Michael Tyworth: September 2008 Archives

Two papers have been accepted to the 8th SIG-SI / SIG-USE research symposium at this year's annual meeting of the American Society of Information Science & Technology.

I will be presenting a paper I co-authored with Dr. Steve Sawyer of Syracuse University where we situate Social Informatics in the broader theoretical debate on the socio-technical nature of information and communications technologies (ICT).  This paper is in the vein of, and draws on, the insights of the Leonardi & Barley paper discussed in the prior post.

You can read this paper here.

I will also be presenting as a research poster on some early findings from my dissertation research on the influence of organizational identity on the design of complex inter-organizational information systems.  Specifically, I find that organizational identity claims are reflected in both the organizational and technological designs of integrated criminal justice information systems.

You can read the paper here.

Paul Leonardi and Stephen Barley have written an excellent paper on how we theorize technology and social action.  It is by far the best treatment of this subject I have ever read.

Social theorists of technology continue to battle with issues of materiality and social context, structure and agency.  Leonardi and Barley frame this as a tension between the materialism (artifact) and the idealism (people) and determinism (structure) and voluneerism (agency).  Their analysis shows that theorists tend to favor or lean towards idealism and volunteerism resulting in little to no agency being assigned to the artifact; and that this 'tilting' is a result of conflating materialism with determinism (e.g., if one assigns any agency to the material properties of a technological artifact, one is by definition a technological determinist).

Indeed in my own work I have found that there is an inertial tendency to drift towards the social half of socio-technical.  Part of this I believe is because accounting for both the social and the technical simultaneously is messy, difficult, and ambiguous.  It's difficult to present a parsimonius explanation of a phenomenon when by definition there is more than one contributing factor.  Saying "it's both materiality and idealism" can be dissatisfying.

Key to this article is the argument that materialism matters - a loaded gun retains its lethality independent of whether its used as a hammer - and that theorists need to do a better job of accounting for the affordances and constraints presented by technology's material properties.