Seminar: Kjeld Schmidt
Join this seminar on the grammar of coordination, exploring how workers use inscriptions and artifacts to coordinate distributed activities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the talk examines how formatted documents and their circulation enable effective coordination across complex work settings.
The Grammar of Coordination: Inscriptions, Artifacts, and Work
Abstract
The talk will invite participants to explore an ongoing long-term research effort focused on a comparative analysis of specialized techniques that workers use to coordinate their distributed activities. Drawing on examples from a rich body of fieldwork, the talk presents the central analytical focus: how formatted inscriptions and collections of inscriptions are used in recurring ways to support coordination. In particular, the analysis highlights how artifacts with specific spatial arrangements of marks, as well as their movement and circulation across the work setting, play a key role in enabling effective coordination.andemics, climate shocks, geopolitical instability, and technological disruption.
Brief Biography
Kjeld Schmidt was trained as both a programmer and a sociologist. He holds the degree dr.scient.soc. and is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Organization at CBS, as well as Senior Professor at the University of Siegen. He has been involved in CSCW research since the mid-1980s and has, in that context, conducted conceptual studies driven by issues emerging from a wide range of ethnographic investigations of coordinative practices. These studies span domains such as portfolio management, trade union administration, steel production, electrical cable production, maritime propulsion fabrication, architecture, oncology, and cardiology. He is currently engaged, together with Ina Wagner, in a comparative analysis of coordinative practices based on this corpus of studies. Schmidt has served as Editor-in-Chief of the CSCW Journal since 1992.