Inside the IMF

Richard Harper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781136395130
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In this book, Richard Harper uses the International Monetary Fund as a case study to show how thinking differently about IT systems can dramatically improve the manageability and accessibility of documents in organisations. The systems he considers uses search and retrieval applications, the use of hypertext documents and shared database applications like Lotus Notes.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The International Monetary Fund’s main building is situated a short distance from the White House in Washington, DC. From the outside, the building is nondescript, indicating nothing of the institution’s importance in world affairs, nor about the activities undertaken within. From the inside, however, the building offers a much more spectacular and informative view. For one thing, it has an enormous atrium ensuring that nearly all of its offices have a window. Most face outward, towards the World Bank across the way on 19th Street, for example. But the remainder face in, meaning that the occupants can gaze across the atrium at their colleagues on the other side of the building. For those who do not have an office—an ethnographer for example—the landings by the elevators offer vantage points onto the atrium. Here the ethnographer can view the institution’s staff in action: as they sit around conference tables in meetings, move from one office to the next, or crouch over their workstations keying in data. During my own ethnographic vagabondage in Washington, these landings provided me with havens in which I could wait in between interviews or could jot down notes from a meeting I had just finished. Sometimes I would simply rest here and watch the theatre of bureaucratic life before me.

There is of course much more that happens at “the Fund” (as it is known to insiders) than can be observed from the atrium. Day in and day out, huge numbers of Fund staff are on “missions”, gathering information from their “member” countries, discussing policies with governments and making recommendations in “staff reports” to the Fund’s Executive Board. The Board itself meets three days a week to discuss these and the many other documents presented for its review. This is the high profile work—the kind of work that gets commented on in the press and on television. But there is also the low profile work, to do with the mundane management and administration of an institution. In the basements of the building there are dozens of staff maintaining the computer systems. Nearby are rooms filled with off-set printers churning out the latest Fund publication. Meanwhile, more or less on a daily basis, large trucks reverse into the service gate on 20th Street to get loaded up with boxes of documents for the “safe repository” somewhere in Virginia. This is the Fund at work.

In this book I want to report an ethnographic examination of this work. Doing so is not simply a case of description, however. A key problem in ethnography is how to present what is observed in a way that does justice to the phenomena and allows some analytic insight. Just reporting on an institution would be merely a form of journalism (which has its place of course), but in ethnography the concern is to investigate in such a way as to produce a view that allows deeper understanding of the setting in question. There are, needless to say, many ways in which such a view can be constructed. In this book, I will not discuss all these possible approaches, nor will I offer a wholly new one. What I will do is alter and adapt an analytic approach that has become (in various guises) a standard within sociology and anthropology.

More specifically, over half a century ago, the sociologist Everett Hughes suggested that one effective way of examining society—of doing more than journalism—was to study the careers of individuals as they move through that society¹. What the analyst does is to enquire into the different sets of concerns that are relevant at any stage within a career. Hughes suggested that by looking at these distinct elements of relevance within each stage, the “working constitution of society could be revealed”. My approach is really an adaptation of this where, instead of focusing on the careers of people, I focus on the careers of documents. In so doing, what I hope to uncover is the working constitution of the Fund. Just how I hope to do so is more complex than I will elaborate on in this introduction. But since this is so crucial to the discussions that follow, let me introduce the reader to the way in which the concept of a “document career” can enable an unpacking of institutional life with the following remarks.

I am wanting to investigate such things as:

• how documents are oriented to in the Fund’s work;

• how they are the outcome of that work;

• how they are used to assess work;

• how they can be the detritus of activities;

• how Fund documents allow for activities as diverse as telephone calls and conversations, through to the disbursement of huge sums of money.

These might seem rather obvious things to list. And indeed they are obvious—but in precisely the ways that are of interest. For these kinds of activities or, if you like, these kinds of doings with documents are bound up with and can be explained by reference to the location of the documents within particular stages of their career. Such an explanation will also uncover the working constitution of the institution within which those documents have their career.

One can unpack this a little further with a simple contrast from the Fund. Let me describe and contrast what documents mean to the Fund’s “Document Preparation Unit” (DPU) and a Fund mission team. The DPU deals with all those documents which have been reviewed, signed off and completed. In other words, it deals with documents once they have become finished products. The DPU is not concerned with what a document concludes (what recommendations, for example, it offers the Fund’s Executive Board), but only with what type of document it is. Once a document has been identified, the DPU staff can commence a variety of courses of action. The most common is to select the appropriate distribution list and, on that basis, forward the document with that list attached to those who have the job of copying and delivering documents. But this job is made somewhat more complicated by the fact that within the category of documents for distribution are various subcategories. Some documents can be done “when there is time” (e.g. briefings) whereas others have to be done “right away” (e.g. lapse of time papers). There are many other categories too, each with more subcategories. For instance, certain staff reports are of immediate impact on the organisation. Their existence is announced in the Executive Board Agenda.

Now these various activities of the DPU are interesting for a number of reasons, but the only point I want to make here is that, for the DPU, a document has no contents. It is rather a thing to be evaluated in a certain kind of hierarchical fashion, and then it is a thing to be tagged, directed and stored. A document means nothing more to them than that.

Now contrast this with how a mission team views a document. A mission team is made up of a half-dozen or so Fund staff who are given the job of visiting a country and reporting on its economic position. A staff report is the outcome of their work. It presents a mission team’s analysis of a member country’s economy, an appraisal of that government’s policies, and offers recommendations for the Fund’s Executive Board. For a mission, a staff report is, unsurprisingly, more than just a thing to be catalogued. It is at once a representation of the mission’s view, a justification for courses of action, and a political and diplomatic device (insofar as the recommendations once presented to the Executive Board will have political repercussions for the country in question as well as for the Fund and its relationship to that country).

I am not wanting to make too many grandiose claims here. All I want to suggest is that the DPU views documents (including staff reports), as much of a muchness: as things to be tagged. A mission views a staff report very differently: as something whose contents they spend a great deal of time mulling over. In other words, what this example shows is that the same document, when viewed with different purposes, is a very different kind of thing. It embodies different kinds of courses of social action.

What distinguishes these courses of action are the differences in perspective brought to bear by a division of labour. But this itself is bound up with and can be explained by what stage a document has reached in its career. So, crudely speaking, a staff report starts its career when it is first drafted by a mission team. At this point, certain sorts of concerns begin to show themselves. These have to do with how a team gradually works up and refines the contents of the document. At the next stage in its career, the document is reviewed. Here, there is a set of different and partly overlapping concerns to those of the mission team in the drafting stage. Once it has been reviewed, it is then delivered to the DPU. As I have said, by this stage, the contents of a staff report are no longer of concern. The staff in the DPU assume that all matters to do with its contents have been dealt with beforehand. Once the DPU has dealt with it, it goes on to what is more or less the last career stage I am interested in—its consideration by the Executive Board. I do not want to say anything about that stage now. My point is that within each of these stages there is a great deal of variation in the doings associated with a staff report, the interpretative schema brought to bear, the background expectations that allow users of those documents to act in expeditious ways, and so on. It is by examining these various doings, these sequential stages of action matrixed through time and a division of labour, that I hope to unpack the workings of the Fund.

Now, this approach will not let me cover every element of the Fund. But what it will provide is the mechanism that will allow the construction of an analytical view. However, my goal in this book is not just to create that analytic view. It is also to present that view as a resource for the discussion of future document technologies and hence the technology of future organisations. As this concern will be important later on, it is appropriate that I make some introductory remarks as to how reference to the ethnographic record may be useful for the analysis and design of new technologies.

It will be perfectly obvious that bound up with the courses of action at any point in the document’s career will be the selection of various kinds of technologies. For example, the mission teams use electronic document editors for drafting their reports, but paper for review and discussion; the DPU prefers to use electronic forms for much of its work, but keeps paper forms for filing and storage. There are good reasons for this which I will not go into here. The point is that the medium of the document, or one might say the technology in which the document is embodied, changes through a document’s career. This movement is not so much sequential as it has to do with how some document technologies are better suited for some tasks than others. This is another commonplace observation—we all know that different technologies provide us with different advantages and disadvantages given the particular job we want to do with some document. But if we look at the document career and courses of action within the stages of that career, we must also be concerned with the medium of those documents. Thus a perspective that looks at organisations through its documents is necessarily a perspective concerned with technology.

Now the point is that, insofar as organisations want to change (and most do), then their documents must change. Hence the technology of documents must change too. In addition, sometimes developments in technology may allow (or even force) change. But to understand what those changes might be, one needs to examine current practice. My concern here is to understand the careers of Fund documents, and this will mean detailing in part the ways in which various technologies are embedded in the stages of the document career. It is my contention that materials from this can be used to guide the design of work practice and technological office systems in the future, whether they be in the Fund or elsewhere. In this way, my arguments follow in the footsteps of others who have looked at the technologies of the past in an attempt to help define appropriate technologies for the future. However, my exposition differs from theirs in two respects. First, I use the present—rather than the past—to divine the future. Second, the tools I use come not from history but come from combining the concerns and analytic outlook of sociological ethnography with those of information technology (IT) research². In this respect, this book reports on something that is rather new: an alliance between two disciplines—IT research and sociology—that have for a variety of reasons only recently begun to converge. As with the notion of the document career, this convergence is a key to the book and so it is worth spending a moment to say more.

In the past decade or so, practitioners within the disciplines traditionally associated with ethnography (namely sociology and social anthropology), have begun to explore the ways in which ethnographic findings, methods and arguments might find a more applied role. To the surprise of some, they have begun to find such a role in systems research. This is not due solely to their own efforts, however. For, at the same time as ethnographers have been searching for a new role, the IT research community has been looking for a new approach to understanding the social world. This search derives from growing dissatisfaction with psychological and laboratory-based methods for understanding what information technology is wanted and needed by people in organisations. It has resulted in a turn to what may be loosely described as social methods, and in particular ethnographic field work and associated methods of analysis.

The confluence of these two developments—from within the social sciences on the one hand, and within the design community on the other—is only now beginning to show itself in various publications and completed projects. What is becoming clear is that the use of ethnographic techniques in this new applied domain has enhanced the design of organisational systems, partly through improving the fit between needs and functionality, and partly through better reconciliation between requirements specification, user expectations and technical possibility.

Organisational ethnography is, however, relatively new (or rather has only begun to flourish after various faltering starts over the years), and there is no text which reports on these developments in any depth, or which might provide a basis upon which future studies may be undertaken³. What there is (although this is not to undervalue this work), is an eclectic assemblage of conference papers and book chapters⁴. Some of these texts fulfil the needs I describe on a partial basis⁵ whilst others provide an increasingly rich background through taking a management science perspective⁶ or combine work from the philosophy and history of science (and sometimes social studies of science) with organisational theory⁷, or look historically at technological determination of organisational work processes⁸, or view the impact of the computer from the information sciences perspective⁹. There is also a growing literature on the developing use of social psychological approaches in systems design¹⁰. But there are none which report an in-depth ethnographic study and its investigations of how the present may teach us about the future. It is my purpose in this book to help fill that gap.

Needless to say, there are likely to be many ways in which this goal can be achieved, for it is far from certain how ethnographic findings might be used in design. But what I hope to do is provide a rich illustration of how an old trade such as ethnography (developed out of a mix of colonial concerns, a delight in the exotic and philanthropy) provides resources for an altogether modern technology.

Overview of the book

The next chapter will essentially be an opportunity to set up the empirical argument as well as saying something about why designers are interested in those empirical materials. Here, my concern will not be to draw attention to the search for better methods as part of design (a topic in the subsequent “methods” chapter) but to note how designers of IT now offer remarkably diverse, powerful and, it has to be said, fascinating technologies. I shall describe some of these technologies. I shall suggest that the technology is there, but the question is what one would want to do with it. I shall map out what one might c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Computers and People Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. Introduction
• 2. What is a document?
• 3. Designing ethnography
• 4. A sketch of the Fund
• 5. The machinery of policy work
• 6. The use of information
• 7. Desk officers
• 8. A mission to Arcadia
• 9. The use of a staff report
• 10. Conclusion
• References
• Index