The Rhetoric of Culture as an Act of Closure in a Cross-National Software Development Department

Global software teams work on interdependent tasks across geographies, time zones, and cultures. Studies of cross-national software teams report that the main challenges are sharing knowledge, creating trust, and establishing common ground. In this study we examine another challenge ”the use of the word culture as an exclusionary act of closure. As theorized by Metiu, who builds on Weber, closure occurs when one group seeks to preserve the advantages of their situation relative to another group. We conducted an ethnographic study of a cross-national software department with members in Denmark and the Philippines. We found that culture was invoked by employees in the Danish office to explain failed collaborations, but not by employees in the Philippines. Filipino employees formulated other explanations for problems, and actively resisted cultural explanations. We argu that employees in the Danish office used a rhetoric of culture as an act of closure, and we focus on technology choices and behavior as they were impacted by closure

Does distance still matter? Revisiting the CSCW fundamentals on distributed collaboration

Does distance still matter? Reporting on a comparative analysis of four ethnographic studies of global software development, this article analyzes the fundamental aspects of distance as depicted in the famous paper “Distance Matters.” The results suggest that, although while common ground, collaboration readiness, and organizational management are still important aspects for distributed collaboration, the arguments concerning coupling of work and collaboration technology readiness need to be refined. We argue that in working remotely, closely coupled work tasks encourage remote workers to spend the extra effort required in articulation of work to make the collaboration function. Also we find that people in distributed software development have already made collaborative technologies part of their work, and individuals are comfortable with them; thus, collaboration technology readiness takes a different shape in this setting.</jats:p