ACM's Queue has a piece entitled
Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams:
_Decision-support systems._ The decision-support systems designed in the United States embody algorithms that fit egalitarian, democratic participation. These systems focus on the task rather than relationships, common in many other cultures. They allow for anonymous voting and weighted decision analysis and other algorithms that ignore any aspect of relationships and obligation.
The one exception is "stakeholder analysis," which surfaces the interests of the major participants. Although it does not openly acknowledge decisions on the basis of power and relationships, it reveals who the players are and what their goals are. Furthermore, in the United States, the criteria typically concern cost and benefit to the future material outcome of an organization. The criteria often are neither wisdom from history nor the preservation of long-term personal relationships central to the thinking in other cultures. And, of course, some cultures don't want the details ever to be made explicit.
This is a B+ piece, the sort I hate posting here -- too good to ignore, not good enough to rave about. They take the trouble to list several ways in which cultures can fail to mesh, and then post _the same trivial assertions we've been reading for literally decades_: its important to be clear, its a misfortune that people's characteristics aren't explicit, video will make things better. _Grrrr_
And then, late in the article, they post what should have been the topic sentence: "And, of course, some cultures don't want the details ever to be made explicit." That's right, some cultures do suffer from this problem -- human ones. (Weinberger is
required reading on this subject.)
When I was in college, there was a communally authored document circulating with remarkable comments received on student papers, and my favorite was "Reading this makes me want to come over to your house, prop your eyes open with toothpicks, and scream 'Look! Look at the text!'"
That's how this piece makes me feel -- it took real work to put this together, and there's even a lot here to think about. Their proposed reactions, however, basically amount to world-as-orkut -- "The second step to dealing successfully with multicultural teams is to find out explicitly what the cultural values are of the people you are working with." This makes me want to go over to their houses, prop their eyes open with toothpicks, and scream 'Look! Look at the community!'
1. mattw on February 3, 2004 1:47 PM writes...
You might enjoy Preserving Communication Context: Virtual Workspace and Interpersonal space in Japanese CSCW* [pdf] (context) from 1998. From the abstract:
"This paper examines the social construction of one group of technologies, systems for computer supported cooperative work (CSCW). It describes the design of CSCW in Japan, with particular attention to the influence of culture on the design process."
They use the phrase "cultural creep" which I particularly like, and reminds me of a footnote in Goffman's Behaviour in Public Places. It's from 1955. ET Hall, looking at different cultural conceptions of personal space and perceptions of time, saw that people in Latin America would touch each other a more than people do in the US, and stand closer to one another.
Goffman quoted this from Hall's paper:
"the wide automobiles made in the U.S. pose problems. People don't know where to sit."
Cultural creep. You can't make that sort of thing explicit.
* Oh, and it also describes ClearBoard, which is awesome.
Permalink to Comment2. Andrew Fiore on February 3, 2004 4:44 PM writes...
"This makes me want to go over to their houses, prop their eyes open with toothpicks, and scream ‘Look! Look at the community!’"
From the article (emphasis mine):
JUDITH S. OLSON is the Richard W. Pew professor of human computer interaction at the University of Michigan. She is a professor in the computer and information systems department of the business school and the school of information, as well as a professor of psychology. Her research focuses on how groups get their work done and how they feel about each other when they communicate over various digital media. She leads a group of researchers doing empirical studies of these phenomena using organizational simulations. She is also doing work in the field, watching real groups in corporations and in science struggle with working together at a distance. Olson has been published widely and has led various conference committees. She is on the editorial boards of several major journals and has served on a number of national panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Research Council.
Permalink to Comment3. Scott A. Golder on February 3, 2004 5:33 PM writes...
I am not quite sure what you're railing against here. It seems to me that this article presents very lucidly many of the cross-cultural issues that arise when using different communication channels.
Your problem with the article seemed to be that they made "the same trivial assertions we've been reading for literally decades." So let's address each of those assertions:
1. "its important to be clear"
My understanding is that the whole article (and the research it describes) is predicated on the idea that clarity is a problematic concept. What is clear to people in your own country/culture/community may be completely opaque or completely misunderstood by someone from another. Being able to speak another language, for example, requires more than being grammatical, it requires understanding the cultural attitudes toward what you're saying and how you're saying it. Sociolinguists call this "communicative competence;" it is a non-trivial skill to acquire when communicating cross-culturally/cross-linguistically. The point is that clarity, in either linguistic or non-linguistic cues, is never so black and white.
2. "its a misfortune that people’s characteristics aren’t explicit"
3. "video will make things better"
This is a straw man. They never said either of these things.
One of the fundamental ideas behind this work is that different interfaces for online communication selectively preserve, highlight, or elide different social cues. Depending on which particular cues are socially important to which user communities, interfaces can be helpful, disastrous, or anywhere in between. They're not saying that "video will make things better." Nothing of the sort.
With regard to the idea that the Olsons need to "Look! Look at the community!" it is only fair to point out that they do look at the community. Extensively. To wit:
Olson, J., Olson, G., and Meader, D. What mix of video and audio is useful for small groups doing remote real-time design work? Proc. CHI 1995
Bos, N., Gergle, D., Olson, J. and Olson, G. Being there versus seeing there: trust via video. CHI 2001 Extended Abstracts
These papers (and more by the Olsons) are very easy to find on citeseer or the ACM digital library.
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