droberts@ai.mit.edu (David Robertson) (05/16/91)
In the organizational literature, there are lots of definitions of "group":
Homans: a group has common goals, psychological awareness of the group, and face
to face meetings.
Schein: pretty much the same as Homans' definition, except he relaxes the "face to
face" part, and replaces it with a more general notion of interaction.
Others have similar definitions.
My question is what defines an "electronic group." Sproull differentiated "pure" electronic
groups (e.g. groups that communicate only electronically) from electronically supported
groups (which have some face to face communication).
Does anyone know of good literature in this area?
My take on this is that groups form to do carry out a set of tasks (as defined by the
"common goals"), and use the technology available that they know how to use (if they
don't know how to use it, it doesn't matter whether it's available). An interesting
question is, given a set of communication media available (select from a set which
includes {email, telephone, face to face, fax, ...}), what tasks will that group, in
general, be good at solving and not good at solving. Thoughts?
-Dave Robertsonmjr@well.sf.ca.us (Matthew Rapaport) (05/19/91)
I don't know about a definition specifically, but most of the "hard" research on electronic work groups has been done in the late 70's through the mid 80's by Murray Turoff and Roxanne Star Hiltz of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Together they must have 20+ papers out on the subject. Should be easy to find most of them in any decent university library. If you can't find *any*, let me know and I'll send some more specific references... matthew rapaport mjr@well.sf.ca.us