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WTO has an active portfolio of projects exploring the intersection between work, technology, and organization. Projects generally feature concern for work, mainly in technical settings, and consider the organizational issues implicated at the intersection of work and technology. Our bias is toward field-based research in which we employ ethnographic approaches to understanding work practice in situ. In some cases, we use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate phenomena of interest.
Our research projects actively involve students at all levels (Ph.D., Masters, and Undergraduate) and often include our research partners from industry as investigators. As we engage with new students and partners, our projects evolve in unanticipated and exciting directions.
Most of our projects are supported with generous funding from external agencies such as the National Science Foundation and from industry sponsors.
Culture & Work Practices
(2007-current)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds
Students: Carol Xu, Tania Laden
Work is increasingly conducted in teams of people spread around the globe. For example, products are designed around the world and used by people world-wide. We are interested in how people who are working in global teams reconcile regional differences in needs and requirements and create global products. We are also conducting studies focusing on the relationship between national culture and context and work practices that have emerged.
Robots & Teams
(2006-current)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds
Our goal in this project is to explore the ways people will work with and adapt to autonomous mobile robots, to understand the possibilities and problems of mutual adaptation in human-robot interaction over time, and to anticipate changes in the group dynamics of collaborative work. We are examining how the presence of a robot affects the development of shared mental models, transactive memory, cohesion, and commitment in robot-assisted groups. We are also exploring how a robot's expertise relative to the group affects group performance.
Cross-Cultural Responses to Technology
(2005-current)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds and Vanessa Evers (University of Amsterdam)
Students: Talia Brodecki, Henrietta Cramer, and Heidy Maldonado
In this project, we are studying cultural differences in peoples' responses to technology based on the belief that fundamental differences in cultural beliefs, values and behaviors affect how people respond to particular instantiations of technology. We are currently most interested in how people interact with and respond to intelligent agents, such as robots. The key themes that we are focusing on are choice, autonomy, and in-group identification. To conduct this work, we rely heavily on theory and methods from cross-cultural psychology.
Transformation Of Engineering Design: Digitization And Global Distribution Of Engineering Work
(2004 - 2008)
Faculty: Diane Bailey and Stephen Barley
Students: Vishal Arya, Will Barley, Jan Chong, Daisy Chung, Yosem Companys, Ingrid Erickson, Aamir Farooq, Alex Gurevich, Paul Leonardi
Funding: National Science Foundation IIS - 0427173 (ITR award)
Corporate Research Partner: General Motors
This project investigates how information technologies that employ sophisticated mathematical techniques are reshaping technical work through a process that we call intensification of abstraction. The intensification of abstraction centers on the replacement of the physical by the virtual: the manipulation of symbols that represent and substitute for objects. We investigate the impact of this process in the context of automotive engineering design. Specifically, we study the way in which tools that employ techniques like finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics are bringing about changes in how engineers think about and do engineering, changes in organizational structures and processes, changes in the nature of engineering knowledge, and changes in the division of engineering labor. We also trace how these technologies alter relationships between automotive firms and their suppliers and pave the way for outsourcing engineering design and analysis.
Ethics and Nanotechnology: Mapping the Views of the NNIN Community
(2004-2007)
Faculty: Robert McGinn
Research Partner: National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network
I am engaged in studying the nanotechnology-related views about ethics held by over a thousand scientists and engineers performing nanotech R&D work at the 13 U.S. universities comprising the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network.
The Social Construction of Telecommuting
(2002-2007)
Faculty: Stephen Barley and Diane Bailey
Students: Andrew Nelson and Dana Wang
We investigate the social construction of telework by conducting a rhetorical analysis of over 3000 abstracts published on the topic since the term was first coined in the early 1970s. Our aim is to show how and why the concept of telework persisted over decades even though estimates of the number of teleworkers has always fallen far short of predictions. We find that actors could construe the concept of telework to address a variety of social and organizational problems over time, including transportation and energy concerns, working women, work and family balance, high real estate costs, and compliance with legal regulations, including the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Subgroup Dynamics, Language, & Knowledge Sharing in Global Teams
(2002-current)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds and Catherine Cramton (George Mason University)
Students: Tsedal Beyene and Aditya Johri
In previous research, we noticed that globally distributed teams often developed an "us" vs. "them" dynamic across sites. Although they are structured as interdependent work teams, distributed, technology-enabled teams frequently are composed of two or more collocated subgroups. The collocated subgroups often reflect national identities, adding an additional layer of complexity. In this work, we identify factors likely to promote and mitigate fracturing between subgroups and consider the impact of subgroup formation on task effectiveness. From our studies, we are also gaining insight into the challenges of a lingua franca in these teams and into the value of site visits.
This project involved a two-year study of collaboration in twelve internationally distributed software development teams. Data collection activities included ethnographic interviews with team members and managers, on-site observation of teams, and team performance assessments. In 189 semi-structured interviews, we explored how team members thought about their team and their experiences in the team. We also conducted twelve person weeks of "concurrent observation" of six of the distributed teams in our study. Concurrent observation of a team distributed between Germany and India, for example, meant that one member of our research team observed during a week in Germany while another member observed members of the same team located in India. Approximately one year after the observations, we also conducted a second round of on-site data collection (including team meetings and selected interviews) to get a sense of how the dynamics on these teams evolved, to ask questions about issues gleaned from our initial analysis, and to get a measure of team performance at a second point in time.
We are currently writing papers on language challenges, cross-national learning, the enduring role of site visits, and influence dynamics.
Publications:
- Cramton, C. & Hinds, P. (2005). Subgroup dynamics in internationally distributed teams: Ethnocentrism or cross-national learning? Research in Organizational Behavior, 26, 231-263.
Robots at Work
(2001-current)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds and David Wettergreen (Carnegie Mellon)
Students: Justin Chung, Hank Jones, Taemie Kim, Yuechuan She, Rosanne Siino, Kristen Stubbs
How do humans develop an understanding of a world in which humans and robotic assistants are interacting and coordinating work together? The work environment raises certain issues, such as teamwork and productivity, which are less evident in non-work settings. In this series of studies, we examine social and organizational issues such as autonomy and responsibility for outcomes, worker satisfaction, and coordination across workers. To study how robotic assistants will interact with people in the work environment, we have explored the mental models that workers develop of robotic assistants and of the social system in which the robotic assistant functions. We are also exploring the relationship between autonomy, disclosure and transparency, that is, when robots are more autonomous, how is transparency achieved? What is the role of self-disclosure (e.g. about its decision processes) by the robot?
One study examined how members of a science team used a remote rover to collect science data. The goal of this research was to gain a thorough understanding of the Life in the Atacama human-robot system through a set of systematic observations conducted simultaneously of the remote science team (in the U.S.) and the engineering team and rover in the Atacama desert in Chile. By conducting in-depth ethnographic observations, Pamela Hinds (Stanford), Kristen Stubbs (CMU), and David Wettergreen (CMU) developed a better understanding of the mental model scientists had of the rover, what capabilities they attributed to the rover, what contributed to errors and confusion when commanding the rover, and how the scientists interpreted data provided by the rover. Through these observations, we make recommendations for improvements to the human-robot system including the scientist-robot interface and the rover itself.
We also conducted a study of the HelpMate robot deployed in hospitals. Our goal was to better understand how workers make sense of a robotic assistant, how these robots are integrated into the work environment, and how they affect the work practices of the hospital workers. We conducted an ethnographic "before-and-after" comparison of processes and structures; that is, observations began when the technology was first purchased but had not yet been delivered and continued as the technology was integrated into the setting. One paper from this data focuses on how different groups within the hospital made sense of the robot differently and considers how these differences contribute to conflicts around the use and acceptance of the technology.
Publications:
- Hinds, P., Roberts, T., & Jones, H. (2004). Whose job is it anyway? A study of human-robot interaction on a collaborative task. Human Computer Interaction, 19, 151-181.
- Kim, T. & Hinds, P. (2006). Who should I blame? The effects of autonomy and transparency on attributions in human-robot interaction. Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Hertfordshire, England.
- Siino, R. & Hinds, P. (2005). Robots, gender & sensemaking: Sex segregation's impact on workers making sense of a mobile autonomous robot. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, Spain.
- Siino, R. & Hinds, P. (2004). Making sense of new technology as a lead-in to structuring: The case of an autonomous mobile robot. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, New Orleans, OCIS E1-E6.
- Jones, H. & Hinds, P. (2002). Extreme work groups: Using SWAT teams as a model for coordinating distributed robots. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). New York: ACM Press, 372-381.
The Effects of Communication Technologies on Availability
Faculty: Stephen Barley and Debra Meyerson (Education)
Student: Stine Grodal
Over the last several decades, people have become increasingly concerned about their inability to manage the boundary between work and family. During the same period of time the number of communication technologies that people employ have expanded to include email, voicemail, chat rooms, video conferencing and internet messaging. Some people argue that these new technologies enable us to juggle the demands on our lives more effectively. Others claim that they are intrusive and are blurring the boundary between home and work. Yet, few researchers have studied how these new communication technologies are affecting our availability and our notions of what it means to be accessible. Using data collected from communication logs, interviews and observations, this study examines how communications technologies affect the boundaries between work and the remainder of our lives and how they shape our sense of what it means to be accessible.
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