Social Science, Technical Systems, and Cooperative Work

Beyond the Great Divide

Geoffrey Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Les Gasser, William Turner

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805824025
• eBook ISBN: 9781317778752
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone.

The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics.

Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

III
Introduction: The Sociotechnical System and CSCW

William Turner
CERESI/CNRS, Meudon, France

An appropriate closing to this book is a set of chapters by people who have elected to take up residence in the great divide. This notion has been used throughout as a means of distinguishing between the social and the technical, between the human, emotion-laden, contingent context of cooperative work (CW) and the formal, rational, and potentially universal character of computer support (CS). The chapters in this section set out from a different perspective. The message is simple and clear: Little headway, if any, will be made if the collective aim is to build bridges between the two terms of the previous equation. Bridgebuilding exercises are not necessary; what is needed is a better empirical understanding of how sociotechnical systems work in practice as well as appropriate cooperative work theories in order to guide their construction. In more concrete terms, the perspective on CSCW research provided here leads to the following question: What precisely is the nature of the relation between sociotechnical systems and CSCW research? As the authors show, at least three different answers can be given.

Sociotechnical Systems Limit the Scope of CSCW Research

The sociotechnical system is an observable object for empirical research that is concretely embedded in a work environment. It gives substance to the CSCW concept and limits its scope to the heterogenous set of social and technical elements brought together and combined in a variety of ways when systems are built. The reasoning presented here has been developed and defended for a good number of years by actor-network theorists (Callon, 1980; Latour, 1987). Basically, the argument says that cooperation takes shape and becomes meaningful because of the work done to build locally coherent sociotechnical systems. People might have different ideas about the ethical, moral, political, economic, or social basis on which coherence should be based, but normative questions of this kind cannot be successfully addressed by an outside observer. The mystery of cooperative work—the fact that despite their differences, people actually are able to build things together (programs, machines, strategies, society, etc.)—has to be formulated in another way. The focus is on the procedures through which groups achieve a relative autonomy with respect to their environment and, at the same time, develop the necessary economic, social, and political skills needed to defend this autonomy. How are stable systems achieved? Cooperative work is looked on as being more of an engineering problem than one that raises the theoretical issues of normative social science. The final structure of an engineered system is determined much less by the intentions, worldviews, and fundamental motivations of its designers than by their concrete decisions to incorporate specific elements into the system, to link them together in a specific way, and to codify interactions by a given set of rules and procedures.

Engineers do not seriously expect to be able to take an initial design and use it as a blueprint for building a workable system in the real world. They expect to have to adjust their plan to local conditions and, according to actor-network theorists, it is precisely this adjustment process that has to be described, analyzed, and explained. In the chapters that follow, Berg applies this approach to show that computer-based decision support tools do not just slip into a niche within medical practice, but concretely transform practice while the routines and design decisions embodied in the tools are transformed at the same time. His chapter illustrates the point already made: A computer-supported cooperative work application is a sociotechnical system that is fine-tuned to operate in a given context; consequently, it will be possible to pierce the mystery of cooperative work and understand the techniques, routines, and strategies of doing things together if appropriate observational skills are developed to document the ongoing negotiations about making systems work.

Ira Monarch et al.'s chapter takes a similar point of view but raises the methodological problem about how descriptions of cooperative work practices can be obtained in distributed environments. Their chapter starts off by showing the extent to which design is a geographically decentralized activity, distributed over an open conception space populated by a great many actors who might or might not know one another and who, in any case, work in a great many different contexts. The problem of describing how a multitude of distributed stakeholders actually build their design and implementation strategies requires providing them with what the authors call an "inscription space." Participants in a cooperative engineering activity are invited to create their documents, sketches, and more formal models using tools that not only facilitate the creation of these products but at the same time maintain their accessibility to multiple stakeholders over the lifetime of a project and beyond. Moreover, the authors discuss how this suite of tools will not just passively record and store this information for later recall, but will actively support design participants in organizing both the information itself and the processes for producing it. The aim is to provide engineering communities, including so-called end-users, with reflexive tools for both constructing and monitoring collective agreements and work processes. And why is this goal appropriate? The answer given by the authors to this question clearly illustrates the particular flavor of work being carried out by those at home in the great divide. Engineers might answer that machine augmented intelligence applied to information flows in distributed work environments will prove useful in organizing the ongoing negotiations and adjustments inherent in cooperative cognition. Sociologists might reply with skepticism pointing to such normative questions as: Who benefits and what kinds of social arrangements will flourish when machines are used in the prescribed way? The fact is, however, that without the developmental work and empirical research undertaken by the authors, the gulf of incomprehension between the two communities is only likely to grow. A new kind of hybrid is taking roots in the great di vide (aptly called by the authors), an engineer/sociologist, who is both builder and skeptic in turn.

CSCW Research Increases the Options Available for Designing Sociotechnical Systems

Design requires answering a normative question: What are the requirements of users if they are going to work with a system? Accepting from the outset that any answer to this question is very strongly theory ladened, the idea defended earlier becomes suspect: It is not at all clear that an understanding of cooperative work solely depends on observing how system skills are deployed. An engineering approach to CSCW research can be criticized because it pays little attention to how blueprints for action are defined in the first place (Goguen, chapter 2, this volume; Jirotka & Goguen, 1994). It is comparatively less important in this approach to understand where ideas come from than to explain the adjustment dynamics associated with their implementation. The point is, however, that the range of negotiations open to stakeholders during implementation is limited in a very real way by the initial assumptions made about user needs. Two chapters in this section address this question and, in doing so, look critically at the conditions that have to be met in order to carry out empirical research into cooperative work processes. They use a reflexive mode of argument in order to show how concrete experience in the CSCW field can be used to define options for the design of new sociotechnical systems. Both are written by people who have actively carried out empirical research and who raise the very fundamental question of how to capitalize on past experience: What methodology should be applied to integrate the results of case studies into an appropriate frame of reference for constantly improving sociotechnical design?

Wagner's experience as a member of a multidisciplinary design team led her to analyze the "norms" of participating disciplines in order to explain how an appropriate statement of system and user requirements might be systematically achieved. After showing that conflicting norm structures constitute a source of misunderstanding that undermines a team's capacity of working together, she makes a series of concrete proposals for building a shared working culture for multidisciplinary design. These proposals define what might be called a "negotiation space" by using four general categories to offer an initial framework for structuring sociotechnical options. According to Wagner, design options become reality by adjusting conflicting points of view about subject-oriented as opposed to process-oriented design; "workable" as opposed to "true" representations of requirements; conditions for confidence building over disciplinary boundaries; and, finally, borderline questions concerning the respective limits of human and machine autonomy in their ongoing interactions.

In his chapter, Bannon sets out from another perspective but arrives at the same conclusion as Wagner, namely, that appropriate frameworks for action can be developed and filled out by ongoing research. Bannon is much more critical than Wagner of the idea that multidisciplinary projects require building a shared working culture. He provides a historical account of research in both human-computer interaction (HCI) and CSCW to show that both fields have developed boundary objects that focus common interests and allow for cross-disciplinary interaction and mutual learning. His chapter indicates a series of arenas that provide settings for boundary object generation. These arenas are articulated around the "interface debate" in HCI and around the "cooperative work debate" in CSCW. He comes out very strongly against the idea of transcending these debates by efforts aimed at developing a sort of interdisciplinary Holy Grail. Conflicts stimulate ongoing research practices: It is important that different disciplinary points of view and interpretations be brought to bear on such things as moving research out from the laboratory into the workplace, defining user needs and requirements, and conceptualizing the design process itself. Theory is much less important in his eyes than appropriate list management techniques for providing a constantly updated overview of the boundary objects emerging in these different arenas. Although Bannon's argument in favor of a bottom-up approach to multidisciplinary dynamics differs from Wagner's, intuitively speaking, one would expect that elements on Bannon's boundary object list could be distributed over the categories derived from Wagner's analysis of disciplinary norms.

World Views for Understanding Work and Explaining Systems

Improving sociotechnical design implies efforts aimed at building an appropriate framework for integrating the results of case studies into an ongoing, collective CSCW research program. But, another way to consider the framework problem is to assume that yet another level of generalization is needed. Global semiotic systems structure understanding of the experienced world (Yoneyama, this volume). They define the cultural values and outlooks that individuals generally admit without question, given the processes of socialization at work in a vast range of institutions from the family, to school, and the workplace. Local frames of reference for CSCW research are necessarily embedded in these global worldviews. So it is not enough to simply work up from experience to theory; it must be understood how the constitutive order of semiotic systems impinge on people's actions and understanding. The filial two chapters in this section work down from worldviews to theory. The first derives specifically from work in engineering, the second from work in the social sciences, but both examine the same question: Flow do people position themselves in order to observe what goes on around them? This, of course, is a crucial question for understanding how global systems impinge on individual freedom of action.

Design of computer-supported applications depend on the way in. which individuals represent a cooperative work problem in organizations and as Taylor et al. argue in their chapter, this representation will be different if the individuals are located in a system or outside it. People experience things differently: "It is experientially not the same thing to understand an airline from the perspective of its passengers, for whom it is a sequence of distinct activities, one after the other, as it is from that of the airline employees, for whom it is a single configuration of activities, repetitively generated for each new batch of passengers: take off, serve a meal, run the movie, land, disembark." Passengers are objectively in the system as entities connected to their food, their seats, and their film through the actions of the airline employees. They make up the material world in exactly the same way as particles of any physical system constitute the objects on which a process of work is concentrated when they are combined in some way or another. Airline employees, on the other hand, objectively manage the system from the outside, organizing the events proposed to the passengers, making the links between them and controlling for their efficiency. In the real world, people are constantly stepping into and out of systems: subjects in one, objects in another. As they move from one worldview to the other, the material objects that surround them are perceived differently. The computer, for example, will be considered as just another information-processing node of a network on an equal footing to men and women in the material, particle-oriented worldview. But, when it is seen as an entity capable of managing events, of linking them together and of building autonomous interpretations, the design question is no longer that of optimizing network configurations for information processing; it becomes one of augmenting human intellect by using an external memory to extend the mind.

Keller takes the argument one step further by insisting on the fact that it is not enough to link worldviews to everyday experience of organizing and being organized in order to fully understand different conceptions of computer design. The link is certainly useful in explaining different design premises, but explaining does not mean understanding. Explaining is a conventional scientific issue: It often means in the social sciences making explicit and communicable actions that individuals perform, perceive, and understand in everyday praxis without any need to codify, formalize, or objectify. If explaining means knowing, understanding means doing, and the point that Keller makes is that individuals only "kno...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Introduction: Social Theory and CSCW
• II Introduction: Design Theory and CSCW
• 6 Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI
• 7 According Tools With Meaning Within the Organization of Concrete Work Situations
• 8 Reflections on a Work-Oriented Design Project
• 9 Scenarios as Springboards in CSCW Design
• 10 Building a Collective Knowledge Management System: Knowledge-Editing Versus Knowledge-Eliciting Techniques
• 11 "As real as it gets. . . . " Taming Models and Reconstructing Procedures
• 12 An Approach to Identifying the Role of "Information" in a Health Care System: Implications for the Quality of Health
• III Introduction: The Sociotechnical System and CSCW
• 13 Formal Tools and Medical Practices: Getting Computer-Based Decision Techniques to Work
• 14 Mapping Sociotechnical Networks in the Making
• 15 Dwelling in the "Great Divide": The Case of HCI and CSCW
• 16 The Worldviews of Cooperative Work
• 17 On Multidisciplinary Grounds: Interpretation Versus Design Work
• 18 Understanding of Work and Explanation of Systems
• Author Index
• Subject Index