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Section I
New Generation
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1
Standardisation and Digitalisation: Changes in Work as Imagined and What This Means for Safety Science
Petter G. Almklov and Stian Antonsen
CONTENTS
1.1 Standardisation: From Weber and Taylor to Standards and Digitalisation
1.2 An Epistemology of Representation and Standards
1.3 Standards, Accountability and Control
1.4 Standardisation as a Part of Neo-Liberal Organising
1.5 Accountability
1.6 Situated Work: Standardisation and the Particularity of Situations
1.7 Digitalisation of Accountability
1.8 Conclusion
References
Introduction
In the last decade, the difference between work as it is imagined and work as it is actually done has been important in the literature on safety and resilience.* The salience and analytical power of this seemingly trivial distinction lies in the fact that it challenges organisational epistemes (dominant discourses of work within organisational and management literature) by underscoring that there is more to work than our descriptions of it. Work, as it is actually done in practice, can never be fully described or prescribed. There is always more to work in context than can be captured by formal descriptions. So while the perfect description of work as it is actually done is more of an aspiration than an achievable goal, we have found it useful in our own research to address situated work, and to challenge the distanced, stereotyping descriptions of work as generated from a distance by researchers, management systems and managers (Suchman, 1995). Understanding work as it is performed in real-life contexts is particularly important for understanding the variability of normal work that we associate with resilience.
We argue that it is necessary to follow the call of Barley and Kunda (2001) to ‘bring work back in’ to organisational theory; to base our theories on empirical studies that seek to understand work as it is performed in real-life situations, with all of their material, social and temporal particularities. In doing this, we are inspired by strands of research from outside the realm of safety science, found across the social sciences more generally.* It is important to critically reflect on the discourses of work within organisations, not only to find out whether or not they are good and true representations, but to discover how their pragmatics influence their organisational decision processes. For example, representations can make some types of work (as well as aspects of work organisation) visible, while obscuring or even suppressing others. Also, as argued by Suchman (1987), it is necessary to understand the role that representations of actions (i.e. procedures, plans) have as resources for situated action.†
In this chapter, we will address changes in the dominating discourses of work and their consequences for safety. First and foremost, we argue that there is an increasing tendency towards an ever more detailed standardisation. Timmermans and Epstein, drawing on Bowker and Star (2000), define standardisation as a ‘process of constructing uniformities across time and space, through the generation of agreed-upon rules’ (Timmermans and Epstein, 2010, p. 71). While we concur with this general definition, we also see a need to add one further aspect: when standardisation meets specialisation across organisational boundaries, it introduces a logic where work processes are increasingly seen as discrete operations, consisting of atomistic products to be delivered, rather than a dynamic flow of actions. This is accompanied with regimes of accountability, of ever more detailed reporting and control, which are also based on standards.
Digitalisation is a critical catalyst for the increased ubiquity and increased level of detail of standardisation. Digitalisation here means making use of digital technology to support the execution and control of work processes. Information infrastructures facilitate more detailed control through descriptions of work as consisting of atomistic standardised entities (see Hanseth and Monteiro, 1997; Bowker and Star, 2000; Almklov et al., 2014b). Moreover, the digital systems have a performativity of their own. They put constraints on action, and exercise power in ways that a procedure on paper simply cannot do, thereby changing the dynamics between work as it is imagined and work as it actually done.
In the following, we will discuss the trends towards increasing standardisation in organisations, as an element of the dominating discourses of management, as well as a general development in modern life. We will then discuss how this meets the particularities of situated action. Thereafter we will discuss the role of digital technologies, both as enablers of detailed control and carriers of a standardising discourse, as well as the possibilities they present for new forms of situated action. On the surface, standards seem neutral and technical, but they nevertheless have politics.* They constrain the leverage for work as it is actually done. The developments we discuss affect these politics in the sense that they increase the level of detail in which this can be done. Also, we will argue that the way in which standardised descriptions of work are themselves part of the transactional coordination of work (e.g. in organisations relying on outsourcing of operational work) and the way they are inscribed in the digital systems through which work is performed, skews these power balances in ways that need attention from researchers interested in reliability, safety and resilience.
1.1 Standardisation: From Weber and Taylor to Standards and Digitalisation
Standards and trans-contextual agreements arise when different localities are connected by infrastructures. Consider, for example, the indication of time at a given place. Even though ways of measuring time had already been around for centuries, there was no definite standard between the many different towns of pre-industrial Europe. The church tower gave the local time, and that was sufficient. However, when trains and railways connected the towns up to one another, the need for timetables necessitated the coordination of measures of time. Common rules or conventions of how to represent the world, through standards or measurement, are ubiquitous features of modern societies. Processes of decontextualisation, commensuration† (Espeland and Stevens, 1998; Larsen, 2009) and measurement (Porter, 1995; Crosby, 1997) are intrinsic features of modern life, and their proliferation is a key aspect of globalisation. While anthropologists describe a myriad of ways in which different societies categorise the world, there is, as part of modernity and globalisation, a tendency towards description based on atomistic standardised entities (see e.g. Larsen, 2009).
This is the dominant ideology within which organisations are shaped. When we discuss standardisation here, we describe developments that are continuations of developments from the onset of bureaucracy. Developments that, arguably, manifest themselves in new ways within a neo-liberal society. All but the most rudimentary of organisations are based on standardisation of work processes to some extent (Mintzberg, 1993). This is also the core of bureaucracy as described by Weber, and of Taylorism in organisations (Antonsen et al., 2012). When we discuss trends towards standardisation, we discuss the tendency towards a more detailed control of operational work, through procedures and reports based on measurements and standardised entries, moving into work situations where professional discretion has traditionally had leverage. The term ‘standards’ is often associated with third-party standards: international or industry-wide standards, such as ISO standards, developed and regulated by dedicated public or private agencies. Though these are certainly relevant for our discussion of the standardisation of work processes in organisations, we will refer more generally to a certain epistemology within which work is described and governed.*
1.2 An Epistemology of Representation and Standards
As already indicated, standardisation consists of descriptions that depend on context-overriding ‘rules of abstraction’ (Almklov, 2008). Work can be described in several ways, but standardised descriptions shape it into certain classes of objects according to rules that are not specific to the singular context. Representations of work adhering to such ‘rules’ or formats produces decontextualised descriptions that are mobile and comparable across contexts. If you describe your workday there is an infinite possibility of its aspects that you could choose to highlight; you could use a myriad of categories to describe each individual task. Using the predefined codes generated by the administration may not say that much to you, but it transforms them into entities that can be compared and combined with the descriptions of others. Such representations are the key levers of control for modern day management. In the same way that the railroads connecting towns required a harmonisation of measures of time, the management’s information system requires that I report my work according to categories and measures that follow certain standards.
Representation always depends on a subject choosing to highlight certain aspects and ignoring others. A standardised description is one where some predefined, context-independent aspects are highlighted. The relevant categories are constructed independent of the specifics of the context of work. Thus, by adhering to some sort of rules, your work is described in a way that makes it commensurable (Espeland and Stevens, 1998) with other workdays and the work of other employees. Moreover, it can be enrolled in systems of standardisation-based audit. Standardisation is, in this sense, a way or logic in which the local is described according to global* categories. The reach of the standard, and how far away the rules are accepted, produces the mobility of the representations.†
If standardisation is, as argued above, description and prescriptio...
