City Research Online

Abstract

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of teamwork in a software development team, contributing to scholarship in Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Organization Studies. It emphasizes the organization’s role in cultivating a sociomaterial understanding of teamwork as an entangled, skilled practice emerging through heterogeneous relations.

Data is derived from a five-month field study of a software development team in a news organization and a corpus of teamwork technology marketing materials. The central argument is that teamwork, involving collaborative technologies, is continuously enacted in a total field of relations. Two insights inform this argument: teamwork tools overlook work’s situatedness in organizational life, serving narrow versions of productivity that detract from wider organizational relations; and they represent collaboration as discrete
nodes and actions.

The thesis attends to teamwork as an interdependent collective practice, contingent and emergent in sociomaterial relations. It reviews organizational teamwork applications, outlines a methodology for studying teamwork enacted through technology and AI, examines collectively enacted skilled practice, investigates collective presence, and analyses visions of time in marketing discourse.

The conclusion synthesizes findings, emphasizing teamwork as a dynamic, collective practice within a complex organizational context. It argues that skill emerges collectively, presence is enacted through care and engagement, and temporality encompasses dimensions conflicting with narrow, productivity-focused conceptions.

These insights challenge current AI and teamwork tool approaches, revealing their reductive, individualistic assumptions. The thesis calls for design approaches that support, rather than constrain, collaboration’s complex dynamics, respecting unmeasurable aspects and fostering collective intelligence.

This research contributes to debates on the future of work and AI in organizations, offering a critical perspective emphasizing human-centred, ethically engaged approaches to technology design and use.

Publication Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Subjects:	Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science School of Science & Technology > School of Science & Technology Doctoral Theses Doctoral Theses

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