Community-based interpretive schemes: exploring the use of cyber meetings within a global organization

Abstract

This paper explores the challenges of adopting a MOO-based technology to support a virtual working environment spanning several geographically dispersed units of a global organization. We use community-based interpretive schemes as an analytic lens for identifying assumptions and expectations about technology use and genres of communication, and for examining how these shaped participants' distributed interaction over time. We found differences in interpretive schemes across sites, nationalities, languages and roles, as well as over time. These interpretive differences help to explain the difficulties in appropriation of the technology and the limited development of shared genre norms. In addition, they offer some reasons for why the use of the virtual work environment was halted after two years.