From: kling@ics.uci.edu (Rob Kling)
Subject: Near Futures of email ... book review
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Date: 8 Jan 93 22:24:44 GMT



                               Review of

                              Connections:
           New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization.
             Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. MIT Press, 1991

              Reviewed by Rob Kling[*,**] and Lisa Covi[*]

            Department of Information and Computer Science*
                                  and
                         Center for Research on
               Information Technology and Organizations**
                   University of California, Irvine.
                            Irvine, Ca 92717

                        Draft 4 -- January 1993

To appear: The Information Society, 9(1) (Jan-Feb 1993).

=========================================
Electronic mail (email) use is one of the important emergent
phenomena of computerization. Email capabilities have often been
treated as minor additions to computer systems with more social
roles. Yet many professional and managers have found them to be
the most important capabilities of their computer systems (Bullen
and Bennett, 1991, Ladner, 1992). There is a small body of
systematic research about the ways that email use can alter
social relations. But it has been relatively unknown to many
professionals and managers who have significant interests in or
responsibilities for these technologies.

A book like Connections is long overdue. Lee Sproull and Sara
Kiesler, along with Tora Bikson, Roxanne Hiltz, Robert Kraut,
Lynne Markus, and Ron Rice are among the pioneers who have been
studying how social behavior is altered when people and
organizations depend upon electronic media for business
communication.

Connections examines how the use of email and computer
conferencing within organizations alters social relationships.
The book is usefully modest in scope, and is aimed primarily at a
professional audience. Sproull and Kiesler focus on behavior
inside organizations rather than upon the numerous forms of
electronic media, including public access systems such as
Compuserve, community bulletin boards, or the Internet. Even so,
readers who are interested in social behavior on these public
access networks can find new insights in Connections.

Sproull and Kiesler provide a sophisticated understanding of how
managing people using email differs from managers' often vague
expectations of "increased productivity."  They argue that email
doesn't just substitute one communication means for another, but
has far more significant social effects. Email increases people's
connections within and outside their organizations. It transforms
the social relationships between people who connect
electronically rather than just face to face not only by
increasing the ease and frequency of interaction, but also
democratizing group discussion.

The window into a highly-connected environment this book provides
is important for people less well-versed in the technology to
help avoid common embarrassment such as sending "private"
messages that may be printed on public printers by any recipient,
inadvertently responding to all members of a list instead of to
the sender, and adopting inappropriate personas in public forums.
The book's ethnographic content is unique among email texts.

The first two chapters are devoted to describing how email
creates an immediate "first-level effect" of increasing
efficiency by reducing the costs of sharing information, and
accelerating and regularizing information flow.  The real news in
their argument is contained in their description of "second-level
effects" in which electronic communication alters attention,
contact, interdependence, roles and information exchange.

The authors support their theses through engaging examples of
group coordination and behavior cues in real copies of email and
systematic studies.  During the last 10 years, they have
developed an important program of empirical research on the ways
that groups use electronic media, and the consequences of this
use. They organize their research by building on a 40 year
tradition of experimental work on small group behavior carried
out by social psychologists. The results of Sproull, Kiesler and
their colleagues extends that tradition to give useful insights
into these newer forms of electronic group work.

For example, small group researchers have found that groups are
much more likely to make riskier decisions than the individual
members would have if they acted alone. Sproull and Kiesler's
experiments build on this theme to examine whether groups which
communicate over electronic media make decisions that are more
conservative or riskier than groups in face-to-face meetings.
Kiesler and Sproull marshal interesting evidence to show that
electronic groups often behave differently than face-to-face
groups, even when they work on similar tasks.  Electronic groups
are less dominated by the amount of talk generated by the higher
status participants. But participants get less ongoing feedback
in body language, and consequently, they engage in less
conventional behavior. Participants are sometimes much less
polite with each other, and take much more extreme positions. The
authors report that small electronic groups can take from 4-10
times as long as face-to-face groups to develop a consensus.  The
decisions were often riskier, but participants trusted them as
much as they did the more conventional decisions made in face-to-
face groups.

A key element is Sproull and Kiesler's argument that electronic
media "lack" the social cues which regulate interpersonal
behavior. When people communicate with electronic media, they
have more trouble imagining what others are feeling because they
don't see nods or grimaces, or hear murmurs of approval or grunts
of dismay in the middle of their sentences. Further, they argue
that electronic communicants do not see symbols of the social
status of a meetings' participants, and consequently are less
constrained by them. We find this argument interesting, but not
completely convincing. Blank paper provides no more social cues
than do computer screens. But people often embellish paper and
screens with clues about their status and orientations. In
addition, experienced email users often embellish their messages
with some crude signifiers of emotions (sigh, grin). Further, as
a discussion continues, people learn about other's perceptions.
Also, one of the reasons electronic meeting may take longer than
face to face meetings is because many people can talk faster than
they can type. It is more accurate to say that people who
communicate with text-based email or paper are likely to have
fewer social cues about each other's social position and
reactions than do people who communicate face-to-face. Kiesler
and Sproull do a superb job of helping us understand the way that
reduced social cues alter the behavior of groups and their
decisions. (The reader who is interested in more recent research
on this theme should see Lynne Markus' article.)

The exploration of cues can prove useful in educating people who
find that the traditional cues of their position are absent in
their email interaction.  Novices or people who only occasionally
use email can use "Connections" to avoid the pitfalls of creating
negative cues through Sproull and Kiesler's observations in
chapter 5.  For example, by illustrating the ephemerality of the
medium, the authors induce people who are concerned about their
status to be more conscious of the way the message "looks" and
how its image is entwined with what it is trying to say.  This is
particularly important for those who have assistants handle their
correspondence.

In modern organizations, people use many means to communicate,
including face-to-face, memos, telephone, and email. Each of
these offers different possibilities for developing a position,
learning how others feel, and obtaining other cues. Often,
participants who have on-going relationships will use two or more
of these media. Kiesler and Sproull open the question about how
groups that use many or all of these media behave in contrast
with those that rely only upon the convention non-digital media.
They propose four principles to create an optimal environment for
a networked organization: view people as people instead of users,
provide open access to people and information, offer diverse
forums for people to interact, and promote information exchange
through policies and incentives.  Connections outlines key policy
and infrastructure choices in a way that can be understood by
both systems managers and upper managers.

Connections pulses with a lyrical enthusiasm for new
communication technologies while periodically pausing to give
readers helpful cautionary insights. Sproull and Kiesler are
generally promoters of electronic communication. Their enthusiasm
guides their emphasis upon some topics at the expense of others.
For example, while they emphasize the ways that electronic media
facilitate new social contacts, they lightly touch on the ways
that professionals and managers in organizations which depend
heavily upon email can collect 30 or more messages a day, and
spend hours responding to those that do require responses or
attention. Further, a professional or manager in such an
organization can return from a 7 day trip to find an enticing
platter of 300 messages filling his electronic mailbox.

It is worth mentioning a few key gaps in the book.  First,
Connections doesn't pay much attention to the issues of
information overload, privacy, misinformation, system breakdowns,
the distribution of competencies, and technical risks, even
though some of these are mentioned. This is a pathbreaking book
that shows how the use of email can be studied empirically and
conceptualized. But there is much important work for followon
studies. These missing topics can be of considerable consequence
in organizational life. For example, organizations may use mail
systems very differently when either mail systems are common and
seamless or mail systems vary from one division to another, and
many messages are lost, delayed or garbled when crossing the mail
system boundaries.

The book also ignores some possibly important elements of system
designs. For example, chapters 1, 5, and 7 examine communication
via distribution lists. However, the authors don't mention that
distribution lists can load one's mailbox with numerous
relatively unimportant messages.  There are alternative
communication architectures, such as bulletin boards, which don't
automatically add messages to one's in-box. But they require
efforts to access, and messages can disappear from the centrally
stored bulletin board before very casual readers scan them. This
architectural difference, with resulting differences in style of
information management, probably plays a key role in how many
electronic groups one can participate in, either seriously or
very casually.

Similarly, Connections doesn't examine issues of long term
information management with electronic communication. When key
communications are in electronic form, people often try to
archive them, and can build collections of hundreds or thousands
of message files. Unfortunately, many of today's email systems
don't provide good tools for managing such archives. It should
not surprise us that organizations that adopt electronic systems
with high quality archiving and search capabilities may behave
differently than those in which managing electronic communication
is a timeconsuming nuisance.

Last, Connections focusses on the groups that use email for
meetings and other work. In many organizations, only a fraction
of people use email routinely. Email connects some people much
more effectively than others, and can reshape the communication
infrastructure of social systems. When and how do people's more
and less active participation in email use alter the way that
whole organizations behave? For some organizational members,
routine email use by others disconnects them from significant
aspects of organizational life. This is an important topic that
would  require a different form of study. It again indicates a
kind of topic which reading this book inspired us to consider
more carefully.


As a collection, the topics listed above are less amenable to the
kinds of experimental studies which form the evidentiary core of
Connections. But they illustrate the range of issues which can
shape the way that organizational participants use email systems,
and consequently, the way that organizational practices hinge of
key details of systems in use, not just generic system features.
For example, the default editor for the mail system used by a
major US bank is a crude line-editor. The clumsiness of the
editor discourages people from sending messages more than a few
lines in length. Message length could be influenced by other
considerations, since many people want to send and receive only
short messages. And there can be costs for people who have to
read numerous long messages. But in this case, it seems that the
limitations of a specific mail system, rather than overwork or
collective preferences for short messages favors electronic
communication via brief notes. And brief notes favor some
"connections" more than others. Brief notes may also be cryptic
and thus foster miscommunication. Bullen and Bennett (1991)
reported that participants in their study almost universaly
valued email, even when the systems were clumsy. But followon
research could examine whether certain kinds of system
constraints alter the forms of commuication and the resulting
social value of email.

These gaps indicate how Connections opens up possibilities for a
rich array of systematic empirical research about the way that
email systems influence organizational behavior. But the
professional reader will find a sufficient number of cues and
clues about these matters to find the book to be an invaluable
resource now. The book is especially important to help bring the
dynamics of electronic group communication to the attention of
practicing managers. Most managers that we know who are
interested in email are preoccupied with basic and important
operational questions about access patterns, gateways, pricing,
system maintenance, security practices and archiving. They
haven't yet given much attention to how their human organizations
may change after they get the mail to flow smoothly, and everyone
to depend upon it for numerous routine communications.

Scholars  who wish to follow up these topics will find rich ideas
and data in Connections. The bibliography is also superb for a
professional book. But it is a bit too selective for scholars who
want to delve more deeply into electronic communication in
organizations. Key citations to important studies of electronic
communication media use by other prolific scholars are missing
from the references.

Connections concludes with a chapter to help managers start up
computer networks inside their own organizations. But Connections
is not a simple technologically utopian tract. Sproull and
Kiesler's analyses make practical recommendations on strengths nd
pitfalls of the electronic communication in various
circumstances. Connections is a pioneering book that every
manager or professional who is interested in the use of
electronic communication must read. And it's a provocative book
for scholars as well. The new and inexpensive paperback edition
makes the book easily accessible to virtually anyone with a
serious interest in email and organizational life.

References


Bullen, Christine and John Bennett. 1991.  Groupware in Practice:
     An Interpretation of Work Experience" in Dunlop, Charles and
     and Rob Kling (Ed). 1991. Computerization and Controversy:
     Value Conflicts and Social Choices. Boston: Academic Press.

Ladner, Sharyn and Hope Tillman. 1992. "How Special Librarians
     Really Use the Internet: Summary of Findings and
     Implications for  the Library of the Future" Canadian
     Library Journal, 49(3), 211-216.

Markus, Lynne "Electronic Mail as a Medium of Managerial Choice"
     (Organizational Science (forthcoming).