Materiality, Rules and Regulation

New Trends in Management and Organization Studies

Giovan Francesco Lanzara, Francois-Xavier de Vaujany, Nathalie Mitev, Anouk Mukherjee, Giovan Francesco Lanzara, Francois-Xavier de Vaujany, Nathalie Mitev, Anouk Mukherjee

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349566198
  9781137552624
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137552648
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Materiality, Rules and Regulation: New Trend in Management and Organization Studies concentrates on the relationship of rules and regulation to the materiality of artefacts, practices, and organizations. It combines the recent scholarly interest on sociomateriality with a focus on regulation and rules.

Part I

Societal and Organizational Regulations: Long-Term and Contemporary Trends

Key questions:

Part I focuses on the sociomateriality of regulation at a societal level. It uses historical and geographical perspectives to show how culture, geopolitics and ideologies are entangled with material rules and regulation in different contexts such as the US, South America and India; and are related to technologies such as IT microfinance, community radio broadcasting, international aid practices, and the global mediatisation of sports.

1

Tecnologia Social: A South American View of the Regulatory Relationship between Technology and Society

Marlei Pozzebon

The purpose of this chapter is to revisit the concept of tecnologia social, social technology in English, from a sociomaterial perspective. In my investigation of South American writings on social innovation, I found a vast and rich literature describing, analysing and theorizing around grassroots social innovations from the perspective of the underlying arrangements among people, artefacts and practices that brings an interesting view to the relationship between technology and society. The term tecnologia social is applied to those sociomaterial arrangements or assemblages whose goal is to promote social transformation. I am talking about a long tradition that seems to have started with Gandhi in India around the beginning of the twentieth century, had numerous but ephemeral trajectories in Europe and North America, and ended by reaching the minds of South American researchers and practitioners of social innovation by the 1960s. There, it has been transformed, blended and remixed, and its impacts have been very prolific.

It is worth noticing that this stream of literature on tecnologia social, which I refer to as the South American one, was never written in English, with very few exceptions. The intent and vision of those researchers and practitioners, involved with the conception and implementation of social technologies, has been geared to having a profound local impact. They seek to promote social changes in a land where, from the very beginning of colonization 500 years ago until the more recent wave of globalization, social inequalities have characterized its society. Given that intent, writing in their native and local language is perceived as crucial.

Recovering the foundations of tecnologia social writings, I quickly recognized an amazing coincidence. The theoretical streams influencing its development were the same that marked my own intellectual path: social constructivism, socio-technical approaches and critical thinking. What’s more, the vocabulary applied in the tecnologia social literature expresses the inseparability of different levels of analysis – micro and macro – and the inseparability of the material and the social aspects of a phenomenon. Put simply, social technologies are interactionist and sociomaterial by definition.

Although the use of the word “sociomaterial” today represents a fashionable way of connecting with specific research communities, the understanding that any innovation implies an intertwined arrangement and an assemblage between social actions and material devices was already present in sociotechnical approaches from the 1980s (Pinch and Bijker, 1984). Revisiting a long trajectory that led to the consolidation of a critical mass in South America around the relationship between technology and society, I recognize that such an inseparability of the social and the material in ways of relating, connecting and performing lay at the very core of the tecnologia social tradition even before the emergence of the sociomaterial current in organization studies (Dagnino et al., 2004; Dagnino, 2009; Thomas and Buch, 2013). Still, their convergence is relevant to advancing our knowledge of social innovations. I argue that European and North American sociomaterial researchers have much to learn from South America’s tecnologia social stream in terms of both theory and practice, as I will try to develop in this chapter.

It is important to mention that the South American concept of tecnologia social is not directly related to what we find in the Anglo-Saxon literature when we search for the corresponding term. Scanning the Northern databases, I recognize two different meanings attached to the word social technology. The first, and oldest, is related to sociology of economics, and was used by Nelson and Sampat (2001) to refer to coordinating mechanisms assuring that economic activities involving multiple actors are well performed. The authors make a distinction between the physical technologies involved in those activities and the social technologies that represent the way that work is divided and coordinated (Nelson, 2008). The metaphor applied by the authors is a “recipe”, a way of doing. Although we can find some similarities between Nelson’s conceptualization and the South American one, the key distinction is precisely the clear separation that this economic-based view makes between physical and social technologies (Chataway et al., 2010). It is noteworthy that we find an even older use of the term, around the end of the nineteenth century, by Henderson (1901). In that case, it was related to social engineering and led to many developments in twentieth century social theorizing (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985). Again, the term is applied to refer to social norms and rules and institutional logics, and we could not identify a direct influence on the South American theoretical stream we are discussing in this chapter.

The second meaning attached to the term social technologies is quite recent and refers to the use of web-based platforms like Facebook or Twitter by groups of people, i.e., technology-mediated social networks and social media. A relatively recent and large number of publications use the term social technologies to discuss the social effects of web-based platforms like Twitter, Facebook and the prominent use of blogs (Li and Bernoff, 2008). Again, the theoretical connections to our work are weak: although web-based platforms might have a place in the grassroots social innovations we are looking for, we do not understand social technologies as simply technology-mediated social networks.

After revisiting those uses of the term social technology, I wondered whether to retain it, lest confusion and ambiguity be produced in a Northern audience. However, because of the force of this term in Portuguese and Spanish as well as to respect the history and the meaning behind the concept, I decided not only to retain the term tecnologia social but to employ it without translating it into English, to reinforce its status as a concept developed by South American researchers and practitioners, and to refer to an existent, strong and relevant intellectual social movement that deserves to be better known. In a recent article, a group of colleagues and I have supported the idea of using native terms to better express our ideas and views (Alves and Pozzebon, 2013).

In addition, it is important to emphasize that the word “social” in the definition is not a reference to poor, underdeveloped, developing or emerging countries. Therefore, all those terms are misleading and refuted, as they imply that there are either developed or non-developed countries. The connotation that development has acquired in Western societies is neither universal nor desirable (Escobar, 2010). The word “social” means society, implying citizen participation, empowerment, self-management and a new way to deal with the relation between technology and society.

In the remainder of this chapter I present thus the history of the tecnologia social concept, revisiting it through a sociomaterial language and its relational ontology. Then I present one empirical illustration, representing one of numerous documented experiences of tecnologia social, considering just those that have been implemented in Brazil. I conclude the chapter with a research agenda that enables better synergies between research traditions.

The history of the “tecnologia social” concept

Understanding the construction of the tecnologia social concept as built by South American thinkers requires some immersion in the South American historical context, a context marked by structural inequalities and exclusion produced by situational and global factors. Neder and Thomas (2010) remind us that, even today, a sizeable segment of the South American population faces chronic problems related to sanitation, water supply, energy, food and housing. We might add that the quality of education and health varies depending on the region. Large proportions of the population live in conditions of exclusion.

The solution to these social problems is probably the biggest political and economic challenge for local governments. All these problems are part of the largest chronic and structural social debt of the region, and facing them seems to exceed the current local governments’ capabilities to respond. It would demand the utilization of resources equal to 50% of the national gross product of these countries. The persistent resilience of social debts shows how inefficient the mechanisms of market and economic growth are to change the socio-economic scenario. (Neder and Thomas, 2010, p. 1)

One of the main points emerging from this sad analysis is related to one of the causes of this process of social exclusion: the very nature of “conventional technologies”. Conventional technology is a generic term applied to large-scale technologies that are capital, knowledge and resource intensive, and that very often imply the exclusion of human labour, particularly in the agriculture and industrial manufacturing sectors. These conventional technologies, developed in specific Western-based contexts, when “transferred” to developing countries, have directly and indirectly contributed to the massive process of labour impoverishment and social exclusion. In addition, available conventional technologies often require a prohibitive amount of energy and raw materials and the amplification of their use would have an even higher impact on the environment (although this could change with a radical move towards green energy, which is not yet the case today).

It is important to mention that most efforts to transfer and adapt conventional technologies to developing countries have failed in terms of social inclusion and poverty reduction (Dagnino et al., 2004). In many cases, social conditions in developing countries have even deteriorated due to the dualistic and colonialist foundations of the transfer process. All this suggests that non-Western contexts should think about technology development in a different manner, one more harmonious with their cultural and natural contexts and with their social needs. The exploration of social technologies becomes a priority in a desired strategic shift to “democratization, socio-economic development and social inclusion in Latin America” (Neder and Thomas, 2010, p. 1).

In brief, processes of technology development can be seen as political struggles, where dominant social groups shape their trajectories based on their interests. In contrast to conventional technologies, a tecnologia social is developed and implemented from the interaction with, and based on the interests and needs of, local communities to promote social transformation. Indeed, the term indeed evokes an older concept, appropriate technology, whose roots are located in the Indian social movement initiated by Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s against British domination (Dagnino et al., 2004). At that time, Gandhi dreamt of a world without large-scale technologies, extolling the importance of preserving cultural handicraft techniques and improving them by adapting the modern technological processes to the environmental and social realities of India (Albuquerque, 2009). The roca de fiar (spinning wheel) became a symbol of national unity and resistance against British domination (Novaes and Dias, 2010). Although Gandhi did not apply the term “appropriate” or “social” technology, he defined the basic lines of those concepts (Herrera, 1983).

Gandhi’s ideas of developing more culturally adapted technologies reappeared in the 1950s in the People’s Republic of China (Thomas, 2009), and it was further developed in the 1960s, in Germany, by Lewis Mumford (1964), who proposed democratic technologies, characterized by small-scale production, and based on human abilities and the discrete use of natural resources. We recognize a very critical perspective behind Mumford, who was reflecting on technologies that could help promote and develop democracy. He condemned the pervasiveness of large-scale production systems and their associated authoritarian governance model when conventional technologies are replicated in peripheral countries (Thomas, 2009).

In the 1970s, we see the emergence of several approaches that describe “appropriate” or “adequate” technologies (Schumacher, 1973; Jecquier, 1976). They emphasize the need of producing technologies that are low in scale (familial or communitarian), low in complexity, affordable in scientific or technological knowledge content, low in energy consumption and intensive in human labour (Thomas, 2009). The German economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1973) wrote Small Is Beautiful, increasing the popularity of the term in the European context (Fraga, 2011).

In the 1980s, other locutions were proposed, such as “intermediary”, which were in the same vein as their predecessors but accepted that a higher scale of technology in place could accelerate economic development (Pack, 1983; Riskin, 1983). They focus on efficiency and their scope is broader, targeting both developed and developing countries, from communities to multinationals (Bourrieres, 1983; Robinson, 1983). These visions of technological development became a tool for influencing public policies and a goal for interventions by international agencies (Jecquier, 1976; Darrow et al., 1981).

Although the goal of overcoming social exclusion was present throughout the entire historical trajectory of “appropriate” technologies, they were not free from severe criticism. First, they were seen as reproducing paternalistic patterns oriented to the solution of very localized problems, often built without local trust or long-term sustainability (Thomas, 2009). Second, they often held premises of the neutrality of science and deterministic views of technology as a means of social change (Dickson, 1974) as well as romantic and utopians views of “neutral” technologies (Rybczynski, 1980; Ahmad, 1989). Therefore, some cracks on the appropriate technology models started to become more evident: exo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Making Sense of Rules and Materiality in Management: The New Challenge for Management and Organization Studies?
• Part I  Societal and Organizational Regulations: Long-Term and Contemporary Trends
• Part II  Performing Rules: Giving Matter and Power to Rules
• Part III  Mediating Rules and Ruling Artefacts: Performativity, Mediation and Material Regulation
• Part IV  Disentangling Sociomaterial Practices: The Transformation of Regulation?
• Conclusion: From the How to the Why of Sociomaterial Regulation: The Question of Ethics in Material Analysis
• Afterword: From Rules to Ethics: Ontological Implications for Sociomaterial Regulation in Management and Organization Studies
• Index