically work together to address pressing social needs.

In this paper, we describe the importance of mundane tools for design practitioners in India working with Euro-American clients. Our findings are based on a 7-week ethnographic study of a design firm based in Delhi, India. We analyze some highly-valued tools and software, such as post-its, as infrastructures with both practical and symbolic functions. These infrastructures are made meaningful in the shared practices of a transnational but primarily Euro-American design community. Designers in India employ a number of strategies we call “infrastructure work” to be able to participate as designers in this mold.

Abstract As practical resources and analytical precepts," materials" have become central to the design and study of information technology. By considering how HCI has moved from material to materiality and, by implication, from practice to theory, we will examine different facets of material culture in HCI, drawing from domains just beyond it, such as craft studies, information studies and organizational studies. This workshop thus aims to bring together a range of perspectives on the materials of HCI to enrich our understanding of the design ...

In this paper, we present the results of a study of the work practices of food assistance outreach workers. We introduce the construct of service mediation, which includes the technical, social, and knowledge labor practices involved in enabling access to and use of an e-government service. We explore the service mediation activities of outreach, technological assistance, providing knowledge, and ongoing engagement. These activities bring to light how successful service relationships involve fostering a process, bridging relationships, and providing broader scaffolding. The results of our research highlight the role service mediation plays in the use of services and service technologies in information-rich organizations. This research extends previous conceptualizations of mediation by documenting how mediators support broader service processes for their clients, transform potential beneficiaries into clients, and engage in long term assistance. Therefore, this work moves beyond prior conceptualizations of mediation that concentrate solely on enabling access and use of specific technologies.

... The “appropriate” time for interaction is typically based on shared understandings and norms, which emerge from a history of recurrent engagement (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). ... The six junior associates are college graduates who are recruited after spending two years at a large ...