Abstract
To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The word revisited: Introducing the CogSens Model to integrate semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives
- The symbolic usage of stone beyond its function as a construction material: Example of residential architecture in Iraqi Kurdistan
- Between interpretation and the subject: Revisiting Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony
- Indexicality, meaning, use
- Modèles logiques de la structure élémentaire de la signification: Templum, prisme sémiotique, carré sémiotique, cube sémiotique et autres
- The soundscape as the transformatrice in some Dene songs and stories
- Epistemic logic: All knowledge is based on our experience, and epistemic logic is the cognitive representation of our experiential confrontation in reality
- Saussure’s “anagrams”: A case of acousmatic mistaken identity?
- The imagination, the conscious, and the unconscious in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête
- How actions and words come to make sense in a continuously changing world of work: A case study from software development
- Wendt versus Pollock: Toward visual semiotics in the discipline of IR theory
- RoboDoc: Semiotic resources for achieving face-to-screenface formation with a telepresence robot
- Book Review
- Review of Umberto Eco in his own words
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- The word revisited: Introducing the CogSens Model to integrate semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives
- The symbolic usage of stone beyond its function as a construction material: Example of residential architecture in Iraqi Kurdistan
- Between interpretation and the subject: Revisiting Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony
- Indexicality, meaning, use
- Modèles logiques de la structure élémentaire de la signification: Templum, prisme sémiotique, carré sémiotique, cube sémiotique et autres
- The soundscape as the transformatrice in some Dene songs and stories
- Epistemic logic: All knowledge is based on our experience, and epistemic logic is the cognitive representation of our experiential confrontation in reality
- Saussure’s “anagrams”: A case of acousmatic mistaken identity?
- The imagination, the conscious, and the unconscious in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête
- How actions and words come to make sense in a continuously changing world of work: A case study from software development
- Wendt versus Pollock: Toward visual semiotics in the discipline of IR theory
- RoboDoc: Semiotic resources for achieving face-to-screenface formation with a telepresence robot
- Book Review
- Review of Umberto Eco in his own words