Introduction

In this chapter, we are concerned with ‘work,’ that is with ‘activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result’ which is typically interpreted as the ‘task or tasks to be undertaken’ (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). In our information and knowledge intensive economy today, most jobs involve activities and tasks that create, manipulate, interpret and use information. In an analysis of job activities and tasks in the UK, Brinkley, Mardon and Theodoropoulou (2009) found that 60% of jobs required some to high knowledge content using primarily tacit knowledge, that is knowledge stored in the head (rather than codified knowledge). Nearly a decade later, we consider information activities and information tasks to be central to most of the undertakings within a workplace.

In this chapter, we deconstruct that work from an information-centric perspective. We start by examining work as a generic process involving a series of activities that drive tasks, sub-tasks and their associated human actions, interconnected in a hierarchical or network-like structure, that is the essence of what is done in the workplace. Next we consider three distinct but essential elements that affect how those activities and tasks are completed:

Notably, all of these elements are deployed to service organizational goals and objectives.

One must not forget that work and its associated activities and tasks are not isolated and independent, but sit within an ecosystem – a social, cultural and legislative milieu (see for example, Suchman, 1987; Button and Sharrock, 2009) that is intersected by technologies and the work that needs to be done. That discussion is outside the scope of this chapter. In a holistic view of work within the workplace, we would need also to consider the organizational, functional and process workflow views as well as the information flow (Durugbo, Tiwari and Alcock, 2013) discussed here, and distinguish information processes from functional, behavioural and organizational processes (Curtis, Kellner and Over, 1992).