Resilience in Collaboration: Technology as a Resource for New Patterns of Action

Abstract

In CSCW, there has been little or no attention given to how people use technology to restore collaborations when there is a major environmental disruption. We are especially interested in studying resilience in collaboration-the extent to which people continue to collaborate with work groups or to socialize despite prolonged disruption. We conducted an empirical study of people living in two countries that experienced prolonged disruption through war in their work and personal lives. We describe how technology played a major role in providing people with alternative resources to reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns of action, for work and socializing. People created new assemblages of technological and physical resources. We discuss how the use of new resources in creating new routines led to more of a reliance on virtual work and in some cases to deeper structural changes.

Full text

Resilience in Collaboration:
Technology as a Resource for New Patterns of Action
Gloria Mark and Bryan Semaan
Department of Informatics
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine
{gmark, bsemaan@uci.edu}
ABSTRACT
In CSCW, there has been little or no attention given to how
people use technology to restore collaborations when there
is a major environmental disruption. We are especially
interested in studying resilience in collaboration–the extent
to which people continue to collaborate with work groups
or to socialize despite prolonged disruption. We conducted
an empirical study of people living in two countries that
experienced prolonged disruption through war in their work
and personal lives. We describe how technology played a
major role in providing people with alternative resources to
reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns
of action, for work and socializing. People created new
assemblages of technological and physical resources. We
discuss how the use of new resources in creating new
routines led to more of a reliance on virtual work and in
some cases to deeper structural changes.
Author Keywords
Collaboration, disrupted environments, resilience, routines
ACM Classification Keywords
K.4.3 [Computers and Society]: Organizational Impacts –
Computer-supported cooperative work.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, we have experienced major events that have
disrupted environments all over the world: 9/11, Hurricane
Katrina, the tsunami in the Bay of Bengal, the earthquake in
Pakistan, terrorist attacks in London and Madrid, and
numerous wars. These events have resulted in the
unfortunate loss of human life and also have involved
substantial economic costs. When the disruption affects the
environment for a prolonged period of time, people must
find ways to adapt to carry on in their lives.
Environmental disruptions are not new. What is new is that
we are now living in an age where video and audio sharing,
podcasts, blogs, wikis, Internet fora, Internet telephony, IM,
cell phones, and other communication and data-sharing
technologies are nearly ubiquitous for many people in many
parts of the world. Whereas just over a decade ago most
people still relied primarily on telephone, radio or television
broadcasts to get real time information about disasters, now
anyone with an Internet connection and a modest amount of
software or anyone with a cell phone can contact others,
disseminate information, connect to others and self-
organize. We believe that this real time ubiquitious control
of information critically affects how people carry on with
their work lives and maintain relationships when the
environment is disrupted.
As CSCW researchers, we are interested in understanding
how collaboration and technology use is impacted when the
environment is continually disrupted. When the
environment is severely disrupted then people may need to
leave their home for a safe environment, sometimes
continually changing residences. They may change
workplaces, not be aware of where colleagues are, revise
work schedules, or need to find new means for traveling to
work if the route is dangerous. Our intent in this study was
to understand the role of information technologies (IT) in
enabling people to continue in their collaborations and
interactions when the environment is disrupted.
ADAPTATION IN DISRUPTED ENVIRONMENTS
To date CSCW research has not given much attention to
collaborative work and interaction in environments that are
unpredictable, volatile, and risky. When faced with such
environments people might leave, stop work, or be resilient
and stay and continue to work. Resilience has been defined
as the ability to cope with an unexpected situation, to
“bounce back” [9]. Discussions of resilience have centered
around properties related to human action in responding to
unexpected events: redundancy, resourcefulness,
communication ability, self-organization, improvisation,
role-switching, and information-seeking [9, 15]. Yet, the
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role of resources, and especially IT resources, have not
received much attention in acts of resilience.
Research in CSCW has started to address how citizens and
groups coordinate in the direct aftermath of disasters [12,
10]. Adaptation after a residential move has also been
studied [13]. We are interested in studying resilience at the
level of groups: not just in terms of how groups coordinate
after a disaster but how groups can continue to collaborate
when the environment is continually disrupted, e.g. in war.
We are interested in how people accomplish action when
their environment is disrupted. To understand how people
develop new ways to act when the environment hinders
them, we focused on identifying typical routines used in
work and social interaction. Routines are defined as
repeated patterns of actions, performed by multiple actors
in a context [5]. Empirical evidence has challenged the
notion that routines are stable, instead showing that they are
dynamic, adaptable, and in fact can function outside of
structural rules or norms [5]. This view includes the idea of
agency in forming new, and modifying existing, routines.
When changes to any social system occur, e.g. from some
outside event or force, in what Barley [2] terms “slippages”,
then such events can trigger new ways to act. Thus, a
disrupted environment which affects people’s normal
routines can be a trigger for people to develop new routines,
or new patterns of action, to adapt to the changed
environment. A focus on routines enables us to understand
how people take action (if at all) to restore these routines or
develop new ones when the environment disrupts them.
People draw on resources to mediate their action [7].
Though the notion of resources is wide-ranging, having
encompassed intangible things such as information or skills
[4], we focus on the use of IT as a resource that mediates
action. When people enact typical behavioral routines, they
draw on familiar resources, such as using their car to drive
to work, or to meet face-to-face with colleagues or friends.
However, when typical routines cannot be performed (in
the case when a disrupted environment prevents them), and
if people are intent on continuing their work and
relationships, then they need to find new resources or new
ways to use familiar resources to create new ways to act.
Feldman [4] showed how when organizational practices
change, in turn this changes the meanings of resources for
people and how they are used. Resources are thus
malleable; their function and meaning is situational. For
technology, this situational aspect is described by
Orlikowski [11] as “technology-in-practice”: through use in
practice it becomes evident how technologies structure
human action. Habitual use of a technology reinforces that
mode of usage. Yet when changes in the environment lead
people to alter their habitual ways, in turn this changes the
meaning, and types, of resources that people use. New
structures emerge through instantiation in practice.
In this study we explore resource choices and how they
were used by people to be resilient in disrupted
environments. As the field changed we discovered that
different attributes of resources become important as
enablers of action. From our data we discovered many cases
that show when familiar routines were not possible or too
risky to do, then through bricolage [cf 9], people drew on
new resources, combined resources or used familiar
resources in new ways to act. An overriding pattern that we
found was that people switched from relying on physical
resources (e.g. cars, workplaces) to using IT as a primary
resource to carry out action. In doing so, people modified
existing routines or developed new routines. Thus, when the
physical environment constrained people, IT provided
people with alternatives to continue to act in both their
physical (and virtual) environments. Following
Orlikowski’s notion of “technology-in-practice”, new ways
of using resources to be resilient led to the emergence of
new structures with consequences for work and social lives.
RESEARCH SETTING AND METHODOLOGY
We chose to conduct our study with participants in two
countries: Israel and Iraq. These two field sites were diverse
in many aspects such as culture and economy, but were
comparable in two major ways: 1) the residents of both
countries were experiencing wars and severe disruption to
their environment and their familiar activities, and 2) IT
was widely available. We stress that we are not interested in
evaluating the events from any political perspective but
rather are interested in understanding how people use
technology to act when the environment is disrupted.
Israel
We chose Israel as a field site because during the 2006
Israeli-Lebanon war it provided us with an opportunity to
understand technology choices due to its high-technology
infrastructure. At the time of the war, the country had a
100% digital network, a penetration rate of 125% for cell
phones, and broadband connections for about 70% of
households (ranking fourth in the world). There were a
number of technology choices available for people: e.g.
Internet, cell phones, laptops, mobile devices, as well as a
variety of Internet applications: audio and video sharing,
IM, email, SMS, blogs, wikis, games, etc. Second, Israel
had recently experienced a major environmental disruption
so that it was still fresh in people’s memories [6]. Third, the
environment remained disruptive for a prolonged period of
time such that people had to develop new routines or adapt
old ones. We could thus study the routines that people
formed. Fourth, many potential informants are English
speakers unlike many other disrupted environments.
Iraq
We chose Iraq as a field site to be able to compare and
contrast experiences with Israel and to generalize our
research results more broadly. As with Israel, the war in
Iraq disrupted the lives of its residents. The war has also
been prolonged (over five years at the time of this writing)

and many Iraqis are English speakers. However, there were
also some notable differences between the countries.
Whereas in Israel the technical infrastructure remained
largely intact during the length of the war, in Iraq, there
were continual breakdowns and problems with the physical
infrastructure. There is also an interesting story to be told
about technology adoption and use in Iraq. Unlike Israel,
where IT has been widely available for years, in Iraq, prior
to the war in March 2003, the technological infrastructure
was virtually non-existent. Contacting friends and family
abroad was nearly impossible; interactions were restricted
to within Iraq’s borders, as one informant described:
Seriously, we felt like we were so much left behind, and we
were different than the world, and the rest of the world was
an alien to us. Besides phones, cars, and computers, there
was no other technology…
Before the war the Internet was available, but was
monitored, restricted mostly to e-mail use, and limited (in
government operated Internet centers) Most Iraqis had
never seen a cell phone, and satellite television receivers
were banned. Also, before the war, electricity and gasoline
was available and people could freely socialize in person.
The technological landscape changed drastically following
the war; information technologies were introduced
practically overnight. While the penetration rates of the
Internet (.1%)1 and cell phones (39.6%) still remain low in
Iraq, technology adoption began to occur. Computers were
used in Iraq before the war but the use of unrestricted
Internet, cellular phones, and satellites came after the war.
Before the war only three of our Iraqi informants used
limited Internet, one had satellite access and none used a
cell phone. After the war, our informants had access to IT
and adopted various technologies: e.g. Internet, cell phones,
laptops, mobile devices, and applications such as IM, email,
SMS, social networking sites, YouTube, and online forums.
Methodology
We conducted 59 interviews. 40 semi-structured telephone
interviews (17 males, 23 females) were done from Oct.
2006-July 2007 with participants living in Israel during the
conflict in August 2006. Each interview lasted about one
hour. Starting in September 2007 we conducted 19 semi-
structured phone interviews with Iraqis (15 males, 4
females) who lived in Iraq during the war: 12 currently live
in Iraq and 7 now live outside of Iraq (UK, U.S., Jordan).
The interviews averaged about two hours as often we
experienced their environmental disruption during the
interviews. Sometimes we had to switch among
communication tools (e.g. phone, Skype, IM or email) until
something worked consistently.
We sought informants who fit the following criteria: 1) they
lived in the war zones, 2) they used at least basic IT, and 3)
1 2007: http://www.internetworldstats.com/list4.htm
they were English speakers. As our goal was to find people
with access to technology, and given the limitations of
access to larger populations for sampling, we used snowball
sampling [3] to recruit participants. Our initial “seeds” were
people we had known in Israel from the research
community and in Iraq from a U.S. contact. Documents and
written diaries were important sources of information about
events and people’s perspectives at the time they were in
the disrupted environment. We had extensive archival data
from 16 Israeli informants in the form of blogs, email,
bulletin board postings, and forum messages written during
the war. We used this to triangulate with the interview data.
Guided by grounded theory [14] applied on the electronic
archives and interviews, we identified the important issues
related to technology use and developing routines.
We asked informants to identify routine behaviors
(following [5]) used for work and socializing, before and
during the war. In our interview and archival data we coded
for patterns of behavior used for work and socializing
before the war, and changes during the war. We focused on
IT use before and during the war and whether it impacted
people’s work and interactions. We consider new routines
to be patterns of behavior not done previously. We consider
modified routines as changes in pre-war existing routines.
Our informants in both field sites were educated. The work
roles of our informants were quite diverse: e.g. control
systems engineer, professor, doctor, administrator, technical
writer, CTO of a startup, teacher, research scientist,
marketing consultant, translator, medical student, farmer.
Their age range was wide. The technical experience of our
informants ranged from basic experience using
technology—email and Internet--to the more technically
savvy use of, e.g., wikis, IM, Internet telephony, and SMS.
THE DISRUPTED ENVIRONMENT
We begin by describing the extent to which the
environments in both countries had changed. The
informants had difficulty enacting familiar patterns of
action in work and interaction. Simple actions that in a
normal environment we take for granted such as taking a
walk or taking a shower or driving in a car entailed risk. In
the event that a siren warning went off (in Israel) then
people needed to seek shelter immediately. The threat of
bombs in both countries was very real. Most of our
informants described that they had experienced either
seeing the effects of recent bombs, hearing the “whizzing”
sound or seeing bombs explode. The Iraqi informants
referred to bombs as “flashes”. In Israel, informants
reported running in and out of shelters from 8-20 times per
day. One informant described the lack of familiar routines:
I don’t know, there was no normal routine of waking up,
going to work, and doing work and getting back home…
things like that. So that was different, sleeping at various
hours of the day, of the night, waking up and checking the
news, and being scared of what was going on, what was

happening to friends, and things of that nature. That was…
I guess that was different than the normal routine.
Driving to work, to school, or to cafes had previously been
taken for granted before the disruptions; they were now
considered highly risky. People did not travel unless they
really needed to, as described here:
I live 35 minutes south of the factory, traveling was a major
safety concern. Rockets could land anywhere. Traveling to
and from work was a major decision, to leave the house or
stay home.
[on driving]: Now you’re in a potential rolling bomb. If
you’re bombarded by shrapnel, it hits your gas tank, then
you’re gone.
Even if Iraqis were able to obtain gas, travel became
increasingly dangerous as these informants relate:
Last year, security was so disturbed, but we had to go to
school. So on my way back home I was with my uncle in a
car, and a bombed car exploded only a few meters ahead of
us. Only seconds separated me from being dead in that
explosion, or even being handicapped.
…I mean if you drive your car to the university maybe it’s
gonna happen… bombs in the street, sometimes we will see
people shooting other people. We were expecting
everything…
First of all many of the roads are blocked for security
issues. It’s either blocked by government offices or by
people themselves. Some of the roads [have] terrorists or
security personnel passing through, so they don’t want
regular people to go through these roads…
TECHNOLOGY AS A RESOURCE FOR RESILIENCE
We found many cases where the environmental disruption
prevented people from using familiar resources for work
and socializing (e.g. using cars for travel or meeting friends
at homes or social clubs). We found that our informants
drew on new IT resources or used familiar IT resources to
create new patterns of action for work and interaction. This
led in some cases to the emergence of new work and social
structures.
For all but one of our 40 Israeli informants, we found an
increased usage and new uses invented for familiar
technologies, and the adoption of new applications and
technologies. In Iraq, because technology was introduced
when the war came, it is not possible to compare as we
could with Israelis whether technology use changed with
the advent of the war. However, we did find that all our
Iraqi informants adopted technology for use fairly
extensively in their daily lives. We therefore cannot discuss
change in technology use but only how Iraqis used
technology resources to create patterns of action in the war.
During the war, familiar routines were disrupted, such as
when or how people worked or socialized. Nearly all our
informants described how they were intent on creating
routines to restore “normalcy” in their lives. Many
informants could not travel to their workplace, or meet
regularly with colleagues or friends. In the next sections we
will describe the ways that technology was used in
changing work and social patterns during this disruption.
Technology Supporting Patterns of Action in Work
Nearly all of our informants continued collaborative work
and social interactions during the war, demonstrating
resilience. In Israel, many of our informants who normally
would have met in the workplace were not able to. They
could not travel or did not want to take the risk to travel to
work. Others described how they changed their residences
frequently, e.g. from relatives’ homes to hotel rooms, back
to their own homes. For others, the infrastructure of schools
and daycare was not available and people had to stay home
with their kids. Familiar routines in work and home life
were disrupted. We first discuss new routines for work.
We describe first the case of five Israeli authors who
showed resilience in meeting a paper deadline despite the
fact that some were continually moving residences
throughout the war. Whereas before the war the group met
face-to-face synchronously to discuss the paper, during the
war their work became mostly asynchronous and
distributed. They changed the resources they used, now
meeting over email, Skype, and IM, and used a wiki.
Changing their resources supported their ability to act and
to continue to be “authors”. The group structure radically
changed. The authors gradually formed new routines of
having multiple two-way distributed conversations, in
contrast to their previous typical synchronous face-to-face
conversations. Because the authors were continually
moving it was difficult to schedule more than two people at
a time. Yet the use of this new routine and resources had
consequences for their communication. One colleague
described that they “shouted” more over email than in their
face-to-face meetings. Another consequence was that the
manager of this group then changed his work routine and
began to travel by car throughout the war visiting each
member of the workgroup to “restore” collegiality of the
group’s pre-war face-to-face communication. He also began
to use new resources to support this new travel routine,
relying much more heavily on IT, cell phone and SMS, to
communicate while on the potentially dangerous roads.
Another case of resilience is that of a psychotherapist, who
explained how due to the risk of travel, she and her clients
could not meet face-to-face, their usual practice of
interacting. This informant developed a new routine of
conducting sessions with her clients by telephone. Whereas
before the war, clients would seek her out, in this new
routine the roles were reversed and she took the initiative in
contacting the clients over the phone, showing resilience to
continue her interactions with her clients. In this way she
could continue to act as a psychotherapist. The use of this
new routine and new use of a familiar resource (telephone)
had consequences as it changed the nature of interactions

with her clients. She explained that interactions became far
more personal using the phone:
It wasn’t official at all. There was absolutely nothing
official about it. We were closed down, we were told not to
go to work, and I was not told really to do anything. It was
just something that I need… that I felt needed to be done,
and it was the right thing to do. But I wasn’t required to.
An interesting case of how technology use changed patterns
of action in work was reported by two different Israeli
informants who were in the military reserves and were
called up during the war. These reservists brought their
existing routines using IT in civilian life to their new
environment in the military. These familiar routines using
IT enabled them to bypass the hierarchy and contact others,
e.g. when they needed help. Traditionally the Israeli
military uses radio communication in a one-to-many
broadcast along hierarchical lines. However, as reservists
entered the military they brought with them learned habits
of technologies that they used in civilian life, e.g. SMS and
the cell phone. One case of using such previously learned
habits in the military occurred when a soldier, whose tank
entered Lebanon and became under siege, used SMS to
summon help from a person of high rank in division
headquarters. Traditionally, soldiers use radio to contact
their commanding officer one step up in rank, but this
person bypassed the chain of command to contact a high
ranking person directly through SMS with his cell phone.
Help was sent. People who were friends and colleagues in
civilian life were of different ranks in the hierarchy when
they entered military life. The use (and civilian habits) of
cell phones and SMS in the military provided soldiers with
a new kind of agency to contact others irrespective of rank
(which bypassed the military hierarchy).
The resources and routines thus changed from formal
communication across the hierarchy to a combination of
formal and informal communication. Again, the new use of
familiar resources had consequences: not only in bypassing
the hierarchy but also in weakening the structure of checks
and balances that exist with radio communication. Because
of the one-to-many broadcast nature of radio commands,
multiple people can overhear the commands and serve as
checks. With cell phones, these checks and balances are
lost, as one lieutenant colonel described:
So what happened is that you know, you take the habits
from their day-to-day regular life, and apply them to the
same encrypted phone, but what the problem is that you
start […] initiating army decisions with the cellular phones.
And even sometimes commanders are sending commands
using the cellular phone, and then there is no… and then
you are basically putting aside the checks and balances you
have in the regular communication channels you have in
the army.
Travel was very risky. We found that informants used
familiar resources of cell phones in new ways to develop
new routines to be resilient to continue to drive on the
roads. Here are just two examples. One informant described
a new collaboration routine for travel that she formed
calling it a “cell phone battle plan”:
… we would basically call when we were very, very close,
we got the timing down so that we would know, ‘ok I’m
about 30 seconds from her house’ and that’s how long it’s
going to take her to run down the stairs and run into the
car, because you didn’t want to be out in the car, and you
didn’t want to be sitting and parked and waiting
anywhere… it was like running a mission for enemy lines or
something, it was incredible.
Another new routine with IT to support travel was
developed by an engineer who worked in a small startup
company. He recently moved to the country from Germany.
He described how he lay in bed for two hours every
morning worried about the 45-minute risky drive to work.
He described a new routine that he developed for travel to
work using the cell phone, calling his family in Germany,
and which helped him make his daily drive:
Of course, the cell phone is always there. If something
happens in the street you can call someone. It ís very
important for me to have a cellular….It was...my family, my
relatives, they call me in the morning [from Germany] and
ask what I'm doing and if I’m going to work. They call me,
because it’s 7:30 and they know I leave then. 45 minutes
later they call me again to see if I got to work. And the
same for the way back.
In the first case, the use of cell phone helped the informant
coordinate driving; in the second case, the use of the phone
gave psychological support. For both, the new use of
familiar resource and new routine enabled them to act.
The Israeli informants who were able to most closely
follow their existing pre-war routines in work were those
who relied heavily on technology for “virtual” work before
the war. Working in a “virtual” environment with others
enabled them to be independent of the disruption in the
physical environment. One engineer, who was responsible
for integrating remote access in a large global company,
took his computer and cell phone with him when he was
called up into the army. He continued to collaborate with
his colleagues in the company while he was involved in
intensive training the first 72 hours and also for about a
week after. One woman, a CEO of a small company, left
her home in the north and began to live a nomadic
existence, moving from hotel rooms to friends’ homes. She
used a new technological resource: a prototype device that
enabled her to have Internet access wherever she was. She
continued to run the company from wherever she happened
to be. An informant who worked in a global distributed
team was able to continue work as he moved between his
brother’s home and his own. Since most of his online
meetings were with team members in the U.S., he met with
them in the evenings (when bombing ceased), a less
disruptive time. Another informant, a technical trainer and
writer, who collaborated with others throughout the country

and in other countries, switched from working at the office
to working at home. Since his primary contact with clients
was on the phone and Internet, his change in location was
not noticeable to his clients. His personal life though was
constantly disrupted as a new routine became moving in
and out of bomb shelters 8-10 times per day. Thus, for these
informants, their work in “virtual” environments enabled
them to be independent of the physical environment and
thus relatively unaffected by disruption.
In Iraq, similar to Israel, the physical disruption in the
environment prevented our informants from enacting their
former pre-war routines of traveling to work and attending
the university. Our Iraqi informants used technology to
develop new ways to continue to work and collaborate.
Missing university became a regular occurrence (one
informant missed school for nine days due to a curfew). We
discovered the creation of new online collaboration fora so
that students could still interact without traveling. One
medical student informant who was “very keen on
computers and the Internet” started a dialogue using email
with a couple of friends. It did not take him long to realize
that they had created an ad hoc e-mail based forum. After
this realization he started a forum which now has over 450
members who discuss university related topics, coursework,
and other issues. Students can now meet other students
online without physically traveling to school. He explains:
Friends sent an e-mail asking about the college and they
included many names and another one replied to all, and
gradually we started to have this very long chain of e-mail
discussing lectures and attendance. Then I noticed, well,
people are willing to engage in dialogue and they are
willing to interact with each other…
Seven medical student informants reported a new pattern of
collaboration that emerged as so many missed lectures:
colleagues began to use technology to capture and
disseminate information to those who could not physically
attend school. Some students began to record course
materials on paper and make photocopies for others. One
informant learned how to create flash animations, created
animations to help illustrate course materials, and
distributed these to his peers on CDs or on flash ROMs.
One informant created a web forum, and after uploading
course materials to a server, would then distribute a
hyperlink to his peers using the forum or via e-mail. In
other cases, people would send him an SMS to ask for the
hyperlinks when it was time to take exams. Another
informant began taking photos of microscope slides using a
digital camera, and would then distribute them on CDs to
his classmates. This new pattern of action caught on and
was adopted by his peers, professors, and soon the
university as a whole, as he explained:
Especially when digital cameras got cheap and more
popular and lots of people had them. When I was in 6th
year, people in their 4th year who were in pathology, they
convinced the department to give students the CDs. The
doctors were taking those photos, making sure they show
you what they want to show you. It started from a simple
idea and the college itself embraced it.
Another case of resilience involved Iraqi informants who
were translators for the American army. Initially they
started physically traveling to their workplace. They
developed a new work routine of receiving assignments at
home, translating them and sending the assignment to their
managers using the Internet, e-mail and cell phones. The
use of new resources enabled them to continue being
translators without traveling to the workplace.
However, as the technological infrastructure was often
disrupted, our Iraqi informants used an assemblage of
physical and informational resources that were continually
being reformed and reorganized. A journalist described that
his news organization had established two reporting groups,
in southern and northern Iraq. People within each group
coordinated among themselves and with external reporters
using the Internet and cellular phones. When a technology
did not work people switched to other communication
media or went to an Internet cafe. Resilience for these
journalists involved flexibility in switching between
technological and physical resources, as one describes:
So when the Internet went down it was all of us. So it was
out of our control. And for the reporters they were just
calling and saying sorry we don’t have Internet. Many
times reporters were threatened so they couldn’t go out and
use the Internet. There were also curfews. You have to be
really flexible when you work in places like Iraq, because
it’s basically a war zone. The kind of rules you have in
other places, in Iraq you cannot…
Technology Supporting Patterns of Action in Socializing
When the physical environment prevented people from
enacting their familiar routines of socializing face-to-face
then many developed new communication routines using
new resources. In some cases this changed the structure of
relationships, e.g. with who our informants interacted and
the norms of communication. We will discuss the
experiences in each of the countries.
Though nearly all Israeli informants reported an increased
use of email and cell phone, and for many also IM and
SMS, we discovered a common new pattern of action that
emerged. Sixteen of our 40 Israeli informants (40%) started
completely new practices of communication. During the
war they began regularly to write blogs, long emails, post to
Internet forums or bulletin boards in messages distributed to
large numbers of people. For all these informants, this was
a completely new use of these communication technologies.
One case is of an Israeli professor who began what she
called a virtual support group where she sent out daily
emails describing her feelings and day-to-day experiences.
She sent these first to her students, and then to a wider list,
eventually reaching about 50 people. This became a new
daily routine for her and she would spend about 5-6 hours a

day composing this email. Another informant, an avocado
grower, developed a daily routine where he wrote a story
about his life each day during the war in long emails, first
to friends and family. The list then grew to the expatriate
community of his town. He included photos taken with his
cell phone, as he described:
It was important to maintain a routine, even if it included
an abbreviated work schedule. That routine included my
daily correspondence, which I considered a personal
obligation to myself. My observations at work were critical
to the writing, as I barely ventured beyond the confines of
the community or the orchard.
One informant began a new routine of writing a blog which
soon included a cartoon in it. She described that her new
daily routine started when she woke in the morning and
spent time thinking of the cartoon to post in her blog:
I used it as a therapeutic means for me, in between work or
when I wasn’t working. And just to know I was
communicating with a lot of people.
A personal trainer, whose hobby was using a virtual
Internet flight simulation program, switched during the war
to using the collaborative forum feature of the program.
There he regularly posted what he called “Letters from the
War Zone”. He said that when the war started he stopped
playing the game as it seemed silly. He thought constantly
about composing writing for this forum. A technical trainer,
who began to post regularly in her blog, sometimes 2-3
posts per day, once received a frantic call from a client in
Spain when she didn’t post. Another informant described
the value of her new email routine during the disruption:
It started out as an e-mail that went out to all our friends
and relatives overseas, and it just grew and grew and grew
because they kept sending it to all their friends and
relatives, so by the end I think my e-mail was reaching over
1,000… I would sit at my computer every second day, for a
couple of hours, and try and create a story based on the
news and our personal experiences as a family. And that
was a very important part of my life during the war…. No
doubt about it, it definitely empowered me. And it made me
feel stronger and braver than I would have felt otherwise.
We found similar new communication routines that
developed in different types of groups. A graduate student
group sent out regular emails, first among 11 students and
then more joined. A workgroup at a large corporation set up
a blog for the group to talk about the war. People posted in
it regularly. One professor turned an e-learning system into
a message system when she started a new routine of
sending personal messages out to her students.
These new communication practices with new uses of
resources not only showed resilience in continuing
communication among existing groups but they also had
consequences in expanding the reach of these Israeli
informants beyond their physically disrupted environment.
Many informants described that having a routine where
they could communicate online became a coping
mechanism during the war, and some explained that it
empowered them. Others described that by communicating
to people outside of their war environment, in environments
that were “normal”, it was a way for them to make sense of
their “abnormal” environment, such as when they enacted
“siren” routines.
In Iraq, communication practices also changed, with a new
reliance on IT, and with changes in social structure far more
radical than in Israeli society. A societal change arose with
the war: in addition to the physical dangers of traveling to
meet friends and family, people also began to not trust
people who they met face-to-face, e.g. on the streets or at
school. Students found it nearly impossible to make friends
at the university because other students could be potential
“spies,” tied to the insurgency, or a part of terrorist groups.
Professors were wary of forming friendships with students
because other colleagues who did so had suffered dire
consequences. One Iraqi informant describes:
… the best thing we had before the war was being able to
go out a lot. You know, stay out late at night… but we
would visit relatives [before the war], you know, come back
home when it’s real dark and we wouldn’t care about it
because it was pretty safe. … The streets were safer, there
were no traffic jams, and no roadside bombings, so we
didn’t have to worry about going out at any time. Our
relatives were still in Iraq but now most of them are gone.
We used to have so many places to go to and people to
hang out with…
Thus, before the war in Iraq, people’s routine patterns of
interaction were to socialize in person. The inability to
socialize in person due to risky travel and the lack of trust
of meeting new people face-to-face led our Iraqi informants
to start and maintain relationships with others online in a
virtual setting. All 19 of our Iraqi informants developed
new patterns in their social lives that incorporated email,
IM, social networking sites, and chat rooms to socialize.
As many people left the country due to the war, people who
remained adopted IT to maintain contact with friends and
family. Thus, technology allowed our informants to “cross
borders” and socialize with friends and family in different
parts of Iraq and the world, as one informant described:
…I’m giving them updates as to what I’m facing in
Baghdad. Right now I’m talking to my family in Baghdad,
and they’re sharing everything with me. It makes me feel
like I’m living in a small world. Everyone can give
everyone news. And that we are crossing the borders
through the Internet, talking to my sisters, brothers, father,
mother, even if they are in different countries. Gives you a
feeling of comfort that you are in touch with them. And you
can simply contact with them and check on them. Can send
e-mail to see if you are well.
The development of these new communication routines led
to a radical structural change for the Iraqi informants.

Before the war Iraqis routinely attended social clubs. Now
technology was not just being used to maintain
relationships, but was also starting to provide entertainment
and socialization – as the social clubs did before the war.
The norms of communication changed: the use of IT
enabled people to talk about topics that they could not
ordinarily do face-to-face. In Iraqi society today, for
example, openly discussing certain topics face-to-face such
as women’s rights can have negative consequences.
However, our informants described that they could discuss
such topics online. Two of our male informants who
regularly used chat rooms discussed how the anonymity
allowed people to express what they were feeling. He said
that people could speak their minds and even be “very
rude.” People discussed their opinions online on the current
Iraqi situation citing there was a “clear division between
people supporting Saddam and those not supporting him.”
While the current regime is “secular”, the general mistrust
and violence in Iraqi society, coupled with increased social
conservatism have “pushed women into the background”
and restricted Iraqi women in speaking freely [1]. A female
informant described that the Internet supported their
“freedom” to discuss their opinions openly:
…people expressed themselves more freely there. They even
had bold opinions that they wouldn’t dare to say when
they’re in school… it was mostly about social things that
discuss the relationships between men and women, and also
women’s rights and how unfair the Iraqi and Muslim
society in general was to women.
Another radical change in social structure occurred with
overcoming societal traditions. In Iraqi culture, tribal ties
have lasted for centuries and most Iraqis are members of, or
have kinship to, tribes. Much socialization and marriage
still occurs through tribal connections [8]. Tribal networks
refer to the long-standing relationships of Iraqis centered
around the extended family and friends of family [8]. For
example, people tend to turn to their tribal network to find a
suitable spouse, as the families are already well acquainted.
Of course people still met others at the University or at
social clubs, but in Iraq it was typical for people to meet
others who were friends of friends or friends of family.
However, in an uprooting of societal traditions, by using the
Internet, Iraqis now meet new people who are outside of
their tribal network. One of our informants even described
that her new Internet relationships were stronger than
previous face-to-face relationships before the war. Three of
our informants began to use YouTube to show videos of
what they described as the “real Iraq”. One informant
described how viewers of his YouTube videos contacted
him and ultimately visited him. Another informant
explained that he met a woman online who was living in
Southern Iraq (and outside of his tribal network). By chance
he later met her when visiting Baghdad as he explains:
It was very strange. I met… you know, if you meet the
person you are talking to on the net without any, you know,
appointment, it was something really new to me. I’m sure it
happened outside Iraq because they had been practicing, or
they have been, you know, having Internet long time ago
and sometimes this stuff is happening. But in Iraq it was
very new to me, to meet people who I know from the net.
That was one of the things that, you know, activities that
changed in Iraq. Everything actually changed in Iraq, it’s
[a] different Iraq.
Whereas in Iraqi society people usually marry within their
tribal network [8], one informant described how she met her
fiancé using Myspace.
I told you that I used Myspace, and that’s where I actually
met my fiancé right now….we started talking about the
situation and it went from that to… you know, other stuff,
and other stuff, and we kept talking for about a whole year,
and…you know, until we met each other…He is American,
he’s a civilian, working in Iraq.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Our goal in this paper was to understand how people adapt
in work and social life when hindered by a continual
disruption in the physical environment. The war prevented
our informants from enacting many familiar routines such
as meeting at the workplace or socializing face-to-face.
In the cases that we reported, we found that our informants
enacted resilient behaviors by adopting new media or by
using familiar media in new ways to reconstruct, modify,
and develop new patterns of action for work and
socializing. The informants whose routines changed the
least were the ones who already were working with others
virtually. They were able to be independent of their
physical environment. These informants reported to us that
often their distributed colleagues did not know their
environment was disrupted (or that they might be speaking
from a bomb shelter). In other cases when our informants
used new media and changed their practices, we found that
their practices moved in a direction of working and
communicating more “virtually”. The Israeli authors used
new technologies to interact at a distance, the
psychotherapist used the telephone to interact with her
clients, the Iraqi medical students used technology so that
students could get access to coursework without traveling,
and the Iraqi translators and journalists used new media to
work at a distance (when technology did not work in Iraq
then they switched to physical resources). Informants in
both cultures adopted more online interaction practices,
replacing face-to-face interaction.
CSCW has long described the implications of technology
use in virtual work. In our study we found that the
environment hindered people from enacting familiar
routines. Technology became a resource that, through
enabling virtual work, people could be independent of their
physical environment, and thus resilient to continual
disruption. The environment was thus an actor that played a
role in leading people towards more virtual interaction.

Our study shows how being resilient in group work and
interaction involves the flexible reorganization of resources.
The informants created new assemblages of technological
and physical resources, at times switching solely to IT to
develop new or modify pre-war routines, and at other times
using IT to modify existing routines where they had
previously solely relied on physical resources, such as cars
for mobility. In many cases our informants adopted these
new assemblages of resources and developed new routines
in a collective manner such as the Israeli authors or the
Iraqi journalists and medical students.
Our study illustrated how resources are malleable as the
context changes. Typical uses in normal environments for
cell phones in car travel might be to inform others when an
unexpected event occurs (e.g. if one is stuck in traffic), or to
simply chat. Affordances of technology resources changed
as the environment changed, so that they were used in ways
that enabled people to modify or restore routines. Cell
phones became devices to coordinate travel in real-time, as
with the “cell-phone battle plan”. In considering the role of
resources in resilience we might extend the notion of
“technology-in practice” [11] to resources-in-practice: only
through using technology in context does its utility emerge
as a resource for resilient behavior. Our study has shown
how the use of technology in conjunction with the
adaptation of routines led to a different conceptualization of
technology as a resource. This also builds on Feldman’s
idea that resources are created through action [4].
Resilience has been discussed as people “bouncing back” or
holding on to an existing practice after a disruption [9]. Our
study showed that acting to be resilient not only led to
modifications, or even the creation of new routines, but also
to emergent structures that had systemic effects. Being
resilient does not just involve achieving short-term aims
such as interacting with clients, or attending class, but we
found that resilient actions often have more expansive
social consequences. Following Orlikowski [11] we found
that through the actions of using technologies differently,
new structures emerged. Recursively, many smaller
structural changes served to create more resilient
environments for our informants’ work and social lives.
The Iraqi medical students were resourceful in using IT to
form new collaborative patterns of disseminating course
materials online and this changed educational routines, soon
becoming regular university practice. There was a practice
in place for future events: students could get course
material if they could not travel to the university. Internet
forums led to discussions about courses which became a
new collaborative aspect of education for the Iraqi students.
The Iraqi translators and journalists created virtual work
practices for future work so that they did not need to
depend on travel if disruptions continued to occur. New
daily online communication routines for both cultures soon
expanded beyond the borders of their countries so that
people interacted with others in nonwar environments.
Getting feedback from people in “normal” environments
helped our informants cope with events in their own
environment. These changes created routines and
environments that were more resilient to disruption.
But some systemic changes created challenges. For the
Israeli authors, structural changes in their group
communication, which enabled the group to continue
working on its paper, led to some discord. The manager
changed his work practice to drive to meet with group
members to restore and maintain good relations. Civilian
habits of cell phone use in the Israeli military benefited
individuals but created a rift in the checks and balances of
the formal radio communication system. Thus, not all
actions to be resilient benefited the group or organization.
Some structural changes affected societal norms. The use of
online communication for socializing for Iraqis led to new
norms of interaction where taboo topics could now be
discussed. In a strong irony, the Iraqis turned to the Internet
to maintain tribal relationships with friends and families
and ended up forming relationships outside their tribal
networks, changing a long-standing cultural practice.
Thus, resilient actions can have effects that extend beyond a
change of practices and use of new resources to accomplish
immediate goals. Such systemic changes have not received
much attention in the literature discussing resilience. Past
studies of resilience have focused on properties of human
action that enable people to adapt to adverse situations [9,
15]. Our study adds to the discussion of resilience by
showing the role of technology resources in creating new
routines for work, travel, and socializing so that people
have more choices of how to act during the disruption.
When physical resources or means to take action were not
available (e.g. travel, workplaces), then technology
provided people with alternative means to enact agency, to
continue to work and socialize during disruptions.
This study allows us to compare and contrast the
differences across two very different countries and cultures.
The two cultures of Israel and Iraq are markedly different
and the informants used technology in different ways. At
the time of its war Israel had already been a highly
technical society, with one of the world’s highest Internet
and cell phone penetration rates. In contrast, at the time the
war in Iraq started, Iraq had limited and controlled Internet;
after the war began our informants adopted IT fairly
rapidly. But what is common to both cultures is that when
the physical environment prevented people from enacting
familiar patterns of action, both changed their use of IT,
flexibly combining IT with physical resources, to create
new (or to modify existing) patterns of work and social life.
In terms of practical recommendations, our study shows
that in times of disruption people need to have increased
situational awareness of others in their social network. This
awareness information on the one hand could consist of
simple status information letting others know that they are
safe. We can envision a system that would automatically
notify members of a group which technology is currently

available for all or most people to use to communicate. This
system might recommend, for example, that members meet
with Internet telephony if all have Internet access at the
time, or by cell phone if the network is available to all.
Our data also points to the potential of utilizing collective
intelligence in providing online information about a
disrupted area. For example, people could collectively
update a satellite map online with up-to-the minute
information on local disruptions in their area. Of course this
practice introduces potential issues of information integrity.
We discovered that the willingness to adopt IT was
important for resilience. Working virtually enables people
to be independent of their physical environment. A
recommendation would be for organizations to train groups
in virtual work practices so that group members could
seamlessly and quickly switch to virtual work when needed.
There is a long history in CSCW describing social and
technical challenges of virtual work such as adopting
interoperable technologies and establishing common
conventions. Environmental disruptions underscore the
need more than ever for organizations to be adept at virtual
work. Disruptions are, for the most part, unexpected. By
training people to be flexible in assembling, combining, and
switching resources, organizations can increase their
resilience to disruptions. Flexibility in switching resources
can be a benefit to organizations even for minor disruptions.
Limitations
We have several limitations to our study. First, as our goal
was to study how people used IT to adapt to disruptions, we
used a snowball sampling approach to provide us with a
group who used IT (a limited group in Iraq). As most of our
59 informants were educated we can only generalize these
results to people who are similar and who have access to a
range of technologies. Our sample though consisted of a
wide range of professions, personalities, ages and
experience so we can say they are good indicators of how
similar people might act with access to IT. However, we
note that our snowball sampling approach could have led
people to recommend others like them. Another potential
limitation is that the memory of our Israeli informants
might be distorted due to the time that elapsed since the war
and interviews (from 2-10 months). However, we
triangulated archival data written during the war with
interviews and found consistency. Also, research shows that
memory is very reliable over time for typical events which
fits our focus on routine behaviors [6]. Last, we cannot
discern whether the structural changes found in Iraq are due
to technology or other changes, e.g. the regime. We can
only report how IT helped people act, but further research is
needed to understand the basis of these changes. We hope
that our study can spark more research in this area.
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
This research was supported by the National Science
Foundation under grant no. 0712876. We thank Boram Kim
and Dania Arafeh for their help. Comments from Barry
Brown, Paul Dourish, Martha Feldman, Charlotte Lee,
Michael Muller, Leysia Palen, Mark Warschauer, and our
reviewers were invaluable.
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