Paolo Brunello wrote:
Hi to you all,
I'm Paolo, an organization psychologist, thesis on intercultural CMC in virtual organizations, now striving to get a job in Africa, hopefully in the digital divide bridging domain.
I think the following link tells about me more than many words: http://www.paolobrunello.it/HTML/laurea/laurea.html (even if it was 3 years ago).
Benvenuto, Paolo! :-D al tuo approccio etnografico ai riti di passaggio della tua università!
I hope you won't mind if i (roughly) translate the intro to your thesis for the others, though. I'm particularly interested in your thesis because I almost joined such a translation farm as you study in your thesis (but backpedalled because their online inscription form was totally security-unaware) So here goes:
file:///D:/Comunic-Azione/Digital%20Divide/tesi_PaoloBrunello.pdf INTRODUCTION
<<This thesis is the result of a field research done in summer 2000 at a translation agency in San Diego (CA), which I'll call VD (a fictitious name, like all the names appearing in this text [*])
This context is characterized by the fact that VD uses a network of translators who live in various countries. They work freelance for VD, on the basis of a collaboration contract, and are called Subcontractors.
For this and other features described further on (see Chapter 1), VD can be defined as a "virtual organization", a new kind of organization made possible by the growing diffusion of the internet in the world.
More specifically, this research aims at studying the special relationship that grows between VD and its members on the one hand, and all its subcontractors on the other hand. I found this relationship interesing because of its distinctive features:
• communication never happens face to face, but is always mediated by technological artefacts (computer, phone, fax);
• people involved belong to different cultures;
• time use is strongly determined by the different time zones - but not only by them, as we shall see.
This relationship is also sociologically relevant, because this kind of distance work is becoming more and more frequent due to the more and more capillar penetration of the internet in the whole world.
This thesis can be categorized as a case study based on an ethnographic, markedly qualitative, approach(see Chapter 3), and using methods such as participative observation, interviews, the analysis of written texte produced by the examined culture and in this case, of e-mails between VD and its subcontractors (see Chapter 4)
These sources of data have been completed by the exploratory use of a more traditionally quantitative tool, i.e. a (web) survey (see §§
3.3.5. e 4.3.).
Moreover, following the guidelines of ethnography, I thought it would be useful to provide readers with as rich a background as possible, in order to enable them to immerse themselves in the specific culture of the examined organisation (see chapter 2).>>
[*]If you ever put an English abstract of your thesis on your site, perhaps you'd care to change "VD" to something else?
cheers
Claude
-- Claude Almansi www.adisi.ch [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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