Inaugural lecture

In January 2008 Kjeld Schmidt came to Copenhagen Business School from the IT University of Copenhagen. He brings to CBS his knowledge of the research area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in which he has been playing a key role for the last 20 years, partly as Editor-in- Chief of the CSCW Journal. His research primarily focuses on the theory of cooperative work and the conceptual foundations of CSCW systems design.

In CSCW, ethnographic investigations and other kinds of in-depth studies of actual work practices in complex work settings are conducted for the purpose of contributing to the development of new coordination technologies: computational artifacts that practitioners can use to regulate their interdependent activities.

Drawing on his studies in work domains such as industrial production, architectural design, and health care, Professor Kjeld Schmidt will discuss some of the key conceptual and methodological issues in this line of socio-technical research:

• How can we conceive of cooperative work so as to make it a researchable problem?

• How can we independently identify coordinative practices?

• How can we conceive of causal constructs such as computational artifacts in relation to coordinative practices?