Page 235 - Culture Technology Communication

218 Lorna Heaton

active participants. Cooperative design, supporting users in their
daily work, and looking at work as situated in a specific context are
common themes. British work is fairly equally distributed among
case studies, conceptual and technical articles, while the volume and
variety of work done in North America makes it very difficult to clas-
sify; all tendencies are represented, from high-tech video-intensive
environments, to ethnographic studies of implementation and use,
to theoretical models of coordination.
The question remains: how can we explain that designers, who
have similar technical knowledge and professional backgrounds,
choose to explore different issues or questions, and, what is more,
appear to answer them in different ways? This is all the more aston-
ishing given the fact that they identify themselves as members of
the same research community and are in regular contact with de-
signers from various countries and institutions. Clearly differences
between communities of practice alone cannot explain these differ-
ences in orientation. Grudin (1991a, 1991b) has outlined a number
of partial explanations including institutional support, funding,
even cultural norms; others have applied an actor-network approach
to analyze the political and cultural regimes in which design is em-
bedded in specific cases (Gärtner and Wagner 1994; Hakken 1994).
Here, we seek an explanation for regional differences in CSCW not
in institutional variables, nor in strictly professional ones, but at a
mid-level between micro and macro—in culture, which is both an in-
dividual attribute and a collective phenomenon. Field research pro-
vides concrete illustrations of the importance of culture as a variable
in the technology design process.

On Culture

While Japanese CSCW design is the focus of this paper, this should
not be taken to imply simply a discussion of national culture. As
will become clear in the discussion of our cases, organizational and
professional cultures are also vital elements in the mix. First, how-
ever, some background and clarification of what we mean by culture
is in order.
The movement to distinguish between national cultures finds
its roots in social anthropology of the thirties and forties. More re-
cently, forces in the real world have heightened awareness of the im-
portance of the cultural factor and a number of studies on work
organization and work attitudes have consistently demonstrated