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Face-to-Face to Interfaced: Facilitating Mediated Communications in Technical Support Work
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- Author(s) / Creator(s)
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This paper explores how technical support workers approach, connect, and engage with mediated communications in their technical support work. Distributed computing to the Cloud and beyond situates local technology at distances away from their home environments and support networks.
Remote technical support workers are called upon to diagnose, troubleshoot, and solve technical issues on problematic devices remotely through mediated channels (i.e., e-mail, online chat, telephone, and remote desktop) neither having seen, touched, nor experienced the technical issue firsthand themselves. Viewed through the theoretical framework of Daft and Lengel’s (1986) media richness theory (MRT) drawing a matching correlation between a medium’s capabilities to transmit information and the communication’s demands of same, this study adopted a qualitative approach of descriptive phenomenology using semi-structured interviews to explore where,
when, and how six technical support workers experienced the influence of mediated communication cited in MRT in their work of delivering technical support. This study found support for Daft and Lengel’s (1986) MRT assertion, but suggests its premise can improve through the concurrent applications of Clark and Brennan’s (1991) grounding in communication (GIC) theory and Orlikowski’s (2008) structuration theory. Findings report that shared understanding between technical support workers and their supported end-users reached through GIC and facilitated through MRT is important for technical support work. Additional findings call for the interplay of Orlikowski’s structuration theory to evolve technical support interactions and surrogated troubleshooting activities through proxied local agents to facilitate remote work.
This research will be of value to technical support workers, vocational institutions teaching technical support, and managed service providers with distributed remote workers. -
- Date created
- 2019-09-09
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- Type of Item
- Report