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From: droberts@ai.mit.edu (David Robertson)
Newsgroups: comp.groupware
Subject: Can anyone define "electronic group"
Message-ID: <15934@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 15 May 91 22:24:43 GMT
Sender: news@ai.mit.edu
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT Sloan School of Management
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In the organizational literature, there are lots of definitions of "group":

Homans:  a group has common goals, psychological awareness of the group, and face
to face meetings.

Schein:  pretty much the same as Homans' definition, except he relaxes the "face to 
face" part, and replaces it with a more general notion of interaction.

Others have similar definitions.

My question is what defines an "electronic group."  Sproull differentiated "pure" electronic
groups (e.g. groups that communicate only electronically) from electronically supported 
groups (which have some face to face communication).

Does anyone know of good literature in this area?  

My take on this is that groups form to do carry out a set of tasks (as defined by the
"common goals"), and use the technology available that they know how to use (if they 
don't know how to use it, it doesn't matter whether it's available).  An interesting 
question is, given a set of communication media available (select from a set which 
includes {email, telephone, face to face, fax, ...}), what tasks will that group, in 
general, be good at solving and not good at solving.  Thoughts?

-Dave Robertson