Origins of the concept of bridging
From Jsarmi
SYNTHESIS FRAMEWORK: A TABLE, A LOGIC MODEL, INCLUDE COORDINATION SPACE, TEAM COGNITION, AND TRANSACTIVE MEMORY. MORE CSCL, MORE CSCW HISTORY AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY!!!
The notion of bridging, as a relevant phenomena of study, has appeared in several areas of research in the past. From the perspective of pragmatics, bridging has been studied mostly as an inferential aspect of the practical use of language. Clarck coined the term when referring to certain types of implicature proceses (e.g., anaphora) where new information is linked to already given information as part of the collaborative process of comprehension that relates speakers and listeners. Clark’s model of grounding (Herbert Clark & Brennan, 1991) is widely used to explain how participants sustain mutual understanding in an interaction but, to our knowledge, his concept of bridging has never been used to attempt to investigate how continuity of communication is established beyond a single interaction.
Bridging has also been used in instructional science as a mechanism to scaffold conceptual change. Here, the instructor attempts to use the indigenous or alternative conceptions of a phenomena held by learners and guides them in using comparative and analogical reasoning so that learners “bridge” or reach a target conceptualization of the phenomena (e.g., Brown & Clement, 1989).
In a different context, bridging has also been used in the study of social networks and the theory of social capital to distinguish the two types of social capital (Putnam, 2002) . Bonding social capital is theorized to be produced through social networks between homogeneous groups of people, while bridging social capital emerges thanks to the linkages between socially heterogeneous groups. Bridging social capital is expected to produce the highest benefit for communities, societies, and individuals. In all cases, the dynamics of “bridging” as an interactional phenomena remain to be more thoroughly described so that the mechanisms through which bridging is achieved (communicatively, conceptually or socially) and their role in the continuity of knowledge-building collectivities can be further understood.
Research in the field of CSCW has dedicated a significant amount of attention to issues of continuity of collaborative work and the designed environments aimed at supporting it. In their call to “take CSCW seriously” Schmidt and Bannon (1992) proposed “articulation work” —the coordination of work among team members — to be the central concern of studies of joint work and argued that CSCW needed to go beyond socio-technical studies of work in order to implement design research that is better suited to support group work. In general, the problem of coordination of work has been central to CSCW (Malone & Crowston, 1990; Montoya-Weiss et al., 2001). Coordination can also be seen as the interactional work necessary to overcome the “gaps” that characterize collective activity and which, in some cases, become magnified in computer-based environments(Ishii et al., 1993). Coordination work includes temporal continuity, coordination across team members and also across organizations. CSCW research has also evolved beyond single-team collaboration systems to consider larger arrangements of collective activity such as those in multiple team configurations, and those supporting larger organizational knowledge management. In fact, the issue of group-to-group collaboration in distributed settings has become extremely important recently. Some researchers, for instance, argue that a “new class of interaction problems” emerge when collective activity is analyzed in these contexts (e.g.,Mark et al., 2003p. 101). This interaction problems all stem from the need to overcome different terminology, perspectives, and work procedures across individual, sub-teams, teams and larger collectivites very much as we have described in our problem formulation. At the moment, it is clear that support mechanisms provided at the data level (e.g., offering access to records of interactions) or at the process level (e.g., controlling workflow) might be insufficient or too rigid (Miao & Haake, 1998) unless we understand how bridging activity works. Interestingly, research on group-to-group collaboration has highlighted the importance of studying the “space between” collectivities and understanding the connections, interdependencies and gaps across groups and organizations (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2005), a goal shared with research in organizational science and knowledge management.
Research in knowledge management has also made significant recent contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of sense-making (Carlile, 2002; Thomas et al., 2001; Weick, 1996). For example, the field has recently increased its attention towards studying the development of expertise in organizational contexts and to interdisciplinary teams, boundary objects, and boundary-spanning work (Gasson, 2005; Star, 1989). The unit of analysis that is suggested by the concept of "boundary objects" is of particular interest to our approach. The concept, proposed by Star based on historical case studies of scientific work involving both professional scientists and amateurs (Star, 1989), suggests that the participants: “(1) cooperate without having good models of each other’s work; (2) successfully work together while employing different units of analysis, methods of aggregating data, and different abstractions of data; and (3) cooperate while having different goals, time horizons, and audiences to satisfy.” (p. 46). Star suggested that in the activity observed, it was the boundary objects that made cooperation possible. Boundary objects are “objects that are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites while sitting “in the middle of a group of actors with divergent viewpoints." Recent research has highlighted the intrinsically cross-functional nature of boundary objects (Carlile, 2002).
