Tag: sociomateriality

  • Design Methods as Performative Objects

    Design Methods as Performative Objects

    Brown and Duguid’s (2001) concept of a “network of practice” has been niggling away at my consciousness. The idea is that a collection of people are enabled to understand each others’ work because of commonalities in practice, but not to the extent that a Community of Practice creates shared ways of framing and performing work:

    “we include under the rubric … groups whose members, to the extent that they have common practices, are able to read and understand one another’s work. Disciplinary networks of practice cut across heterogeneous organizations, including, for example, universities, think tanks, or research labs. Professions make up yet other such networks of practice, where again similar practitioners, by virtue of their practice, are able to share professional knowledge through conferences, workshops, newsletters, listservs, Web pages and the like. … different networks of practice cut horizontally across vertically integrated organizations and extend far beyond the boundaries of the latter. Along these networks, knowledge can flow.” (Brown and Duguid 2001, p. 206)

    So create closer bonds than organizational membership, spanning organizational boundaries. If the type of intersubjectivity that derives from shared practice (i.e. what Polanyi calls tacit knowledge) does not underpin a network of practice, what does? This rings true, given the observation that IT professionals identify more with the interests of their profession than with their organization (Chou and Pearson 2012). Which brings me to the second property of networks of practice:

    “it is important to note that networks of practice may also inhibit the flow of knowledge. As Lynn et al (1996) show, professional networks will occasionally work to resist the spread of ideas felt to be inimical to the interests of the network’s members.” (Brown and Duguid 2001, p. 207).

    So how do networks of practice share knowledge? Brown and Duguid have an explanation:

    “We have used the notion of networks of practice to explain leakiness. This is not, we have suggested, simply an inherent property of some kinds of knowledge. It does not result from making knowledge explicit and so tradable. It is, rather, a function of the common underlying practice, which creates social-epistemic bonds. Where practice doesn’t prepare the ground, knowledge is unlikely to flow.” (Brown and Duguid 2001, p. 207)

    But this is not very satisfying when members of the network are not co-located. Surely, “common underlying practice” includes some form of shared framing as the basis of those social-epistemic bonds? I thought back to the work of Howard Rosenbrock (1981), who explains that IT professionals’ paradigm of system design with the aim of making users interchangeable results in deskilled, repetitive, and unfulfilling jobs for those who use these systems. He explains:

    “The paradigm is transmitted from one generation to another, not by explicit teaching but by shared problem-solving. Young engineers take part in design exercises, and later in real design projects as members of a team. In doing so, they learn to see the world in a special way: the way in fact which makes it amenable to the professional techniques which they have available.” Rosenbrock (1981, p.6),

    So we have design methods as a form of performativity, embedding ways of framing job design, as well as creating a shared design practice that ignores users’ psychological and motivation needs. But surely, IT professionals are continually learning, acquiring new skills and approaches to system design? It would appear not:

    “The fact that most IS professionals learn the bulk of their technical skills during college or immediately afterward encourages recruiters to focus on technical skills for new hires. IS professionals generally learn non-technical skills in the workplace.” (Lee et al. 2001, p.28).

    All is not lost. Lee et al. (2001) go on to observe

    “IS professionals generally learn non-technical skills in the workplace. And because these non-technical skills are so valuable in the long term, new hires need to possess the aptitude to learn these skills. This may help explain why recruiters prefer graduates who took more MIS classes than those who concentrated strictly on computer science courses.” (Lee et al. 2001, p.28).

    How can we remedy the perspective that leads to such impoverished outcomes? As Rosenbrock observes, IT systems can be seen as a replacement for human ingenuity and skill, or as a way of supporting these. We have a choice to automate or to informate work (Zuboff 1988). We also have two chances to undermine the automation-on-rails approach taught in so many methods classes. Back to the network of practice idea. IT professionals have a network of practice with really strong bonds. We can teach IS methods more thoughtfully to those who return – for ongoing education in Masters degrees, etc.  Finally, we can mobilize the network of practice, on LinkedIn and elsewhere, to ensure that IT professionals are aware of the types of skill and knowledge-preserving approaches to organizational system design that we would want to see used in our own organizations.

    References

    Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. 2001. “Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective,” Organization Science (12:2), pp. 198-213.

    Chou, S.Y. and Pearson, J.M. 2012. “Organizational Citizenship Behaviour in It Professionals: An Expectancy Theory Approach,” Management Research Review (35:12), pp. 1170-1186.

    Lee, S., Yen, D., Havelka, D., and Koh, S. 2001. “Evolution of Is Professionals’ Competency: An Exploratory Study,” The Journal of Computer Information Systems (41:4), pp. 21-30.

    Rosenbrock, H.H. 1981. “Engineers and the Work That People Do,” IEEE Control Systems Magazine (1:3), pp. 4-8.

    Zuboff, S. 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York NY: Basic Books.

  • On Realizing The Relevance of Actor-Network Theory

    On Realizing The Relevance of Actor-Network Theory

    A recent emphasis on sociomateriality appears to have entered the IS literature because of discussions by Orlikowski (2010) and the excellent empirical study of Volkoff et al. (2007). Now that people have been sensitized to the literature on material practice, actor-network theory is classified as “tired and uninformative” [1]. Which leads me to wonder just how many IS academics have actually read the actor-network theorists? Or pondered how this applies to technology design?

    Long before people started discussing socio-material “assemblages,” Bruno Latour (1987)and John Law (1987) were discussing how technology developed by means of “heterogeneous networks” of material and human actants, the combination of which directs the trajectory of technology design and form. Latour (1999) suggests that he should recall the term “actor-network,” as this is too easily confused with the world-wide web. Yet actor-networking – in the sense of a web of connectivity, where heterogeneous interactions between diverse individuals, between virtually-mediated groups, and between individuals and material forms of embedded intentionality – is exactly what is going on in today’s organizations.

    In addition, Michel Callon’s (1986) work on how the “problematization” of a situation in ways that aligns the interests of others leads to their enrolment in a network of support for a specific technological frame. Once support has been enrolled, such networks endow irreversibility, which makes changes to the accepted form of a technology solution incredibly difficult. So we have paradigms that are embedded in a specific design. Akrich coined the term “script” to define the performativity of technology and the term was adopted by the other leading actor-network theorists [2]. This thread of work articulates incredibly deeply the ways in which technology design directs its users (and maintainers) into a set of roles and worldviews that are difficult to escape. We must “de-script” technology to repurpose it to other networks and other applications – which is much more difficult than one would suppose, given the embedded social worlds that are carried across networks of practice with the use of common technologies (Akrich 1992).
    So what does actor-network theory give us? It provides a conceptual and practical approach to understanding and modeling why design takes specific forms – and what needs to be “undone” for a design to be conceived differently than in the past [3]. It provides a rationale for understanding technology as a network actor in its own right, influencing behavior and constraining discovery. The assumptional frameworks for action embedded in – for example – a software book-pricing application will direct the evaluation of price alternatives in ways that reflects the model of decision-making adopted by the software’s author. This results in the type of stupid automaticity that recently saw an Amazon book priced at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping). The cause of this pricing glitch was traced back to an actor-network of two competing sellers, unknowingly connected via their use of the same automated pricing software [4].

    Finally, I want to observe that a lot of the recent “materiality of practice” literature has identified new phenomena and new mechanisms of actor-networks. For example Knorr Cetina (1999) has sensitized us to how epistemology is embedded in socio-technical assemblages, Rheinberger (1997) has demonstrated how some technical objects are associated with emergence while others enforce standardization and Henderson (1999) demonstrates how the use of specific representations can conscript others around an organizational power-base. But I would argue that these effects can be understood by using Actor-Network Theory as one’s underpinning epistemology – and that exploring actor-network interactions continues to reveal ever newer mechanisms that are relevant to how we work today. I would strongly recommend Bruno Latour’s latest book, Reassembling The Social.

    Notes:
    [1] I have to declare an interest here – this comment was contained in a review of one of my papers … 🙂
    [2] As Latour (1992) argues: “Following Madeleine Akrich’s lead (Akrich 1992), we will speak only in terms of scripts or scenes or scenarios … played by human or nonhuman actants, which may be either figurative or nonfigurative.”
    [3] One of my favorite papers on the topic of irreversibility in design is ‘How The Refrigerator Got Its Hum,’ by Ruth Cowan (1995). Another good read is the introduction to the same book by MacKenzie and Wajcman (1999).
    [4] The amusing outcome is recounted by Michael Eisen, at http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

    References:
    Akrich, M. 1992. The De-Scription Of Technical Objects. W.E. Bijker, J. Law, eds. Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies In Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 205-224.
    Callon, M. 1986. “Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” J. Law, ed. Power, Action, and Belief: a New Sociology of Knowledge? Socioogical Review Monograph 32. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 196-233.
    Cowan, R.S. 1995. “How the Refrigerator Got its Hum.” D. Mackenzie, J. Wajcman, eds. The Social Shaping of Technology. Open University Press, Buckingham UK, 281-300.
    Henderson, K. 1999. On Line and on Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture,and Computer Graphics in Design Engineering. MIT Press, Harvard MA.
    Knorr Cetina, K.D. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA.
    Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
    Latour, B. 1992. “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts.” W.E. Bijker, J. Law, eds. Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies In Sociotechnical Change. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
    Latour, B. 1999. “On Recalling ANT.” J. Law, J. Hassard, eds. Actor Network and After. Blackwell, Oxford, UK 15-25.
    Law, J. 1987. “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering – The Case Of Portugese Expansion.” W.E. Bijker, T.P. Hughes, T.J. Pinch, eds. The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
    MacKenzie, D.A., J. Wajcman. 1999. Introductory Essay. D.A. Mackenzie, J. Wajcman, eds. The Social Shaping Of Technology, 2nd. ed. Open University Press, Milton Keynes UK, 3-27.
    Orlikowski, W. 2010. “The sociomateriality of organisational life: considering technology in management research.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 34(1) 125-141.
    Rheinberger, H.-J. 1997. Experimental Systems and Epistemic Things Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 24-37.
    Volkoff, O., D.M. Strong, M.B. Elmes. 2007. “Technological Embeddedness and Organizational Change.” Organization Science 18(5) 832-848.