This reading list consists of papers that present interesting, original ideas about information of one sort or another, and are likely to be useful to people in a wide variety of fields. Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces, Information Systems Research 7(1), 1996, pages 111-134. This paper is based on the authors' participation as ethnographers in an ambitious, early-1990's, pre-Web attempt to provide a community of biologists with a shared set of online tools to support their work. Even though the system was designed with knowledge of the field and input from the users, it was not widely adopted, and Star and Ruhleder attempt to explain why. Their reasons are numerous, and they group them in three categories derived in a loose way from Gregory Bateson: straightforward issues of money, access, and training; unexpected contingencies arising from incompatible standards and languages; and the kinds of institutional and epistemological that arise in social studies of science. All of these issues are hard to predict and harder to fix with mere technical design. Star and Ruhleder analyze them as general considerations of infrastructure. Many forces are working to interconnect similar sites of practice, such as biology labs, but actually including all of these sites in a single, shared infrastructure is hard because every site is to some degree unique. An infrastructure, moreover, has opinions. It is not just a neutral platform onto which you can place any activity at all. For the scientists to get the benefits of a collaboratory, as this particular infrastructure is called, they have to manage a wide range of tensions between uniformity and diversity, whether of technology, vocabulary, work practices, representations, genres, customs about ownership of data, and so on. Of course, scientific communities have always has to negotiate such things, and I think a next step for a project like Star and Ruhleder's would be to back up and study the collaboratory in the broader historical sweep of forces toward (what sociologists call) isomorphism. At the same time, Star and Ruhleder want to avoid the opposite extreme of treating diversity in negative terms as a miscellaneous category left over by the forces of homogenization. For this purpose it would be useful to contextualize the various biologists' labs not simply in relation to this one community but also in relation to the various other institutions and forces in which various subsets of them also participate, as well as the kinds of structural diversity (e.g., center-periphery, relations to funding agencies, basic research versus applied, etc) that operate within the particulare "community" that they studied. Wanda J. Orlikowski, Improvising organizational transformation over time: A situated change perspective, in Joanne Yates and John Van Maanen, eds, Information Technology and Organizational Transformation: History, Rhetoric, and Practice, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. This utterly excellent paper traces a cascade of five changes that took place, one after another, in an organization that adopted Lotus Notes. Orlikowski's description of these changes, though lengthy and detailed, repays careful reading. Her argument is that these changes were largely emergent, that is, they were not planned but arose through the workers' responses to situations as they encountered them -- situations that were, in large part, created as outcomes of their own responses to the situations that had gone before. In sociological language, Orlikowski is describing a recursive relationship between human agency and the social system that both provides the terrain for action and is created by that action in turn. For example, the first change involved data entry, which turned out to present much more challenging issues than anyone expected, and which then changed the workers' relationships to customers in new ways as well. The result was a reshuffled array of practices and a new equilibrium that then provided the status quo for the next change. That second change involved a new division of labor that digital records made possible, and that then led to subsequent issues and more changes. This paper is organizational ethnography at its absolute best, serious social theory integrated with fine-grained use of narrative evidence. A next step might be to analyze the materials on other, "higher" levels, such as the specific industry that the company Orklikowski studied is part of and its longer-term historical evolution. Leysia Palen and Paul Dourish, Unpacking "privacy" for a networked world, http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/Papers/palen-dourish.pdf This is a very good paper about privacy, both in general and in the context of interactions through networked services such as calendar programs. They draw on theories of privacy from the 1970's and place them into a 1990's-era theory of institutionally organized activities. They analyze privacy as a dynamic phenomenon, something that people improvise from moment to moment in designing their own identities. That analysis will work differently in various social settings, so they then place it in the context of institutions. They connect these micro- and macro-scale phenomena in part through the genres that a given institution makes available for representing oneself to others. These ideas ought to be useful for design. Because of their emphasis on activity, they are an improvement on a data-centered theory of privacy. They also help avoid overgeneralizations from particular cases. The next step is to understand how software can provide people and groups with mechanisms they can draw upon in the dynamic way that the authors describe. Daniel G. Bobrow, Robert Cheslow, and Jack Whalen, Community knowledge sharing in practice: The Eureka Story, paper available on the Web at: http://www.dialogonleadership.org/EurekaStory.pdf This is one of the best papers on organizational informatics that I have read. It describes the authors' experience getting a groupware program actually deployed and used in a large global company. The problem, as you might imagine, was about 80% political, given the need to unsettle large numbers of existing organizational routines and understandings. In order for this kind of software to succeed, users must actively work to include it in their work practices, and the authors describe in vivid terms the socio-technical work that was necessary to include users in the process. They conclude by providing large amounts of advice for others who are trying to get group-oriented software working, not just in a technical sense but in the real sense of being taken over by the user community as their own. Geoffrey Bowker, Information mythology: The world of/as information, in Lisa Bud-Frierman, ed, Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business, London: Routledge, 1994. All of us in advanced industrial societies live at the intersection of numerous infrastructures. Since most of these systems work well enough almost all the time, we can treat them as being more or less part of nature. Without them, our daily routines would be disrupted in many ways. Bowker emphasizes the infrastructures that generate knowledge -- that is, more or less technical representations of nature or society -- and he describes the way in which people in industrial societies take them for granted, and the characteristic mistakes they make as a result. He draws on historical examples from manufacturing and oil field logging to describe the complex sociotechnical systems that the simple story about infrastructure omits. His goal is to make sure that our theories include the whole material reality of information and the institutions that produce it, rather than reproducing the commonplace mistakes that we have gotten from history.
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