Wendy Mackay documents Xerox EuroPARC's now-defunct experiments with embedded social software, in which easily-available multimedia connections were spread through both the public and private areas of the workspace.

The goal was to foster casual workplace social connections by creating a sense of shared presence and making audio-visual communication easy.  However, while they may have intended to break down existing social barriers, the system continued to reflect the real-world social roles and hierarchies of the group.  Long-time users tended to have more access to others' private spaces than new ones; administrative assistants used the system very differently from the researchers; members' real-world networks of trust affected how much they trusted information this system gave.

While the focus of the paper is on the technical and interface details of their system, I'm always interested to see more of this kind of research about how real-world roles and rules carry over into the technological arena.