Meeting 2 Notes

Co-ordinator = Eve Mitleton-Kelley

PARTICIPANTS

• Can we start by assessing the quality of the alignments between personal values and social forms (the emerging organisational forms)?
• I would also like to explore a bit more this biological necessity of physical contact that was mentioned in the last meeting. Could we have biological changes due to technology? For instance people of younger generations have developed physiological skills that are different from the ones that were developed by older generations and this may be directly related to the king of technology they were brough up and lived with. This could als be an interesting issue for the people in the ethics group.
• One aspect that we can pursue is to find out what research has been done in the effect of ICT on the users. This can be carry out in particular industries at add the structural dimension to these studies.
• Notice that we have two levels of analysis, one is the level of description and the other is the level of a framework or a theory which would allow us to do some diagnosis base on the description of the viewers.
• I think we need to ask ourselves what is ICT and what aspects of ICT are we looking at now in this discussion?

CRITICS

• Can you please expand more on the relationship between structure and organisational forms and between prescription and emergent properties? Do we know what kind of organisations we need for particular values that we wish?
• In the last meeting you were discussing the understanding and changes brought about by ICT in the work place and I think that was very valuable and narrow, could you recover that points in your present discussion? Regarding this you mentioned many negative effects of ICT on the work of people like the example of the call centres, but what about the positive aspects? Could you expand on this? And finally, what are the effects of the use of ICT in the private life of people? What are the benefits of ICT and how can we amplify the positive effects of ICT?
• I think that in terms of your topic it could be relevant to look at the unintended consequences of the design of ICT in the working place.

PARTICIPANTS

• I think that one of the positive effects of ICT is the possibility of working from home. However, this could have some negative effects as well because it is much more difficult to realise when work is over and home life begin every day.
• Another aspect of the digitalisation of society is that ICT is allowing the transference of data much quicker from point to point. As a consequence, one aspect that is changing the nature of work is that you can have far more of the creative high quality type of work in one part of the world whereas you put the least attractive work in some other part of the world. What is the implication of that if this is repeated many times for society at large? Perhaps we are creating so different societies among which the tension will be quite high.
• Another interesting aspect is how is it that new technologies are changing the practices in the office and how these changes are related with the balance between the office and home and with the co-evolution of this work with its medium. From here we can start to think in issues like transportation, health and ethics.
• I think that we are interested in exploring the co-evolution between the work in the office and the work at home in connection with other technologies and other issues such as health, transportation as ethics as we mentioned before. Also we would like to explore how the personal values of each individual are going to be affected by this and whether the new organisational work is going to put more tension and pressure on these values. 
• Co-evolution means reciprocal influences so we have to look at both the changes in the way people work and changes in ICT within an organisational context.
• I think that this relationship between home and office mediated by ICT is emerging as a key issue in this group. We may be taking about a kind of "e-office" which is integrated with people's life.

CRITICS

• Notice that the boundaries that define our work are not clearly identifiable nowadays. Even the work of the researchers is changing as well, we do not require to do much statistical analysis for instance, the user have access to the database and have different statistical packages at his/her disposal.
• If you consider a metaphor of the medieval artist where there was no difference between a space for a job, a space for home and a space for recreation and you connect that with many of the aspects you have been discussing perhaps you may see the emergence of some of the current ways of working patterns enabled by ICT.
• Can you think in the possibility of design as a way to obtain desirable ways of working through the use of ICT?
• I think that you seem to be taking a very narrow view of the word work.

PARTICIPANTS

• I think that there is a very interesting distinction between work and home. At home we are persons, we are in the full experience of being. In the office, at work, is where you are a slice of yourself. This provides us with a definition of work here. The definition of work is the slicing of the person; somehow you put a dimension to the person whereas it was a-dimensional. What work is doing, as many other things, is dividing the self. With this in mind, perhaps our concern on this group is how ICT is affecting this slicing? I think that nowadays the boundaries between the slice at work and the person are becoming blurred and they are not so precise than they were in the past.