November 8-11, 1997
Workshop Info

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Workshop on Advances in Organizational and Social Informatics

Principal Investigator: Rob Kling
Co-PI: Howard Rosenbaum

A workshop on "Advances in Organizational and Social Informatics" will be held at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana between November 8-11, 1997. There are three objectives for this workshop, the most important of which is the articulation of emerging interdisciplinary research domains, called organizational informatics and social informatics, that focus on the social dimensions of the integration of computerization and networked information into social and organizational life, including the roles of information technologies in social and organizational change. Organizational informatics is a subarea of social informatics. Findings and theories belong to organizational informatics when they can be characterized in terms of the participants of organizations. Using this criterion, scholars' and researchers' understandings of the adoption, use, and impacts of groupware fall well within organizational informatics. In contrast, the Internet is used by millions of people outside of their worklives, and the character and consequences of the public's use of the Internet is a topic outside of organizational informatics, but within social informatics.

The NSF has funded some of the important research in both organizational informatics and social informatics a complete bibliography would be quite large and well beyond the scope of this brief proposal. The workshop will bring together scholars and researchers from several different disciplines, including information science, sociology, communications, information systems, social psychology, computer science, and anthropology for two days of intensive interaction, the goal of which will be to frame a report that will more sharply characterize organizational and social informatics, better identify the state of knowledge, and outline a set of research issues that could constitute effective and plausible advances in both organizational and social informatics.

This page prepared by V. Weiley
Last update: 10.29.97
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