Structuration for IT beginners

Larry Stillman, Centre for Community Networking Research 2003.

Home: webstylus.net

A presentation outline

Dead, white, hirsute and very clever 19th cent. males…

Had three highly influential views:

• Constraint because of class conflict and economics? (Marx)
• Constraint because of the pressure of social norms and values? (Durkheim)
• Constraint because of institutional & organisational structure?(Weber)
• Where do ICTs sit in all of this?

Karl Marx Emile Durkheim Max Weber

A live white male: Anthony Giddens in his Study

Source: Giddens composes new works, reads books and discusses ideas in his office at the London School of Economics. Theory.co.uk

Giddens’ oeuvre

• Literary and subtle academic style
• Excessively learned, confusing, incomplete, multi-dimensional, slippery & provocative & not always entirely original & doesn’t answer criticisms fully, but…
• He puts it together so well…popular textbooks
• Key to the ‘Third Way’ in the UK
• A British tall poppy -at least 72 books!
• Best sellers on modernity, sexuality, personal choices

Order is not a one-way street!

For Giddens, dichotomies between institutional constraint and personal ability to act are false! The debate tend to become either/or and deterministic:

• ‘Just because I’m poor…and she’s rich!’
• ‘My job MAKES me like this’
• ‘It’s all about interpersonal relations’
• The computer made me do it!

It is really all in our individual and collective heads (and artifacts) and what we do with ideas and objects!

• Order is really nothing more than ‘memory traces’, everyday practices
• We create, reflexively think about, communicate, and change the social rules and principles about us
• Simple determinism (Marxist, positivist or otherwise is too crude a tool)

‘Structure’ has a special meaning

• Not physical or built structures, eg a building, or even the formal organisational structure
• Structuration = the study of the medium and the outcome of social rules and order

Example: ‘It’s just a road, but what is different here?’

• Garfinkel’s tests of order and structure provide profound insight

What's going on cross-culturally?

Insights from ethnomethodology and hermeneutics

• Up close and personal interactions (Erving Goffman)
• People are skilled performers or actors, not ‘cultural dopes’
• We carry and create all sorts of scripts and schemas to deal with situations
• From the micro to the macro

Foundations of structuration

• Structures are ‘both the medium and the outcomes of the practices which constitute social systems’ – a duality
• Practices constitute structures
• Structural principles – principles of organisation across time-space
• So technology as a machine-people interaction is both the medium and the outcome of practices (think how PCs affect knowledge and work practice)

Knowledgeability

• Discursive knowledge
• Practical knowledge

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• The Subconscious

The interplay between the first two produces action

Structurated Duality

• Circles represent new rules/schemas/scripts/ over time.
• Shading represents the sedimentation or embeddeness of of particular social practices in time-space
• "Stacking" is also an indicator of variability in the coverage of rules/schemas/scripts over space and time

Time-space

• Brilliant insight or at least ‘putting the case’ by Giddens
• From up front and personal co-presence and interaction order (Goffman) to extensions of co-presence via electronic media
• How order/memory is created and recreated across time-space

Embeddedness & Systemness

• Giddens’ way of describing the ‘stacking’ of structural rules & principles

The place of information and knowledge in structuration

• Giddens’ repeatedly identifies information and knowledge systems as key components of the creation & maintenance of modern institutions.
• They are what he calls ‘allocative resources’, used in process of signification, domination, legitimation
• Tokens and symbolic means

Applied to institutional and organisational analysis

• Barley- ‘scripts’
• Orlikowski – genres and forms of knowing / communication
• Weick – technology as ‘eviquoque’

Example- Barley on CT scanners

• A new complex technological apparatus in a human-machine environment
• What are the ‘rules’ which determine the different ways scanners are used by doctors and technicians in two different hospitals

CT scanners

Different rules and practices developed over time/space

• If the machine is the same, why is use different? It’s not just a matter of machine design
• Different levels of experience and workplace relationships between status-consciousness doctor radiologists and waged technical assists
• Thick description -- ethnographic interpretative research

New situations, new scripts

Derived from Barley and Orlikowski

Ethnomethodological understandings of order and the place of ‘technology

• What is technology? People? Machines? Systems? Networks? Inscribed meanings (Actor Network theory)
• Theory doesn’t seem to have kept pace with the emergence of new technologies (eg Office packages and their possibilities are much more complex systems than envisioned even 10 years ago)
• Meaning, routine, sensemaking, dealing with chronic technological snafus (Weick)
• ‘technology framing’ (Gregory)
• Multiple, competing realities (Manning)
• Knowledge performance? Derived from Goffman

Orlikowski on genres

• Different structures for meeting, presenting information and knowledge
• Contrast the old fashioned formal business letter with the memo, and now the informal memo
• I worked somewhere with 7 different letterheads and woe betide incorrect usage!
• Different sorts of meetings
• What do these tell us about information and knowledge practices & changes over time & space?

Summing up

• A dynamic theory of social and institutional order
• A theory with important pointers to the situating of knowledge and information systems as part of complex social systems
• Capacity for combining with interpretative methodologies of social and systems observation
• A big task to bring so many perspectives together and provide simple and useful advice when the focus is so often on ‘the machine’ or ‘the technology

Readings

• Giddens, A. (2000). Runaway world : how globalization is reshaping our lives. http://www.lse.ac.uk/Giddens/
• Giddens, A. (1981). Agency, institution, and time-space analysis. Advances in social theory and methodology : toward an integration of micro- and macro-sociologies. K. D. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel. Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul: 161-174. A very clear presentation of issues, though early in the piece.
• http://www.theory.org.uk/giddens.htm. Short overviews on lots of structuration topics
• Barley, S. R. (1986). "Technology as an Occasion for Structuring: Evidence from Observations of CT Scanners and the Social Order of Radiology Departments." Administrative Science Quarterly 31(Mar): 78-119.
• Gregory, J. and T. Bratteteig (1999). Human Action in Context. A Discussion of Theories for Understanding Use of IT. Proceedings of the 22nd Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS 22): “Enterprise Architectures for Virtual Organisations,”, Jyväskylä, University of Jyväskylä, Computer Science and Information Systems Reports.
• Manning, P. K. (1997). "Organizations as Sense-Making Contexts." Theory, Culture & Society 14(2): 139-50.
• Orlikowski, W. (1992). ""The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,"." Organization Science, 3, 3, 1992: 3(3): 398-427.
• Weick, K. (1990). Technology as Eviquoque: Sensemaking in New Technologies. Technology and organizations. P. S. Goodman and L. Sproull. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass: xxi, 281.

Created on ... August 07, 2003