Organizational culture and computer-supported cooperative work in a common information space: Case processing in the criminal courts

Research has shown that CSCW systems must be aligned with an organizational culture or they may be underused or not used at all. This study focuses on the work culture of the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts and its reciprocal relationship with the CSCW systems used in a large-scale, distributed networked environment. This location is an excellent domain for the study since the actors---judges, district attorneys and public defenders---work together within a rich, organizational culture utilizing shared digital resources in the form of case management and legal research. An organizational culture perspective will be used to study the alignment of CSCW and organizational culture in this setting. Most CSCW studies concentrate on small homogeneous groups with circumscribed goals in 'real-time' settings such as decision support systems, shared text editing, or video-conferencing. An under-researched area is that of large-scale, distributed cooperative work environments where local shared knowledge is needed to interpret data from a common information space (CIS) such as a database. Previous researchers have identified problems and issues relating to the articulation of cooperative work needed for the construction, maintenance and use of a CIS. This study contributes to this area by examining empirical data in an under-researched area---moving from a paper-based CIS to a combined paper and electronic CIS. Each group in this study---judges, district attorneys, and public defenders---are characterized as an occupational community within the organizational culture of the court. The research includes the conceptualization of a computing subculture within each group's occupational community which influences the subsequent diffusion of CSCW systems. Contributions of this study include a deeper understanding of the construction, maintenance and use of a CIS in a distributed networked environment; and a theory about the way that computer systems fit with work cultures of organizations.