Supporting emergent collaborative work through the use of personal technologies

Whilst there has been considerable progress in the development of the CSCW in business organisations, some of the notions arising from modern organisational thinking are not reflected by groupware developments. This thesis examines the notion of emerging collaboration through the overlapping personal interests and agendas of information-based workers. Building on notions of knowledge work, personal information management and informal communication a bottom-up approach to groupwork is explored. This is contrasted with other approaches which either (i) use an explicitly top-down approach, which imposes rigour and classification from upper- to lower-levels of the organisation, or (ii) have no explicit model of the organisation, but implicitly use the organisational model through the use of its technological and communicational infrastructure